Page 1 of Tempt Me

1

Larry’sbeady eyes were like my mother’s black pearl earrings, round, lustrous, and judgmental.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I whispered, turning my attention back to Chef Guillaume.

With a genius for multitasking honed in the finest restaurants in France, the instructor flashed me a threatening stare without interrupting the flow of his lesson on shellfish.

Larry blinked, which was weird because I was pretty sure lobsters didn’t have eyelids. If they did, Chef Guillaume would’ve taught us to filet them.

I shifted on my feet, sore from standing in the miserable clogs that mercilessly rubbed the top of my foot. Pulling the kitchen towel from the belt of my apron, I tossed it over Larry where he rested on the cutting board at my workstation. Now I could focus on Chef Guillaume, who’d started a sidebar on shellfish allergies.

Much better.

The towel twitched, and one banded claw waved feebly at me. My chest panged. Chef explained that our local California spiny lobsters were shipped to China at exorbitant prices.

Poor Larry.

A couple of days ago, he’d been hanging out with his lobster buddies in the North Atlantic. Today, he slowly suffocated here in my cooking class at a community college in San Francisco, paling under the unflattering fluorescents, waiting to plunge into the pot of water that had almost reached a boil.

I stared at his immobilized claw.That makes two of us, buddy.

Tugging the towel off his head, I tucked it under his reddish-brown body so he wasn’t lying on the slippery cutting board. It had to smell like the other poor creatures I’d dispatched in my butchery class.

Did lobsters have noses?

Probably not, thank god. If he did, he’d smell my fear.

We’d started the semester with poultry. They’d come to us deceased with their heads detached, unlike Larry. I’d almost puked at the sight of the pale, featherless bodies, but instead, I imagined what Mother would say if I dropped out of this school too. I’d swallowed and carried on, splitting the parts well enough for a pass from Chef Guillaume.

The next unit had been beef, but that had also come to us faceless. I’d learned to separate the ribs from the loin, and I’d created a standing rolled rib roast Chef hadn’t snarled at. He’d called it “not bad,” which was as good as an A in any other class. Though I didn’t have much experience with As in school, culinary or otherwise.

We’d moved on to fish, and although they had faces, at least they were dead on arrival.

Until Larry.

“Miss Natalie Jones, are you paying attention?” How had Chef Guillaume snuck up on me like that? He scowled at me from the other side of my worktable with his hands on his hips.

“Yes, Chef,” I squeaked. I didn’t dare look at Larry.

“Then why is your lobster swaddled like un bébé and not cooking in the pot?”

Uh-oh. I glanced to my right, where my neighbor Gregory was wiping down his station. Steam wafted from the cover of his stockpot.

“Waiting for a full boil, Chef,” I said, glancing at my pot, where bubbles were starting to break the surface.

“Show me.” His lip curled as he stared down at the lobster. “Remove that towel.”

“Sorry.” Gently, I disentangled my towel from Larry. Poor guy didn’t look so good.

Chef’s nostrils flared. “Demonstrate for the class how to humanely kill the lobster.”

“I…uh.”Humanely killsounded like an oxymoron to me. “Could you show me the technique again?”

He reached for Larry.

I leaped to cover the crustacean with my body. “Not him!” I froze. “I mean, I’ll do it.” It was the least I owed Larry.

Chef raised an eyebrow. “Bon. I will demonstrate, then you repeat.”

---