The Complete Eagle Cove

Chapter 3 -3

Greg considered the challenge. He’d never really imagined himself just walking along with Jessica Baxter. Of all the things he’d ever imagined with her, he’d never thought of something so simple.

He did wish he hadn’t blurted out that she was the one he was crazy about, but it was truth and it was out there. He remembered Chef Manuel telling him, “Once you break the damned egg, let it go and move on.” So, he’d said it. No taking it back.

The other thing he’d never expected from Jessica Baxter was the amount of distress she was showing. He’d always been attracted to her simple confidence. She’d walked down a high school hallway with an ease of passage, without tipping over into her being some kind of a queen bee. It was the same way she wrote. He had an online search alert that kicked him an e-mail of every article she published. Her written voice was as engaging as her spoken one—straight ahead, true, no evasion or softening of hard facts.

And here she was asking him to help her avoid whatever she was thinking. She looked so sad, rooted in place at the end of Beach Way and staring at the small working docks floating at the edge of Eagle Cove. Daring greatly, he rested a hand lightly on her lower back and turned her toward the beach. With just the slightest pressure he was able to get her moving again.

And from that brief contact, he could imagine how she would feel to hold. The warmth of her against palm and fingertips, the extra little pressure where her spine and the inside of his knuckles had lined up. The soft smoothness of the thin fabric of her blouse. The tip of his thumb had just brushed the lower edge of her b*a’s back strap.

Way too easy to imagine holding her close.

“There’s a moment in cooking,” he had no idea what he was going to say, but if he didn’t speak soon, a sudden dryness might close this throat forever. “I’ll wrestle with a dish a hundred times. I follow the recipe. I work the ingredients. I get to the point where if I eat another lobster-stuffed pork chop I’m sure that I’ll die.”

They moved down the concrete boat launch ramp until they reached the beach and then turned south. The town lay sleepily atop the bluff to their left. On the moonlit sand, giant driftwood logs looked ten times their size with their dark shadows. The sand was a mixture of tide-packed hard and wind-blown soft that tickled his feet.

And his shoes and socks were still on the diner’s porch. Well, he wasn’t leaving Jessica’s side to go back and get them.

To their right, the ocean waves sparkled outward forever. The steady whump of waves hitting the sand then scraping up and down the beach kept them company. Seagulls slept on the sand as bright lumps, who scowled when “forced” to stand and step out of the humans’ way. A few miles to the south, Orca Head lighthouse towered above the beach, casting its sweeping lights out across the water, but passing high above the beach and town—a guiding beacon that offered no illumination to their next steps.

The ocean breeze didn’t draw on the infinite fresh air and sea salt to intrigue his nose. Instead, Jessica, walking just windward of him, scented the breeze like warm honey. Like…what in the hell had he been talking about?

Food. Tough guess. He was a chef after all. Pork chops. That was it.

“Then after a hundred meals of merely good,” he continued, “and occasionally awful, something happens. I’ll cook without looking at the recipe. After all, I’ve long since gleaned every scrap that the prior chef encoded in coarse-minced versus fine-diced and dash versus pinch. And maybe I’m in too much of a hurry to look at the recipe again. I just cook.”

He tried to assess what Jessica was thinking, but she ambled along beside him watching the beach ahead. They were moving too slowly for it to be walking. They were like two old friends heading down the beach as somewhere to talk rather than actually heading anywhere.

“There’s something that happens at that moment. I…” he tried to recapture what he’d felt while cooking tonight. “I was no longer just cooking. I was…”

Somehow they had stopped walking and were facing each other in the moonlight. The sliver of a moon was behind her and her face was cool skin and deep shadow, like a modernist painting of herself.

Well, if he was going to go down for anything, he might as well go down for the truth.

“I was cooking for you.”

It wasn’t something he could have said even this afternoon. But the Judge had been right; he’d never cooked like this before. After so many meals for himself, for the Judge, and for the town, he could now feel the difference. And some part of him knew now that he’d finally glimpsed how to be a chef rather than just a cook. He wouldn’t be sliding backward anytime soon. Just as thoroughly as Jessica had ruined the morning’s roulades, she’d made the dinner, but he owned that now.

Jessica watched him without blinking. No tilt of her head to show what she was thinking.

He waited, too tired to do anything else. Too certain that once again he’d utterly blown it.

“I’m going back to my original premise,” her voice was as neutral as her expression.

Was it some journalist’s tool? Never show your own emotions so that the interviewee must fill the void? Well, his voice was food, not words, and he’d spoken with everything there was inside him.

“My first question was, ‘What the hell, Slater?’ That still seems appropriate.”

If she couldn’t see it or couldn’t let it in… Somehow he’d thought more of her. He’d given her all that he had and it hadn’t been enough.

“You know what? You were right. Teenage crush, decade-long delusion, whatever. I hope you enjoyed the meal.” And to hell with her and to hell with himself.

He turned to continue down the beach.

Jessica grabbed his sleeve.

He shook her off, surprising himself as much as her.

“Okay!” It came out as a shout that he couldn’t seem to clamp down on. “I don’t know who you are. You left this town fourteen years ago at a dead run and you think I’m a failure because I didn’t. Well, I did leave. But after eight years I came back because my mother was dying and then my father needed me. And you know what happened? I discovered I liked it here.”

Still that neutral damned expression.

He almost blasted her with the rest of it. That he knew it was still a stupid schoolboy crush, but it was one that even just the sight of her brought roaring back to life. He wasn’t an i***t, except about Jessica Baxter. He—

Unable to face what he did and didn’t know, he turned from her and headed down the beach. She didn’t try to stop him this time.

He waded through one of the half-dozen little runoff streams that cut just inches deep across the sand. The chill water did nothing to slow his steps as he passed the small, sleepy hotels perched along the bluff. The cuffs of his jeans now slapped wetly at his ankles chafing the sand into his skin.

When he glanced back, Jessica was still standing there, a shimmering figure in the moonlight—as ephemeral as the waves and just as indifferent. Maybe he should go back and apologize or placate or something, but he didn’t feel like it. He was only now putting together why he’d cooked the way he had. He hadn’t even known it until he said it aloud and it scared the crap out of him. The food had always been his and his alone. No one should have the power to ruin roulades or create the best meal he’d ever put together.

And the worst fear—the one that had him practically sprinting down the beach—was that he was fooling himself and he’d never again be able to cook just for himself.