Page 57 of Grace & Henry's Holiday Movie Marathon
“These aren’t free?”
He shakes his head and sets four plates down. Each one has a miniature portion of something that looks delicious.
“We’ve been over the main course,” he says. “Spaghetti, that’s locked.”
“The Prego. I remember.”
“Thematically, I wanna go all in on comfort food,” he says. “It’s Christmas, right?”
He moves his hand from left to right. “Chicken parm, cut into strips, because your staff of heathens is probably used to chicken fingers.”
“God, you’re obnoxious,” I say.
“Italian wedding soup for starters. A sausage-and-zucchini casserole, too, to get some vegetables in the mix. Finally, shot glasses of bourbon-spiked tiramisu. And to all a good night.”
The smells are so good that they practically transport me, like I wasa barefoot Italian girl running through a villa in some other life. “This meeting could’ve been an email,” I say. “Like, what, I’m gonna say no to any of this?”
“You know,” he says, “in some cultures, it’s customary to put your napkin in your lap before you eat.”
I grab my fork and make a show of snapping my black napkin open. I start with the chicken parm, and it’s so stupidly good that my eyes close again. When I open them, I see that Dom has stolen back my Peroni. It’s nice, sitting with him like old times. But as he sips from my beer, smiling at me, I’m now remembering the time when we came dangerously close to making a huge, huge mistake.
It was five years ago.I try to think about it as little as possible, because I’m not proud of it.
A group of maybe a dozen twentysomethings from the neighborhood rolled into Edgar Allan’s on a Saturday night around 9:30. The staff and I knew them because every other month they did a themed bar crawl complete with outfits, like surfer beers, fancy Gatsby drinks, James Bond martinis. That night, decked out in jackets, ties, cocktail dresses, and stained teeth, they guzzled red wine with reckless abandon.
Edgar Allan’s is known for a few things, but our red wine isn’t one of them, so I ran over here and asked Dom if I could grab a few bottles from his little dungeon of a wine cellar downstairs. He said I couldn’t be trusted to pick the right ones, so he followed me down the stone staircase.
“How old are these assholes?” he asked as we studied his inventory.
We were side by side in the narrow room, our shoulders touching. the Italian Embassy’s relentless bustling hummed above us.
“Early to midtwenties, probably.”
“So, idiots then?”
“Well, you don’t have to be a dick about it,” I said. “But…yeah.”
“And how drunk are they currently?” he asked. “Scale of one to ten?”
I told him seven and a half. “One of the girls is wearing her date’s tie as a headband.”
“Perfect,” he said. “Fancy Hawaiian Punch it is.”
He grabbed two bottles, told me four should do the trick, then laughed as I stood on my toes to try to reach the other two.
“Easy, shorty,” he said, using his body to gently ease me aside. “I gotcha.”
If there’d been a security camera recording us, there’d have been no evidence of wrongdoing. Two adults making brief physical contact—the taller one helping the shorter one. But for two full seconds a significant percentage of our bodies touched as we faced each other in an impossibly small space. Our eyes met, and my pulse ticked up. I thought about what kissing him would be like. It was more than one of my make-out fantasies, though, because my imagination shot right past that until I considered the physical logistics of having sex with Dom in his wine cellar. How his hands would feel on me, which of his tattoos I’d bite first.
Dom broke eye contact before I did, cleared his throat, gave a little laugh. “You good?”
“Yeah,” I said, shaking off whatever had just happened.
“Sure you can carry all four? Drop one and I’m still charging you.”
“Got ’em, Dom,” I said. “Thanks.” Then I nearly tripped as I raced up the stairs to get the hell out of there.
As I tell him nowwhat he’s waiting to hear—that his chicken parm is amazing—I wonder if he ever thinks about our moment in the cellar and how complicated that could’ve suddenly gotten for all of us.
