Page 11 of Midnight Secrets

She hadn’t seen women flocking to Joe’s door but then he was often gone. Who know where? And with whom?

And she really had no business thinking these thoughts because she was barely human these days. She wasn’t good company for herself, let alone for someone else.

And sex. God. She’d enjoyed sex back in the day, but now? Now she shuddered if someone got too close to her. Claustrophobia clawed at her in an enclosed space with too many people. Her hands and feet turned to ice and her stomach churned and panic rose in her throat. Walking with Joe had been really nice but who knew how she’d react if it ever came to intimacy? She’d freeze, surely. Curl in on herself, incapable of reacting like a woman.

Isabel rested her head against the back of the couch. Sadness and weakness nearly overwhelmed her.

Was this going to be the rest of her life? Missing her family like crazy. Unable to stop grieving them. Nightmares every night. Despair and exhaustion her constant companions during the day.

These thoughts were toxic thoughts, just as surely as if she was taking poison, drop by drop. She couldn’t go on this way. She was dishonoring her family, who had loved life and lived it to the fullest. Though the dizziness and the nightmares were beyond her control, her thoughts weren’t. She could control her thoughts, or at least try to.

Doing something. That was usually a good antidote. But do what? The house was spotless. Her accounts were in order. She’d neglected her food blog for so long she had no more followers, so that was out.

Food.

Okay.

She’d cook something else for Joe, to thank him from saving her from the big bad slobbering puppy. Baked ziti. A hearty recipe a friend’s Sicilian grandmother had taught her. He could freeze the pan and share with his buddies over poker some other time.

The thought energized her enough to propel her from the couch and back into the kitchen. Her hands took over. When she cooked she rarely had to think. Her hands just did the work without much input from her. It was magic.

So she switched on her cook setting and went along for the ride.

There was something so magical about food. Food and sex, the eternal healers. In her heart of hearts, if someone put her feet to the fire to make her tell the truth, she thought food was better than sex. More reliable as a source of pleasure. Good food never let you down like people did.

Before the…before. Before, she’d been making a name for herself as a food blogger because all of it interested her.Foodways, her blog was called. Well, it had been called that when it was active. Now it was dormant, dead. She still got puzzled inquiries from fellow food enthusiasts who hadn’t put together that Isabel Delvaux ofFoodwayswas one oftheDelvauxs, the political and artsy family. The family that had died in the Washington Massacre.

The contacts were falling off fast and other food bloggers had picked up her readership.Foodwayswas dead. Last week she’d even canceled her personalFoodwaysemail address.

But in its heydayFoodwayshad received hundreds of thousands of hits a day. A million and a half readers. A best of collection of her posts had been published and enjoyed a modest success. Before…before. Before, she’d received several offers from publishers about writing a big book about the history of food, about food folklore throughout the world, including recipes. She’d been in negotiations with a major publisher when…

When the bottom dropped out of her world.

Memories usually carried sharp-cutting edges, slicing deep, making her bleed. It was only in the kitchen that she was able to chase memories away.

Right now she resolved to make the best pan of baked ziti in the history of the world for Joe. She’d put it into the biggest pan she had and leave a note on top that he could freeze the pan until the next poker night if he wanted. All he’d have to do was take it out of the freezer and pop it into the oven an hour before his friends were due to arrive.

Not the microwave oven, she’d have to add that to the note. She knew the attraction microwaves held for bachelors.

The real recipe, the true one, for baked ziti took hours. It was something only a grandmother could possibly cook. And, well, Isabel, who had hours to kill. Great aching vast oceans of hours to kill.

So she set to it, making the sauce from scratch, making almost a hundred tiny flavorful meatballs, undercooking the ziti because they’d finish cooking in the sauce in the oven, grating the scamorza cheese. It was a rich dish full of carbs and fats and protein. The kind of dish you’d need if you were walking across Antarctica.

Not the kind of dish she could eat, though she could certainly cook it. That was another thing that had fled from her world that night, together with sleep. An appetite. She’d always loved food and now most food tasted like cardboard, like a simulacrum of food. No matter what the dish, whether she’d prepared it or a master chef had, she couldn’t taste anything. Her stomach often clenched shut so tightly her abdominal muscles hurt.

Months ago, she’d have vomited if her plate was too full. Now she’d learned to nibble at the blandest, most tasteless things possible. Dry toast, small bowls of plain rice. Nothing with taste and color.

Right after the Massacre she’d completely lost her desire to cook. Cooking was recently reintroduced in her life, thanks to Joe. He helped her so much with things she couldn’t do that she knew she had to do something in return, something she did know how to do.

Crazily, cooking for Joe didn’t make her dizzy or nauseous. She could cook the most elaborate dishes and as long as she didn’t have to eat a bite of them, she was okay.

Like now, putting together the ziti dish, delicious smells coming from the stovetop, and all she felt was pleasure.

She’d often toyed with the idea of actually inviting Joe over for dinner, instead of leaving something on his doorstep like the cooking fairies. He went out of his way for her so much that cooking a meal and serving it was the least she could do.

The thought even gave her a crazy kind of pleasure. She’d started over completely here in Portland, getting her furniture from IKEA and her linens from a home goods warehouse. But she’d shipped over all her culinary equipment and her Limoges dinner service and the Delvaux silver cutlery. She could wow him with an elegant meal as a thank-you.

It was so incredibly tempting. Not spending an evening nursing a cup of lukewarm milk, with the TV on to a show she wasn’t watching, simply so she could hear the sound of human voices. So she wouldn’t feel at the bottom of a deep well, the only person in the world. Having Joe over would be fun. He was an interesting guy and, well, there was that hotness factor.

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