Mr. Fix-It

by Crystal Hubbard

Khela made two cuts and lifted out a solid wedge of her cake. “Beef.” She eased it onto Carter’s plate.

  He seemed to shudder, and Khela pinched back an impish smile.

  “You made a beef cake?” he deadpanned.

  Khela stood up straight, her right fist propped on her hip, the cutter protruding from her clenched hand. “The irony of you buying this cake is just too indescribably delicious.”

  “Why is that?” His jaw tightened. “Because you think of me as beefcake?”

  “No, I figured this cake would go to some stranger, not someone I know.”

  “Oh,” he grunted, a faint blush rising in his cheeks. “Sorry.” He looked down at the pleasantly steaming cake on his plate and took a deep whiff of it. “Is this meatloaf?”

  Khela toyed with the cutter, her eyes lowered. “It was supposed to be a joke. It’s a double-layer meatloaf made with lean ground chuck, pork sausage, green peppers, onions and mushrooms. The frosting is mashed potatoes. The roses are made of ribbons of red bell pepper, and I cut the leaves from green peppers.”

  Carter stared at his cake, his brow slightly furrowed.

  Khela shifted from foot to foot, yet again regretting her decision to make light of her auction contribution. “I thought it would be funny,” she explained, twirling the cutter just to give her hands something to do. “The Literacy Fund sent me that invitation right after the writer’s convention, and I just wasn’t in the mood to promote romance. It was just bad timing, and I wasn’t thinking about how the person who got the cake would feel about it. Now that I think about it, I’m glad that you bought it, because if someone else had I’d be even more embarrassed than I am now. So—”

  Carter stopped her river of words by touching her hand. “It’s perfect.”

  “It’s a joke,” she smiled wanly.

  “It’s a good one.” He smoothly took the cutter from her and laid it on the table. Then he wrapped her hand in his.

  “So you get it?”

  “Coming from you, yes,” he chuckled. “A romance novelist who donates a comfort food cake. It’s brilliant.”

  “Uh…yeah,” Khela hesitantly agreed. “Um…what’s so brilliant about it?”

  “Who but a romance writer could so vividly illustrate that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach?”

  “I didn’t…That wasn’t…” Khela struggled to confess that his deduction had never factored into her decision to make a meatloaf instead of a traditional cake. The fact that he’d provided a decent, heartwarming excuse for her cake sent a flood of affection through her. Acting on it before common sense stopped her, she leaned forward to brush his lips with a kiss.

  But before she could make contact, Carter turned his head and leaned away from her. “What are you doing?”

  Scorching heat raced into Khela’s face as she hastened away from him. “I was going to kiss you, to thank you, for…oh, my God, I’m so embarrassed.”

  “Don’t be,” he said. “It’s okay. It’s just that I came here for cake, not…sugar.”

  “Right.” Khela swallowed hard, her cheeks still burning as she took a seat adjacent to him. “There’s, uh, gravy in the little boat there, and I’ve chilled a bottle of wine. Please, start before it gets cold.”

  Carter focused on his meal to keep his mind off the kiss that almost was. It had taken every bit of willpower he possessed to refuse her kiss. But one thing he’d learned from her books was that a kiss was easy, and almost meaningless. Carter wanted more and he determined to hold out for it, just like Khela’s fictional heroes. In every one of her books, whether the hero was a myopic stringbean or a Tarzan-styled alpha male, the hero settled for nothing less than his ladylove’s whole heart.

  “This really smells delicious,” he said, using his fork to cut a hearty bite.

  Khela held her breath as he chewed, then swallowed. “Well?”

  “Tastes better than what my mama used to make,” he said through another hearty bite. “It reminds me of the meatloaf she used to make on Saturday nights, only better.”

  The compliment eased Khela’s mortification at having been rebuked and gave her a more pleasant reason to blush. “This is my Grandma Belle’s recipe. She was born and raised in Mississippi.”

