she said, “we need some tequila, and two shot glasses.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he asked in Spanish.
She wiped the counter. “I’m sure.”
When he brought the bottle into the room, there was a murmur from the guys. One tucked his hands under his armpits. “Go, Chef!”
Ivan sauntered over, drying his clean hands on a fresh white towel from the stack on the counter. His eyes glowed turquoise beneath the hooded lids, and he cocked a brow as he lifted the shot glass. “May the best man win.”
“Most huevos,” she said, and Ivan chuckled.
They knocked back a shot, then one more, and went back to cooking. Ivan had a beer at his elbow the whole evening, but even when goaded, he didn’t drink as many shots as Elena would have liked. And it took a while for her to realize why—he eyed the door every now and then. Hoping for Patrick.
As she cooked, she tried to keep her mind on her task, but the busy hands left a wandering mind. Over and over again, she saw a flash of Julian, leaning in to kiss her. His hands on her face, his black lashes floating down to the high angle of his cheekbone, the feel of his tongue against her, sliding in and out of her mouth, dragging across her lip—
Over and over, desire blistered through her, carrying with it a powerful and peculiar heat she kept nudging like a secret. Lips, tongue—tingling in the small of her back, the nape of her neck. His hand on her jaw—her throat flushed red and she could feel her nipples standing at attention beneath her baggy shirt.
Oh, I get it, Dmitri had written, he just wants to fuck you.
She breathed in. No, she definitely wanted to fuck him. Julian. Her desire had teeth, violence in it. As he’d sat there in front of her in the kitchen, wearing a neat, discreetly striped shirt in white and palest purple and palest blue, she thought of his chest, and wanted to tear at the fabric. She wanted to bite his neck like a cat, mount him, ride him, scream a lot.
Stop.
Focus.
Obviously, she needed to find a friendly buddy for sex. The stress of working so much was making her horny, and sex would ease some of the aches and pains, too. Nobody in the kitchen, of course, but maybe once Mia arrived, they could go out sometimes, meet some new people.
Ivan stepped out to have a smoke, and Elena ducked into the break room. Her eyes were red and she squeezed some drops into them, blinking the sting away. Settling on the bench, she pulled out her cell phone and punched in Patrick’s code. It rang, a lilting piano piece, but went to voice mail. He was still driving, then. Maybe on his way.
She stood up straight. Inhaled long and clear. Gave herself the eye in the mirror. She wished for company, for the comfort of her ghosts, but nobody came. They never did when she wanted them. Only when they felt like it.
“Fuck you then,” she said aloud. Easy for them, on the other side. She unbound her hair, combed it, put it back in a ponytail. A depth of regret and resistance pushed through her—weariness. She didn’t want to have to keep fighting for her position forever. She was sick of coming out of her lonely corner, fighting, going ten rounds, coming back to the lonely corner again.
And yet, what choice was there? You could sit down on the side of the road and cry, or you could keep fighting.
In the vastness of the great room, Julian balanced his laptop on his legs and tapped quickly, a rush of inspiration moving through him at last. Outside, the night swirled with fat, cottony snow against a soft pink sky. Pines arrowed into the pastel softness like sentinels protecting the property. It was vastly, unbelievably quiet—the thing people either loved or despised about the town. He drank it in like a drug. All of his life, he’d lived in noisy cities. This silence felt like a benediction, a blessing.
A fire flickered in the fireplace, logs burning with yellow and blue, the crackle of exploding sap sending a spray of sparks out every so often.
He wrote of a man isolated and lonely, a writer perhaps. No, that was too clichéd. A—what? What kind of a person lived the life of a recluse? He wrote fast: writer, scientist, researcher, naturalist, forest ranger.