The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat)

by Florand, Laura

  He shrugged, half smiling. “I don’t know much, in fact, Sarabelle. Teenage boy fantasies about being a ninja and studying Asian forms for inspiration for desserts are about all I’ve got. Do you ever go back there with your mom to visit family?”

  Sarah gave a tiny shudder. “No.” No, her mother would never go back there. Never.

  Patrick frowned a little, thumb moving gently up and down the base of her foot. “It was bad for her?”

  Sarah nodded, all her insides tightening. This thing no one could discuss, that hurt so much that it hurt her, who had been born after.

  Patrick stretched over the length of the couch, picked her up, and settled back with her snuggled against him. “Do you want to come tell me about it?” he asked, only after he had already gotten her tucked firmly in place.

  “Not really,” Sarah said, strained, into his chest. That supple hardness of his body in repose did too many things to her: aroused her, intrigued her, calmed her.

  He nodded and didn’t say anything else. A long time passed while Patrick just held her, the warmth of his body seeping through her, while he seemed in no hurry to return to his film.

  “They were starving,” Sarah said, low. “Her and my older sister and our…brother. She got rice on the black market, but the police found out, and they…they…held her hands down on the floor and stamped on them.” Her fists clenched and hid in his body. You got used to it, in a way. Her mother’s hands had always been askew, awkward, settling beside her daughter’s perfect, pretty little hands as Sarah tried to write those damn letters of the alphabet, no excuse at all for why Sarah’s unbroken hands couldn’t do better. Not that her mother ever said that, it was just – Sarah always knew it. “In their military boots.”

  “Oh my God,” Patrick said, and his own hands flinched. Their hands were their careers. Their lives. She had given up all the brilliant promise and security of her engineering degree to choose a career where the grace of her hands was essential. Where feeding people was essential. Where the delight of food became the greatest gift you could give someone. He forced one hand out of its flinch and covered both of hers.

  Oh. Oh, was he protecting her hands? From boots? With his own?

  Her heart broke in a way it never had before, as if it had been cracked wide open to reveal this glowing richness inside, all hers. Her treasure. A gift from him.

  She took a breath and closed her eyes, concentrating on the feel of his hand, on the sound of his heartbeat under hers. Maybe just here, in darkness, wrapped in him, she could finish this story.

  Her own heart beat so hard, her voice a whisper. “So then – so then – she had to get them out. They snuck their way to the border with South Korea, but – my brother was three, and – she had to choose, you know. She was too weak to carry him, and he was too weak to walk, and my sister was only five and weakening fast from hunger. And she asked some farmers to watch out for him – they promised – until she could come back for him. And – she did come back for him, but they didn’t keep their promise. He – he died. Wandering the fields, calling for his mother until he was too weak to keep calling.”

  Patrick made a low sound and tightened his arms too hard around her, squeezing her whole body like he had squeezed her foot.

  “And – and – when she got to America with my sister, she had me right away, so no one could send them back. And – I think because she had to have another baby, she had to. I don’t know – she had to replace him, you know, she–” Sarah buried her head in his chest. This was why she couldn’t cry. Because there was this. A grief so great in her mother’s heart that nothing else could be permitted tears. To be so weak as to cry over stupid things like failing to get a sugar shoe right shamed all those tears her mother still cried on the dark nights, those nights when Sarah as a child would sneak out of her bed in flight from a nightmare and find her mother curled in a ball in her own bed, weeping, prey to her own far worse dream.

  “Sarah. Sarah, I’m so sorry.” Patrick lifted her hands and kissed all her fingers, as if they were the ones that had been hurt. “My God, your mother. God.”

  “That’s why I don’t know my father, because it didn’t really matter who he was. I don’t know if she even knows. She just had to get pregnant. Desperately had to. And I had to be worth – that.”

  “Bon Dieu.” He rocked her against his body.

  “It’s not me,” she said. “I wasn’t even born. I don’t know why you’re comforting me.”