  Carter used his fork to emphasize his next point. “I knew you had a bit of the South in you. Not too many Yankees know about Chilton peaches, and every now and again I hear a trace of the Delta in your dialect.”

  Resting her elbow on the table, Khela propped her fist under her chin. “What brought you all the way from Alabama to Massachusetts?”

  “School.” He stopped eating long enough to touch a napkin to his mouth. “Could you pass the gravy, please?”

  Khela did so, delighted by his enjoyment of her cooking. Carter cut himself a second slice of the meatloaf cake, and drizzled gravy over it. He moaned after his first bite. “Lord, woman,” he mumbled through a mouthful of meat and mashed potatoes. “You cook as good as you look.”

  “Thanks,” Khela said. “What school did you go to up here?”

  “Dearborn Academy,” he managed, chomping on a bell pepper rose.

  Khela’s eyebrows shot up. “Wow. I spoke at Dearborn once, on writing. I’ve never seen so many Hummers, BMWs, Mercedes and Jaguars in a student parking lot.”

  “It was the same way—minus the Hummers—fourteen years ago when I graduated,” he responded. “With honors, I should add.”

  “Your parents sent you up here?”

  Carter leaned back and unfastened the snap of his jeans to give his full stomach room for one more slice of meatloaf. “Naw, I was recruited. My friend Detrick and I, we both got the call to come up and play football our junior year. In exchange for our speed, size and superior athletic talent, we got a full ride.”

  “And a diploma that would get you into any college you wanted.”

  His mouth too full to speak, Carter nodded until he swallowed. “Yeah, Detrick ended up at Columbia. He majored in business and finance. He’s in real estate. Does all right for himself. He splits his time between Alabama and New England. He was in town last month working on a property deal for a strip mall in Woburn.”

  “So you decided to drag him along to watch you spend an insane amount of money on my cake.”

  “A ‘funny-looking’ cake, according to him.”

  “What college did you go to?”

  “Boston University. Go Terriers.”

  “Hmm.”

  Carter gave his mouth a final swipe with the cloth napkin before neatly placing it beside his plate. “What’s that mean?”

  “There’s a lot about you that I didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know or didn’t expect?”

  Khela thought a moment. “Both, I guess.”

  “A college boy can’t be a handyman, is that it?”

  “No, a Dearborn boy can’t be a handyman,” Khela clarified. “Obviously, there’s much more to you than I realized.”

  “You’ve been a writer too long, Khela.” Carter took a long sip of wine before explaining further. “You don’t see folks as folks any more. You see them as characters.”

  Khela sat back in her chair, her jaw falling. “How…?”

  Carter guiltily picked up his plate and cutlery. He couldn’t come out and admit that in reading her work he’d recognized tenants in the brownstone, and even her friend Daphne, in the pages of her books. He fled into the kitchen, Khela hot on his heels.

  “You can’t make an accusation like that and just run away without explaining it,” she said, taking Carter’s plate from him and setting it in the sink.

  “I just think that all writers probably borrow in part or whole from real life when they’re creating their characters,” Carter allowed, leaning against the Le Cornu stove. “Seems like a bit of truth would only enrich the fiction.”

  “It does,” Khela agreed.

  Carter crossed his arms over his chest and, staring at his feet, asked the one question that he most wanted answered. “
What would you do to me to turn me into one of your heroes?”

  Without hesitation, Khela met his gaze straight on and said, “I’d make you black.”

  * * *

  Carter watched as Khela retrieved a black lacquered platter from the refrigerator and set it on the prep island. He moved closer to investigate the colorful tidbits comprising her dessert course.

  “Cake for dinner, now sushi for dessert?” he asked.

  “In keeping with the theme, I thought I’d make a main course dessert.” Khela pointed to each item as she described it. “The sticky rice in the California maki is actually a mini cupcake topped with shredded coconut. The seaweed wrapper is a Fruit Roll-Up. The carrot, cucumber and avocado are actually cut from jellied fruit slices, and the crabmeat is vanilla taffy with a bit of food coloring. The nigiri is a hillock of candied coconut with a Swedish fish on top. The seaweed strip around it is more Fruit Roll-Up.”

