Page 33 of Best Served Hot

“Oh. Right.” Bennett reached with flour-crusted hands for his phone, then hesitated and went to wash them off, just like I did. Which somehow made me relax a little, enough to return to my bowl of meat and onions and add a good flurry of salt before mashing it all up. I was supposed to mash it, right? Mash it good?

Now I was starting to get in my own head. I finished mashing the meat and onions and salt together, then clumped them into patty size and packed them all together as tight as I could so that they wouldn’t fall apart when I went to cook them. Once done, I stacked them up on the cutting board while I worked on the buns.

“Switch places?” Bennett asked. I stole a glance into his own bowl as he passed. It was full of white gloop, which was not helpful as far as snooping went.

At least I could look up my recipe now. I opened my phone, which took me automatically to my social media, where responses were pouring in. I didn’t like looking at feedback while I was in the middle of something, but I couldn’t help scanning a few pieces of it while I switched over to the recipe.

Don’t pack it too tight!

Touch the meat as little as possible!

Don’t add salt until the end!

Make sure to salt throughout!

I took a deep breath, trying not to let it all worm itself too deep into my thoughts. The salt thing was contradictory. I literally could not salt throughout and not salt it until the end. Or could I? Was I missing something totally obvious?

“You okay?” Bennett was watching me again with that infuriating look of amusement. “Want to give up? We can just eat my delicious burgers.”

Yes. “I would rather eat my own foot,” I said. “Just figuring out the best way to start these rolls.”

The rolls started great. I dumped some yeast in with some warm water and sugar as the recipe specified, then mixed in the flour and salt and everything else. I mixed it all together, and it got nice and sticky and looked like dough.

You know what’s extremely therapeutic when you want to punch somebody in the face? Kneading dough. I slammed and punched and slapped that dough until it turned soft and pliable. By the time I was ready to divide it into round chunks and let them sit for a bit on a baking sheet, I felt great. Maybe I should bake more often. Or start a bakery where I got to do this every day. Annoying troll trying to ruin your morning? Don’t stress, just go beat up some bread.

With ten to twenty minutes to kill—that was the range the recipe gave me, but I had no idea what I was waiting for—I tiptoed over to Bennett. He was forming his patties into big hunks of meat, pressing on all sides and then squishing them flat between his hands. “Need any help?” I said loftily. “I just need to cook everything. Don’t worry, it’s okay if you’re a little slow.”

“Is it?” he said dryly, not missing a beat. “Thank you, so much. I feel validated.”

I couldn’t help grinning. “Step aside so I can turn the oven on.”

I set the oven to preheat at the temperature the recipe had told me, then pulled open the cabinet Bennett directed me to for a burger pan. “This apartment doesn’t have a grill?”

“There are grills up on the roof-deck,” he said. Of course there were. “But I think somebody’s having a party up there tonight, so unless you feel like shouldering your way through a bunch of drunk twenty-one-year-olds . . .”

I shuddered. “That wasn’t fun even when I was one of those drunk twenty-one-year-olds.”

“You aren’t a big party person, either, huh?” He bent down and pulled out a big, heavy pan for himself. Cast iron, I was pretty sure. But that appeared to be the only cast-iron pan, and there was no way in hell I was going to ask him to share, so I pulled out a regular stainless steel pan instead and set it on the stove.

“Not so much,” I said. “In college, a bit. I assume you’re not a big party person, because you own a Blood Sword of Death and Blood. You can’t earn that if you’re out partying all the time.”

He didn’t answer that, only stared seriously down into his cast-iron pan. Had I struck a nerve? He’d seemed fine the last time we discussed it.

Then again—who cared? I’m not here to make friends.

Before putting my burgers into the pan, I took a look at my buns. They looked exactly the same as they had when I’d put them there. Was something supposed to happen in those ten to twenty minutes? Weren’t they supposed to rise or something? I poked at one dubiously.

“Problem over there?” Bennett asked.

“Not at all,” I said. I’d put them in the oven and hope for the best. What was the worst that could happen?

Approximately twenty minutes later, I was staring at the worst thing that could happen. Well, maybe not the worst worst thing that could happen. I hadn’t lit the kitchen on fire or singed my eyebrows off. But my burgers looked gray and dense and unappetizing, and my buns may as well have been matzah (the dry, cracker-like, worst part of any Jewish holiday. Yes, even the ones where I had to fast).

Maybe I shouldn’t have teased this on social media, I thought with a wave of nausea.

Bennett, meanwhile, had taken over the stove. His burgers hit the cast iron with a sizzle that could probably be heard in the neighboring apartments, and he slid his buns into the oven with a flourish. “If yours aren’t living up to expectations, don’t worry,” he called over his shoulder. I’d retreated from the kitchen and was examining his bookshelves again, awed by his collection of cookbooks. He seemed to have every cookbook that had ever been printed. I pulled Coconut and Sambal off the shelf and opened it up, surprised by the crack of the spine—he must not cook much Indonesian food—and inhaled the new-book smell. “We can dine on mine.”

His grandiose statement was kind of ruined by the “oh shit” he let out when he turned back to his cast iron, and it only took me a moment to realize why he’d cursed: the pungent odor of overly charred meat. I sauntered closer to see him frantically attempting to flip one of the burgers, which, by the edges I could see, was burned black on the bottom. It seemed to be fused to the metal. “Did you not season your cast-iron pan?” I said smugly. I knew all about the seasoning of cast-iron pans thanks to the yelp Marcus had let out the one time I tried to be nice and do his dishes and almost washed his in soap and water. Apparently, that would have washed away the level of hard-earned seasoning, which prevented things from sticking and the pan from rusting.