Page 51 of Best Served Hot

And so we dug in. Maybe he’d forget for real by the time we were through with these dishes. For one, the lomo saltado was so delicious I thought I might forget my own name. It was beef tenderloin stir-fried so that the sugars in the marinade caramelized on the outside, making it crispy and chewy and as tender as the name in the middle, on a big blue platter piled high with roasted tomatoes, various salsas and chiles, and crispy fries. The idea was to wrap pieces of beef and the toppings in the scallion pancakes that came along with it. What resulted were flavor bombs, savory and spicy and fatty and crispy, all accentuated by the sweet, tangy pop of tomato. Flakes of scallion pancakes drifted from my lips down to my plate as my teeth crunched through each bite.

“I can’t even handle how good this is,” I said, then swallowed because I couldn’t wait to say it.

The other two dishes we’d ordered were pretty great, too—a whole branzino marinated and charred so that we picked it clean off its spindly bones and ate it with greens and roasted peppers; a half chicken roasted with aji amarillo chile paste and served over shiitake mushrooms and a lime crema—but the lomo saltado was the true star of the table. I could already picture how it was going to look on my page. The golden-brown fries glistening with oil. The beef shaded from light pink in the center to deep brown on the edges. The ruby red tomatoes nestled among them. And the scallion pancakes serving as a lacy backdrop.

Maybe there’d been some nuggets of kryptonite cooked into the scallion pancakes, because my superpower was starting to fail me. My stomach was protruding from under my blouse, dangerously full. Eating another bite might make it explode.

“I think we’ll need a few minutes before dessert,” Bennett told the waitress. Then turned back to me. “Julie, what you were saying earlier about me wanting to keep things professional?”

I couldn’t bear to look him in the eye. My cheeks might burst into flame. “It’s okay, I shouldn’t have said anything. We don’t have to talk about—”

“I wasn’t the one who wanted to keep things professional.” I looked up then to find him appearing vaguely surprised at himself, maybe for interrupting. “I thought it was you. You were the one who ran out of the room after our . . . after we kissed, and who wouldn’t look at me, so I thought I’d let you make the first move, if you wanted to, and you skipped the reservation, and then when I finally heard from you again afterward, you were saying you wanted to keep things professional. That wasn’t me.” He was out of breath by the time he finished, wicking away a drop of sweat from his forehead.

“No, it was totally you,” I said, but I was less sure. In my mind, he’d been the one to . . . but no, maybe that was me, after I’d missed the reservation, and he hadn’t wanted to scare me away. I cleared my throat, and because I had to be absolutely clear, I asked, “What does that mean? You don’t want to keep things professional?”

He reached out and took my hands on the center of the table, pushing aside our mostly empty plates. His thumb brushed lightly over my knuckles, sending a shiver trembling from my wrists to my shoulders to my chest. “I want to keep things anything but professional,” he said, voice low. It thrummed somewhere deep in my stomach. “I mean, unless you want to keep things professional.”

I traced my own thumbs over his palms. They curled reflexively up into my hands. “I want you to stop saying the word professional. And thinking it.” I swallowed hard. Once I said this, there was no going back.

But I didn’t want to go back. “I don’t want to keep things professional. At all.”

“Then we’re in agreement,” he said gravely. “To be unprofessional. Together.”

I nearly wrenched my shoulder from its socket waving to the waitress for the check. “No dessert tonight,” I told her, trying not to look at Bennett’s slow grin across from me. “I think we’ll just have it at home.”

17

Normally, when I left a restaurant, I was already calculating in my head the precise combination of subway lines and stops that would take me home in the shortest amount of time.

Today? I stood on the sidewalk beside Bennett as he waited for his Uber, pressed tight against his side. Cars roared around us, exhaust filling the air. I was probably breathing in all sorts of terrible things that would give me cancer in twenty years.

And I didn’t care.

Bennett was staring down at his phone to track how far away the car was, his neck cricked at what had to be an uncomfortable angle. He glanced up and caught me looking at him. His lips quirked in a smile, which made my heart twist. I wished for teleportation. I wanted to be at his apartment right this second.

“Julie?” Bennett said. I realized I was still looking at him.

“Bennett,” I breathed. Screw waiting to get to his apartment, I couldn’t wait. I reached up to kiss him, warm lips on warm lips, his hand pressing into my lower back, the sweet taste of the cherimoya dessert we’d skipped somehow on his tongue. Custard apple, people called it, rich and creamy and slippery, or maybe that was just him.

He pulled back, and my whole body seized in panic. He was going to tell me it was a mistake. That he’d forgotten that he didn’t like kissing me, and we should keep things professional after all. That we should never have—

“The car’s here,” he said, breathless. “Come on.”

We didn’t kiss again in the back seat of the car. It was too weird, with the driver rattling on about the time he’d rear-ended a cop car over a soundtrack of jangling Bollywood hits. Instead, we sat side by side on the cracked leather back seat looking straight ahead, my right hand in his two.

Hand-holding, hot. It felt like I was in middle school again. But Bennett traced every inch of my skin, fingers skimming from my wrist up my palm, learning my life lines and my love lines, rubbing each finger from root to tip. My breath caught in my throat as his thumb rubbed an oval into my palm, sending tingles shooting up my arm. Muscles strained in my neck with the effort to keep looking forward as he raised my hand slowly, gently, to his lips and grazed the back of it with a kiss.

We tumbled out of the back seat when we reached his building, and let me tell you, it was a good thing we had to pay ahead in the Uber app, because neither of us had money on the brain right then. We hurried past the doorman, who was perceptive enough not to try and make small talk, and then into the elevator. The doors whooshed closed behind us, and it was only then that I turned to Bennett and looked him in the eye.

The way he was looking back at me. How to describe it? Some delicate mix of awe and kindness and fear and hunger, the way you’d look at something you wanted so badly but were afraid of breaking. All of that blazed behind his glasses, those blue-gray eyes pinning me in place so that I went up in flames, too.

Into the hallway. We’d barely made it inside his apartment, the door closing with a click behind us, before we were together. My front pressed up against him, his front pressed up against me. His hot mouth moving on mine. His hands tangled in my hair, pulling it without hurting it, somehow. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t breathe. My only sense that worked was touch, as his fingertips blazed a trail over my body.

Damn clothes were in the way. I slipped my hands up under his shirt, exploring the divot running down his back, the way each muscle tensed and then relaxed at my touch. “Julie,” he said roughly into my ear, and I guess my hearing worked, too, or maybe it was the way just one single word of his hot breath could make my insides melt into a warm, slick puddle.

My other hand fumbled with his buttons as he kissed my ear, my chin, the hollow of my throat. I finally pulled that last button free, sending his shirt dropping to the floor, and turned my attention to his chest. I nuzzled the spattering of light brown hair that covered defined pecs, a soft belly, the hair growing coarser as it wound its way down under his dark jeans.

I panted as he pulled me back through the entryway, hands on my waist, kissing the whole way, and collapsed backward onto the gray leather couch, which felt softer than my skin. I fell on top of him, straddling his lap. He kissed his way down my neck and across the collar of my blouse, leaving a trail of fire behind.