Skinny Bitch in Love (9 page)

“But then what?” he asked, stepping closer until he was right next to me, his back to the counter, our shoulders touching.

He didn’t move. And neither did I.

“Someone blindsided me again and I got fired from a top restaurant. That’s why I’m trying to get the Skinny Bitch biz off the ground—being a personal chef, offering cooking classes so that one day I can open Clementine’s No Crap Café.”

“So do you think The Silver Steer and your Skinny Bitch world can coexist on Montana and 14th?”

I smiled. “I wouldn’t have thought so, but maybe.”

He lifted up my chin with his hand and leaned down and kissed me.

“You just kissed me,” I said like an idiot. Duh.

“Yeah, I did. Couldn’t help myself. I guess that means we’re not enemies anymore.”

“I never said
that
.”

He laughed. “I’ve always liked a challenge.”

Yeah, no kidding.
And remember that, Clem. A zillionaire who gets everything he wants? Of course, he’s interested in the vegan who doesn’t worship at his feet like every other woman probably does. Remember that. Live it. Don’t be lured.
“You know what I find challenging? Making sure blackened tofu doesn’t get so black that it’s burned to a crisp,” I said, turning off the burner and plating the stir-fry. The tofu was fine, but I wasn’t.

“I’ll let you focus on your work,” he said, staring at me for a moment. “I’ll get out the stuff for the portobello burger. I admit I like the sound of that better than the tofu stir-fry, but my chef—Walker—says both will definitely move.”

As he opened the refrigerator, I could still feel the imprint of his lips on mine.

And then he was standing in front of me, kissing me again. Instead of taking my own advice, instead of not being lured, I kissed him back. Hard.

The doorbell rang, and Zach went on kissing me as though someone wasn’t obsessively pressing the bell over and over.

Like a girlfriend.

“It’s like someone knows you’re here and isn’t giving up,” I said, heart unexpectedly plummeting. I shouldn’t care.

The bell would not stop ringing.

“Excuse me,” he said, looking pissed.

He stepped outside and closed the door behind him, so, of course, I went right to the peephole to get a look.

She was stunning, of course. Very tall. Long blond hair and huge boobs.

And in seconds, she was in his arms. I couldn’t tell if they were kissing, but he was holding her. Very close.

Dick. He was just all over me!

You’re here to cook for a job,
I reminded myself. Do not walk out. Do not tell him he sucks. Just do what you’re here for. Make your four hundred bucks. More money will come for the recipes themselves.

Just grab the portobello mushrooms and pull off the fucking stems.

The door opened, and in walked Zach and this woman who I still thought of as
Baby
.

“See,” he said to her, his arm extended toward me. “Chef jacket. The smell of an amazing meal cooking. This is Clementine, and she is here making some vegan options for The Silver Steer.”

Baby glanced at me, her big blue eyes on my jacket. “I’ll wait for you upstairs,” she said to Zach. “In your bedroom,” she added, eyes, suddenly cold, back on me.

Before he could say anything, she was marching up the stairs.

“Sorry about the interruption,” he said. He looked as though he was going to say something else, then slightly shook his head. “I’ll leave you to the burger. Call up when it’s ready for the tasting.”

He started for the stairs.

My blood started to boil. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You
just kissed me,” I whispered—unnecessarily generous. “And now you’re dismissing me to go fuck your girlfriend while I audition my cooking for you?” I threw the knife I’d been using to slice avocado in the sink. “Have a nice life.”

I grabbed my bag and stalked toward the door.

“Clementine, wait.”

“For what?” I pulled open the door.

“At least let me pay you,” he called.

Bastard.

Chapter 6

“Call Alexander right now and ask him out,” Sara ordered the next morning when I dragged myself into the kitchen, the smell of pancakes in the air.

When I got home last night, furious, she’d called Ty, who’d come over with potato-leek soup; more insanely good cupcakes, which I stuffed my face with; and my favorite wine, which I drank too much of. We watched the Food Network for hours, and by the time Ty left and Sara turned out the lights, I felt slightly better. Zach was a jerk, but was that ever really in question? And, as always, my friends had my back.