  “I gotta give you credit for inventiveness,” Carter said. “May I?” he asked, reaching for the platter.

  “Please.”

  Khela groaned as he popped a fat slice of candy California roll into his mouth. “I don’t know where you plan to put that,” she chuckled. “You look like you’re going to pop.”

  “There’s always room for sushi,” he said, his cheek bulging.

  “There’s always room for Jell-O,” she corrected.

  “That, too,” Carter agreed. “So, um, why would I have to be black to be your hero?”

  “The book I’m working on now is an African-American romance.” Khela picked up a piece of coconut nigiri. “My hero is black. If I use a real person to flesh him out, that man has to be black. Other than that, you have most of the qualities I’d like my hero to have.”

  “Oh, yeah? Such as?”

  “Well, you’re reliable. You’re straightforward. And honest.” Seeing Carter’s self-satisfied expression, she added, “And you’re really not all that good-looking.”

  Carter’s head jerked up. “What’s wrong with my face?”

  “Your eyes. I think one is a little tiny bit higher than the other.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Your hair is too short. It emphasizes the roundness of the top of your head.”

  “It’ll grow out. Problem solved. What else?”

  Khela rolled her eyes. “There is nothing else. I just made up that stuff about your eyes and your hair. You’re stunning, Carter. Quit fishing for insults.”

  “So I’m hero material after all?”

  “No. You’re very handsome and you know it. My hero is very handsome and doesn’t know it. That makes a big difference.”

  “I see.” Carter said pensively. “You’re sayin’ that I’ve got an Adonis complex.”

  “I didn’t say that at all,” Khela retorted, nibbling the end of her nigiri.

  “But you think I’m hung up on my looks.”

  “I didn’t say that, either.”

  “Then what are you saying?” He closed the distance between them to meet her eye to eye and toe to toe.

  “I’m saying that I would like to experience the kind of love I write about,” she said plainly. “I don’t think I could have that with you.”

  “Why not?” he asked softly, searching her eyes.

  Because your looks and my money are a bad combination perched on her tongue, but she turned it into, “We don’t complement each other.”

  “Because you look at me and see some dumb Mr. Fix-It, and you’re the sophisticated novelist?” He took a step back, and Khela’s feet moved her in his direction.

  “I never said that,” she insisted. “I never even thought about it like that! Is this the reason you bought my cake? So you could come here and ambush me in my own house?”

  “This is my house,” he countered. “I’m the one who takes care of it, and—”

  “Why are you yelling at me?”

  “You wrote me off after the convention because you’ve become a victim of your own competence!”

  “I have not!” she fired back. “What?”

  “You said you want the kind of love you write about,” he began. “So you think you should be with a sheik who captured you for his harem and forsakes his four hundred other wives for you? Or that you’re the emotional and physical salvation of some sea captain whose dark personal secrets have condemned him to a life of solitude at sea?”

  Scowling, Khela marched back out to the dining area and grabbed the bottle of wine and Carter’s empty glass.

  “You ignorance is showing,” she muttered as she poured wine into the glass. “Those aren’t even plots to any of my books.”

  “The plots don’t matter!” Carter exclaimed, joining her at the tableside. “The boy gets the girl in every one of those books. It’s the details that make the difference between them. You’ve managed to capitalize on the simple formula of boy-meets-girl and eventually lives happily ever after. You take yourself too seriously.”

  Khela slammed down the wine glass, splashing wine onto the dark, polished surface of the dining table. “Do you take your tinkering seriously? Don’t insult what I do. It might not save lives, but it can definitely make life easier to bear. Reading is one of the oldest, most personal forms of entertainment and leisure, and—”

  “Romance novels are just soft porn for women,” Carter stated flatly.

  “—romance is the ultimate escape,” Khela continued as if he hadn’t interrupted. “Men are perfectly happy with sex. Women want romance.”

  “And sex,” Carter put in.

