Page 3 of Blood Orange Christmas
It is a simple dough—flour, eggs, zest, two drops of oil—and it comes together under my palms with the kind of calm that makes the mind stop chewing on itself. Flour coats my fingers and the bridge of my nose because I forget and push hair back where it doesn’t belong. I press the heel of my hand in and fold and press again. The rhythm is steady and private. It has nothing to prove.
The door opens and closes so softly, I almost miss it. I don’t look up because I am in the middle of a count and I am past caring who is watching. When I do lift my head, he is there at the far end, not moving, as if he is trying not to disturb the air. His eyes drop to my hands and stay there, following the press and fold, the way flour clings to skin, the way the dough smooths as if it were always meant to be this shape.
Heat climbs up my throat for reasons that have nothing to do with the ovens. He is not staring like a man who wants to own something. He is staring like a man who has found a thing he didn’t know he'd missed.
My cheeks go warm. I tell myself it’s the kitchen. I tell myself I should be annoyed. I tell myself all sorts of useful lies. What I know, under all of that, is quick and clear. I want him to look.
2
SERENA
Aweek later, I tell myself I am still here because the schedule is full, that the house manager forgot to send me a checkout time, that it would be rude to leave a kitchen this clean without a proper handover. The truth sits comfortably beside the lie. He has not asked me to leave, and I have not volunteered. The days begin to stack, neatly and quietly, the way plates do after service.
By now, I know where the light falls on the prep table and which burner runs hotter by instinct. I learn the timing of the house, the way staff speak in low voices before ten, the way the corridor outside the kitchen stays free of footsteps when he is in a mood. Bianchi brings me invoices to sign and never lingers. The dishwasher asks how to clean a copper pan without scratching it and listens like it matters. The kitchen starts to treat me like I belong.
He doesn't eat with anyone else. He sits alone at the end of a long table that could seat twenty, and he leaves a space on his right that feels like a decision. I don't ask questions. I do my job.
Dinner becomes a rhythm. I plate for one, send it out, plate for myself, taste, adjust the plan for the next course, and watch the door with the calm interest of someone who would like approval but will survive without it. The server brings back clean plates, and that is enough.
One night, I try something that tastes like winter and the coast. I char a slice of bread, rub it with garlic, and pile it with anchovies and shaved fennel dressed in lemon and oil. The fennel snaps under the knife, and the smell cuts through the warm air like a small bell. I add a few curls of orange peel because I can. The plate comes back with nothing left to question. It makes me feel taller.
He begins to appear at the kitchen door more often. He doesn't announce himself. He stands just inside the frame, hands in his pockets, and watches me turn onions translucent and stir polenta like it owes me money. He asks short questions that are not small talk. He asks why I salt the pasta water until it tastes like the sea, and whether I prefer saffron from Abruzzo or Sicily, and how I know when the fish wants to be flipped. I answer and let him watch, because this is my territory, and I can be generous here.
“Lemon again,” he says one night, when the whole room smells bright.
“It works,” I say, and grate a little zest into the dough resting under a bowl. “I like food that wakes the mouth without shouting.”
“You don't like shouting,” he says, and it is not really a question.
“I grew up in a small kitchen with a big woman,” I say. “If you shouted, you chopped onions until you remembered your manners.”
“She sounds effective.”
“She is a legend,” I say, and I am not sure whether I am teasing or telling the truth. “Her lemon cake could start a war, and I mean that as a compliment.”
“What makes it special?” he asks, and he leans in the smallest amount, the way a careful man risks something on purpose.
“Boiled peel, thin as a breath, then candied in syrup,” I say. “It melts into the crumb. Not a gram too sweet.”
He looks down at my hands and then at the bowl, and his mouth shapes a thought he doesn't say. “You should make it,” he says.
“I will.” I lift the bowl and press my fingers into the dough. It rises back to meet me. “Not tonight.”
“No,” he says, and I feel him move away even before he steps back. He leaves as lightly as he arrives. The door hushes shut. The dough remembers my hands, and that is enough to keep me steady.
I cook because cooking gives me a place to stand when the rest of the world is moving. He sits in his quiet dining room and eats like a man who wants to believe that food can fix things that are not broken by hunger. We don't talk about what lies between us because nothing lies between us yet. There is only heat, and work, and a kind of attention that makes the back of my neck warm.
Another night, just before nine, I spoon a little ragu into a small dish and let it cool to safe. It has been on the back burner mostof the day, barely moving, deepening in its own time. Tomatoes cooked down with soffritto, a hint of milk to round it, bay leaf, a piece of rind from the parmesan that would have gone to waste in a lesser home. I pick up a wooden spoon, turn, and find him at the doorway again, close enough to catch the scent.
“Try,” I say and hold the spoon out before I can change my mind.
He steps in and takes it without hesitation. His mouth closes around the spoon, he tastes, and then he closes his eyes like someone turned the volume down on the rest of the house. It is not a show. He is not an actor. He is a man who gives in to a good bite of food with the seriousness he gives to everything else. “Don't change a thing,” he says, and his voice is warm in a way I have not heard yet.
“Understood,” I say and set the small dish aside for myself. I taste it a second later and have the strange urge to smile at a pot of sauce. It tastes like something that has learned patience and is being rewarded for it.
The line between personal and professional moves by a finger’s width with that spoon. Nothing obvious shifts, but now when I move through the kitchen, I feel us sharing the same air, not as strangers but as people who have done something small and kind for each other. I plate for him with an attention that is sharper than it needs to be. He eats with focus, and I watch the doorway and think about the way his eyes shut while he tasted the sauce.
The next night, I bring out a small plate with a curl of orange peel as a joke to myself. He notices. Of course he does.
