Page 20 of Best Served Hot

She nodded, consulting her tablet. “And I see it’s your anniversary. Happy anniversary!”

Bennett let out a strangled sound that might have been him choking on something. The noise that escaped my throat probably didn’t sound all that different, but I was the first one to respond. “What?”

She blinked and looked down again, as if double-checking, then nodded to herself. “Yes, that’s what it says here. I’m glad you chose us to celebrate your special day!” She winked. “We’ll have a special surprise for you later on.”

I blinked back, but she was marching away before I could grab her tablet away and consult it myself. “She must have been looking at the wrong reservation, because . . .” I trailed off as I turned to find Bennett wearing a knowing grimace.

“I’m going to fire my intern,” he muttered. “Unless this was the only way she could get us this reservation, then I’ll commend her. But otherwise, definitely fired.”

I glanced over my shoulder. The hostess was staring at us. “We don’t want her staring at us or paying us any extra attention,” I muttered back. “Do you want her remembering your face? Or thinking something is suspicious?” I swallowed hard. “We’ll just have to pretend to be out for our anniversary. It won’t be that hard. It’s not like they’re expecting us to, like, have sex on the table.”

The moment those words came out of my mouth, I could feel my cheeks glowing. Bennett’s face had gone red as a fancy heirloom tomato, too. He swallowed a couple times, his throat working, before he replied, “No, I imagine not.” His voice was all strangled again, but this time I couldn’t blame him. Not if he was also picturing what it might feel like to stretch out on this smooth surface, press our bodies against each other until there was nothing but sweat and heat between us, gently removing his glasses and placing them to the side before I grabbed his face and brought it to mine . . .

Good Lord. I nearly had to fan myself with the menu. Abort fantasy. Stupid fantasy that I didn’t even want to come true. “I hope there’s octopus on the menu,” I said, pulling my menu closer and not fanning myself with it. Because I was fine. Totally fine. I definitely did not need to distract myself by thinking about the food. I skimmed it quickly, then clicked my tongue. “Darn.”

“I don’t think of octopus as a particularly Jewish food,” Bennett said dryly, because of course, Wander was a Jewish restaurant. At least he didn’t sound like he was choking anymore. Good. We could just proceed normally. Just two people celebrating an occasion out for a nice dinner.

“I don’t think of pork as particularly Jewish, either, but there’s a pastrami-rubbed pork shoulder on the menu,” I said. “Definitely getting that.” I was Jewish but not observant, much to the chagrin of my mother’s family. I liked to use it as an excuse to eat lots of bagels and lox, mostly.

“Pastrami-rubbed pork shoulder sounds good to me,” Bennett said. “And how about this kimchi chopped liver?”

We bargained our way to a truly enormous number of dishes. “My stomach might explode by the time we’re through,” Bennett remarked as he handed off his menu to the waitress.

I told him, “Well, I hope none of your stomach explosion gets on me.” And then I pulled out my phone so I didn’t have to keep talking to him or thinking about him, taking a quick picture of the menu before giving mine back.

I expected him to sit there silently as I scrolled through my social media, liking Jada Knox’s new video even though I wouldn’t have a chance to watch it all until later (We were mutuals now! We had to support each other!), but he spoke up. Probably because a couple on their anniversary would be speaking to each other, not because he actually wanted to talk to me. “So, what’s your secret?”

I forced myself to look up and put down my phone. “I have many secrets, and I’m not sharing any of them with you.”

He sighed. “No, I mean your secret to engaging your followers. Our social media intern is doing all he can, and we’ve been getting help from the cooking department, whose pages do really well, but I’m not doing well enough. How do you do it?”

Should I share anything? I was saved from having to provide an immediate answer or refusal by the arrival of our amuse-bouches. I sat up extra straight from excitement. I loved these little teasers before a meal, things I didn’t have to order but just came to me like gifts from heaven.

These amuse-bouches actually looked like little gifts; they were small pouches of dough that twisted at the top and came to a gleaming golden-brown ruffle. They actually looked kind of familiar. “These were on Chef Supreme!” I said. I took a quick picture. “I wonder if they’ve got a sauerkraut and potato filling, like the ones that Chef Sadie made on the show.” I bit into it. The wrapper crunched and then relaxed into a nice doughy chew, almost like a very thin pizza crust. Sure enough, the interior was plush and buttery with a smooth potato puree but also zingy with fermented cabbage, the sour shreds of leaf providing a perfect contrast to the richness of the potatoes and the crust. “Remember when I told you there was no such thing as too much potato?” A mustard seed popped between my teeth, spicy. I finished with the ruffle on top, brown and shatteringly crunchy. “It’s still true.”

“You may have a point.” Bennett closed his eyes as he chewed, as if he were concentrating so hard on the taste and texture that he had to block out the outside world. He pulled out a notebook—a real notebook, with a real pen and a fancy black leather cover!—and scribbled a few notes in it.

“You know, you can take notes on your phone now,” I said. I craned my neck, peering over the table. I’d expected perfect little blocks of letters, totally legible probably from across the room, but no, his handwriting was a messy scrawl. I swore half the letters were upside down.

“I like the feeling of actually writing something with a pen. It helps me remember things better.” He capped the pen and stowed it away.

“It’s also a lot more obvious to waiters or hosts that you’re a food critic. If you’re taking notes on your phone, you might just be texting, like your typical rude millennial.”

He chuckled dryly. “So, you’re looking out for me and my job, not mocking me for using an outdated mode of note-taking?”

I blinked, because I had been looking out for him. When had I started caring? I don’t, I told myself firmly. “Whatever.”

The waiter returned to clear our knish plates away. In the extra space, Bennett folded his hands on the table before him, steepling his fingers to a point. “So. Are you going to answer my question?”

“Both,” I said promptly. “I was both trying to help and mock you. You’re very mockable.”

“Always wonderful to hear,” Bennett said even more dryly than before, collapsed in the middle of the desert, a cry for water on his cracking lips. “But not that question. If you had any tips for making our social media succeed. My subscriber base is supposed to be what makes the Scroll different. What keeps us going in an age where the medium I love is slowly dying out and being converted to digital this and that.” He lowered his gaze, but not before I saw his eyes go soft. Vulnerable.

Insecure.

“So,” he continued, staring at the table. The waiter had missed a tiny piece of knish ruffle, nearly the same brown as the table’s wood. “How do you do it?”

It came to me like a flash. He hadn’t been dismissive of my work because he was a cruel person or he thought less of me for doing it. He hadn’t made fun of me because he sneered down at my work from his print pedestal.