  “And tenderness.”

  “And sex.”

  “They want honesty and bare emotion!”

  “And…sex?”

  “Serious romance authors are some of the smartest people you’ll ever meet. We do more than entertain. We do our best to bring our stories to life by loaning our own very real experiences to our fictional characters! Do you know how much research goes into a romance novel, especially a historical romance? We take our readers directly to times and places they would never otherwise experience.” Khela stopped, but only to breathe, fueling her next volley. “January Rose writes romantic ethnic westerns that blur the line between commercial and literary fiction. Her books are sharp and brilliant in detail. She’s Harper Lee, Louis L’Amour and Nora Roberts in a single African-American skin.”

  “Who’s Nora Roberts?”

  Rolling her eyes, Khela went on. “If I set a book in ancient Rome, you’ll come away knowing how the Romans dressed, ate, fought, worked, played and—”

  “Had sex.”

  “You would smell the dust kicked up by a centurion in the midst of battle, and you’d taste the wine and honey on the pouty lips of an emperor’s handmaiden.”

  “So you distill important lessons in Western civilization through cheap paperbacks,” Carter reasoned.

  “Why do you have such contempt for me?”

  “Why are you so scared of me?”

  Khela scoffed. “Scared doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means. Annoyed would be a more apt description of how you make me feel.”

  “How do I annoy you?”

  She stared at him for a moment, torn between the truth and a diversion. The truth burst from her. “You make me feel things that I know I can’t follow up on,” she blurted. “You give me an itch that I just can’t scratch.”

  “I don’t think itch means what you seem to think it means,” Carter said, choosing his words deliberately. “Lust would be a more apt description of what I make you feel.”

  Grunting in frustration, Khela balled up her fist and punched Carter in the stomach. It was like striking the side of a cliff, and she hugged her aching hand to her chest.

  “Love and lust combined is what makes women hungry for sex,” she said, allowing Carter to take her hand. “You men are too stupid to realize that, and women are tired of explaining it to you over and over. The best thing any man could do for the woman in his life is to read a romance novel with an open mind an
d pen and paper in hand to take notes.”

  Carter gently massaged her aching knuckles. “Are you willing to at least consider the possibility that in your books, you’ve created the kinds of men who intrigue you personally?”

  Dropping her eyes to their clasped hands, she murmured, “If I fall in love with my hero, then so will my readers.”

  “With your books, you’re God. You build a man from scratch, making him exactly what you want him to be. You can’t do that in real life, so no man will ever be as good as the studs in your books. You need a man who’ll show you that the real thing is better than the sterile neatness of what you put in your fiction.”

  “Are you talking about sex scenes?”

  “I most definitely am,” he responded defiantly. “Sex is raw and slippery and sticky and—”

  “Not in my books.”

  “Then you ain’t doin’ it right.”

  “Have you ever read any of my books?” she demanded.

  He offered a sheepish smile.

  “Then shut up,” she snapped, snatching her hand back. “You don’t know what my men are like, and you don’t have the first clue as to the kind of man I need!”

  “What you like and what you need are right here, honey.” Carter pressed her hand to his chest and took her about the waist, pulling her against him. She stiffened and would have protested had Carter not sealed her complaint with a kiss. Her lips parted against his, to welcome rather than disagree with him. Her arms went around his neck, her fingers into his hair. He backed her onto the table, shoving up her skirt to give her legs the freedom to wrap about his hips.

  Khela, sighing against the explorations of his mouth, let her head fall back to give him easier access to the sensitive terrain of her neck. His shirt bunched in her hands, Carter allowed her to draw the obtrusive knot of heat between his legs into the soft cradle between her own. The tips of her breasts rose to meet the pads of his thumbs through the thin fabric of her dress. With each movement of her skirt, her custom scent and the one organic to her rose to infuse his lungs. Every part of her fit his hands perfectly, fit his mouth exactly.

  Instantly addicted to his kisses, Khela broke free of them only to gasp for air and, if need be, to beg him for still more.