A Cuban Girl's Guide to Tea and Tomorrow - Laura Taylor Namey Page 0,81
still shaded, not steady and warm like the sunlight over my bare shoulders.
I scoot closer. “But there’s also a dangerous kind of hurting between people. You run from those hurts.”
“You ran from me. Back there.”
“I needed to decide how I felt without unleashing my Reyes wrath.”
His brow arches as he jerks his thumb sideways. “That wasn’t your wrath?”
“It’s funny you thought that was my wrath.”
He laughs nervously, but he drops into gravity when he meets my face. “And how you feel now. Is there a part of you that’s able to accept my apology?”
I nod. “All my parts do.”
He cracks a smile and takes my other hand. “Do you want to go back to the inn? Or will you let me take you to Le Cordon Bleu? Show you around the neighborhood?”
“Let’s go.”
But instead of leaving, he rests his head on my shoulder. “I’m not the hurting kind of dangerous, Lila.” We’ll get up soon, but not yet. Right now, he’s warm as sweaters and sure as stars. And every other kind of dangerous I know.
28
Flora stays when I offer to brew café con leche to drink with the guava pastelitos we made. She sags into a stool and cuts thick slices of the bread we also made, watching me pour Cuban coffee shots into fat mugs of steamed milk. “It’s like a latte, then?”
“Pretty close.” I study her. She worked hard today, making her first pastelitos on her own. And now she gets to eat them. But all through the mixing and layering and folding she was the kind of quiet most girls notice about other girls. I noticed but kept my mouth shut.
Instead I drag over mugs, sugar, and the plate of extra pastelitos we kept back for her family. I toy with the pastry—perfectly golden and flaky, with just enough guava filling peeking out from the sides and ridge-cut tops. In my head, I’m back in London on Saturday, staring up at a classic ivory and brick building locked into a row of attached brownstones. Le Cordon Bleu.
The school was closed, but its public café flanking the adjacent courtyard was busy with customers. We studied photos of students in their white emblemed chef coats over loose gray pants. Then we sat under a blue umbrella and shamelessly sampled four desserts and pastries. So light and airy, with carved chocolate shapes and delicate cakes filled with creams and fruits.
“Why this school?” Orion asked over a miniature lemon tart covered with tiny puffs of toasted meringue shaped like clouds.
“There’s not much more for me to learn in Cuban baking. But there’s so much out there—so many techniques I don’t know. How to mold sugar and chocolate and countless other tricks.” I pointed my fork at the layered torte we were sharing. How did the chef stack all those fillings so thinly? “I don’t know how to make a pastry like this. It’s artwork. Also, Abuela’s sweetness philosophy was different from what many Cubans believe, which is add sugar to your sugar.”
Orion laughed and finished off the lemon tart.
“By the time she opened La Paloma, she’d had some French desserts and noticed they were more rich than sweet.”
Orion bumped me playfully. “That’s how I’d describe your pastries for sure.”
“Right. At home, I saw no reason to learn more. But being here and getting out of my little Miami corner changed all that. It’s reminded me that the world is bigger than my neighborhood, and my skills could be bigger too.”
“Like what you’ve been doing at the inn? Mashing everything up?”
“Yes, only better. Like taking an intricate French dessert but subbing out some Cuban flavors. Or British flavors. Of course, I’ll always make my old recipes. But customers love eclectic pairings and interesting food. For that, I need help. Yeah, there are schools in the States, but not LCB caliber. London is the closest one where I…”
He snaked his fingers over my wrist. “Where you have people you’re close to.”
I nodded. “It’s an hour from the inn, but back home, people who work in Ft. Lauderdale drive that long too, and in the most stressful traffic you can imagine. I could relax on the train. Read or message or make calls.” Call my family? Call them while they stayed in Miami and ran my business without me? Again, there was no choice here that made everything all better. Another time, I’d have to decide who would get all the hurt. And either way, one of those hurters would be me.