Sara flipped a buckwheat pancake at the stove. “You guys will go on some perfect vegany date and you’ll be madly in love with each other and you’ll be like, ‘Zach who?’ ”

Except that Alexander, with his fresh-scrubbed cuteness,
couldn’t compare to the utter hotness of Zach Jeffries. Still, I did like Alexander. He was my kind. And obviously too shy to ask me out. I would put him out of his misery.

“But wouldn’t that be using him to get over someone else?” I asked. “I ran into him the other day when I was having lunch with my sister. He’s too nice to use.”

She added the pancake to the stack of four already on a plate. “Who says you’re using him? Alexander could be the perfect guy for you. How are you supposed to know either way if you don’t give him a chance?”

“You spun that well,” I said, going into my bedroom for my phone. I found his card in my wallet. Alexander Orr. Sous chef, Fresh. Good thing he’d scrawled his cell number on the back, because there was no way I’d call Fresh.

“And hurry up because breakfast is ready. Spiced buckwheat banana pancakes from your recipe,” she called from the kitchen. “Please tell me I can use maple syrup.”

“Yup. The real stuff is in the fridge. But not too much,” I added, heading into the living room and peering out at the dead cow head sign for fortification. I dialed.

“Clementine,” Alexander said, sounding truly happy to hear from me. “I’d love to see you. I’m attending a special concert at two. Want to join me?”

A concert at two in the afternoon? Maybe some outdoor lunchtime thing.

“Sounds great,” I told him.

“Terrific. Meet me in front of Taft Middle School at 1:50.”

Middle school? What?

I tried to do the math fast in my head. Alexander couldn’t be more than thirty. How old were middle-school kids? Eleven? Twelve? Could he have a twelve-year-old kid? He could.

Crap. Not that I didn’t like kids and all, but . . . did I want to watch that twelve-year-old kid blow into a clarinet or whatever for an hour? Not really.

Before I could come up with a good excuse, he said, “Looking forward,” in that cute British accent and hung up.

What did you wear to a middle-school concert at two in the afternoon, anyway?

My own middle-school years sucked, just as I’d told Zach. My parents had switched me from a crunchy private school, where you took electives in African drumming, to the public school, which had four times the number of students. It took me a while to find my people.

And it took me a while to spot Alexander among the throngs of people walking and milling around the school. Everyone’s parents and grandparents and bored-looking little siblings were heading toward the main entrance. No one else was wearing incredibly cool four-inch over-the-knee ecru faux-suede boots, though.

Sara, who’d once substituted as an aide in a middle school, told me I could wear my skinny jeans and sheer, flowy shirt and amazing boots.

Alexander was sitting on a stone bench and stood up and
smiled when I approached. Damn, he was cute. He took off his sunglasses and squinted his sweet dark brown eyes at me.

“So, you were a teen dad or what?” I asked as we headed in.

“More like a teen mentor,” he said with that irresistible British accent. “It’s a Big Brothers–type program. I mentor a great young bloke called Jesse. He’s in sixth grade. Crazy good tuba player.”

He was a Big Brother. Brought his grandmum soup. The guy might be too good for me.

“What kind of stuff do you do together?”

He led the way into the auditorium. “Everything from basketball to helping with science fair projects. My father took off on my mum when I was young and I had a few different mentors in a similar program. One taught me how to cook, and here I am.”

Huh. “That’s really great,” I said, noticing that he smelled great, too. Like the ocean and clean. He also had a handsome profile. Strong, straight nose. Excellent chin.

“So Jesse knows you’re here?” I asked as we sat down close to the stage. Under the dark blue curtain across the stage, I could see lots of little feet moving around.

He nodded. “His mum can’t take off from work, especially since she works so far from here, so I go to all the school events she can’t attend. Make sure he’s represented, you know?”

Man, that was nice.

“You might make me want to become a better person,” I whispered, because the audience was quieting down.

He smiled, his eyes on mine. He took my hand and held it for a second, then began clapping as a woman in a really long skirt walked onto the stage.

The principal. She made her introductions, there was more clapping, and then the curtain parted to reveal a bunch of kids of wildly varying heights, some looking like munchkins and others like teenagers, sitting with their instruments.

“Which one is Jesse?”

“See the kid in the second row with the floppy blond hair and tuba next to the redheaded girl?”

“Aww, the tuba is bigger than he is.”

They weren’t half bad, which I expounded on to Alexander, who smiled and squeezed my hand again.

I liked this guy. Thank you, universe. I wouldn’t even remember Zach Jeffries’s last name in a couple of hours. Or the way that kiss of his shot straight from my toes to every part of my body. One little kiss did all that. But by four, maybe five o’clock when Alexander would have to head to Fresh for work, I should be completely over that kiss.

Forty-five minutes later, after a standing ovation, we headed backstage. I could see Jesse in a crowd of kids being hugged by proud, beaming parents, craning his neck in all directions to look for Alexander. When Jesse spied him, he broke out into a smile that melted even my cynical heart.

“You came!” Jesse said, pushing past the crowd to get to Alexander.

The two did some fist-bump hug combination, and then
Alexander pulled a small wrapped gift out of his back pocket and handed it to the kid.

“What’s this?” Jesse asked excitedly.

“Open it,” Zach said.

Jessie ripped off the wrapping paper to reveal an iTunes gift card. “Awesome!”

“It’s for classical music with tubas,” Alexander said. “Not Ne-Yo.”

“Gotcha,” Jesse said with a sly smile. He waved Alexander close and whispered something in his ear, then shouted, “Thanks again,” before disappearing into the sea of kids lining up to head back to their classes.

“What did he whisper?” I asked.

“Hot babe,” Alexander said, then laughed. “He has crushes on two girls at the moment. And, apparently, now you.”

I smiled. “I had a great time. You’re one nice guy.”

“So everyone says.” He mock-rolled his eyes. “White Blossom for late lunch?”

“I can’t show my face in there,” I said as we made our way back outside. “I asked about a job at White Blossom after I got fired and they told me they don’t take Emil’s sloppy seconds.”

“Finch said that?”

I nodded. Finch was one of the best vegan chefs in L.A. And clearly a big dickhead.

“I’ll never eat there again,” he said. “Wanker.”

I laughed. “You curse, too? You might just be perfect for me.”

He flashed me a dimpled smile and took my hand. And
held it all the way to the Pier, where we decided on Indian from his favorite truck.

We sat on a bench and ate and talked and people watched. He told me about growing up in a rural town an hour from London, with three brothers and one sister. How all the brothers looked so alike that even his mother sometimes called them by the wrong name. He’d been accepted to cooking school in New York, then got into veganism, and ended up in L.A. to train with Peter Farkoff, one of the best vegan chefs in the country. Alexander had figured at least one of his siblings would follow him to America, but only his cool grandmother did after she was widowed and needed to shake up her life. She lived in a retirement condo and did yoga on the beach every morning.

“Fresh is one of her favorite restaurants and she’s not even vegan,” he said. “Do you hate that I work there?”

“Eh, I’ll get over it.” I ripped off a piece of garlic naan. “So Emil didn’t keep anyone at Fresh? Everyone’s new?”

“He only kept the support—waitstaff and dishwashers. He fired James, the one who waited on the critic, but then hired him back.”

“Where’s Rain these days?”

“Looking, I hear,” he said. “Word got around she sabotaged you.”

“That’s good.”

As we finished up our samosas and chana saag and naan, he told me about his two dogs, a German shepherd named Brit and a crazy Jack Russell named Lizzie. He asked if I
wanted to take the dogs for a walk, which I did, so we headed to his place, which turned out to be a tiny house with a surprisingly big backyard (a must for the dogs, he said). I got the German shepherd, who was better behaved than the Jack Russell, and we went to a dog run in a park nearby. The minute the dogs were off leash, I was reminded of early mornings just like this with Ben and his yellow Lab, but the memory popped out of my head in seconds instead of slow-burning with the usual sensation of someone sticking a fork in my chest.