  “I do. I know why I’m doing it. Just take it, all right?”

  She wanted to take it. She wanted to take it so much. “But it’s not fair, you know,” she whispered into his shirt, stealing all that comfort even while she denied her right to it. “That I get the comforting. I didn’t suffer. I never went hungry. I never got hurt. I should be perfect. Like you.”

  There was a beat’s pause. “Like who?”

  She lifted herself up with a forearm across his chest so that she could look down into his face and shrugged one-shouldered, embarrassed now. “You’re always so–” She shrugged again. Perfect. Warm and funny and protective and flirting and charming and unfailingly…perfect.

  “Sarah. Did you notice that you’re an intern? Under me? And I seduced you? Exactly how perfect do you think I’m being?”

  “Perfect enough for me,” she said softly.

  He stared at her, struck dumb. A soft, deep breath ran through him, flexing his chest under her weight.

  Her eyebrows drew together. “I didn’t sleep with you because I thought I had to, to keep my job, you know. That’s – pretty insulting, that you would think that.”

  “I know. You’re too strong for that. But I did use my position of power over you to seduce you, didn’t I?”

  “How?” she asked, genuinely curious.

  He looked at her as if she was being willfully dense. “I made you trust me. I got you used to me being in your space. I made you admire me. God, you think I’m perfect.”

  She tilted her head. Put like that, it sounded oddly like a – “Patrick. That’s not abusing power, that’s, that’s–” Courting. Her stomach swirled, slow and strange and oddly beautiful, as if all the swirls inside her were kaleidoscope turns around something wonderful she couldn’t quite see. She couldn’t say it out loud. He would laugh.

  But would he laugh just to hide the fact that it was true?

  “I think that’s how it’s supposed to go,” she said carefully. “When you’re – interested in someone else. You build their trust. You try to get them to think well of you. Comfortable with you.” Damn, that sounded so nice. As if had dating actually gone that way during college, she could have enjoyed it.

  “Yeah, but you didn’t really have a choice. You couldn’t exactly tell me to get out of your space every time I showed you how to do something correctly.”

  That was true, but – she hadn’t really tried. Until she taught herself how to hate him in self-defense, she had liked it. So much too much. “It was just our context, Patrick. You might as well say I seduced you by wearing sexy underwear under that marshmallow chef’s jacket or by being so helpless I constantly needed you hovering over me.”

  “No, you seduced me by being you. But if I’d known about the underwear, it would have been a nice, cruel touch.”

  By being her?

  She felt so strange. Like she didn’t know whether to squeeze herself tight, tight, tight, to hold this to her, or fling her arms out wide to encompass him.

  “It’s not the power, it’s–” She broke off.

  Something ran through him, a stillness, an alertness. As if, far out on the horizon over the sea, the surfer had caught a first hint of that perfect wave. “It’s…?”

  “Everything,” she said on a rush.

  His eyes brightened, intensely blue, and he waited, breath held.

  “The way you make me laugh, and the way you flirt, just – teasing, you know, and the way you always know what to do, and the way you make me feel like I can do i
t, that it’s all right, if I relax and give it time, I’ll be fine. The way you’re so gorgeous, everything you do looks so beautiful and so easy, and yet it can’t be easy, but…it doesn’t matter, when you’re there. When you’re there, it feels possible. The way you’re so damn nice, all the times you’ve done that little thing to relax the whole kitchen when people needed it, all the times you’ve tweaked Luc when someone was ready to hit him on the head if they couldn’t somehow get their own back, and all the times you’ve kept him human. My God, I think you’re the only thing that does keep him human, and you just do it because you like him. Because you like people. The way you take me over, I know I shouldn’t like it, I don’t mean to, but” – she covered her face with spread fingers – “I like it so much.” God, so much. It made everything about her right. “You’re so sweet, and – did I mention you’re gorgeous?”

  He sat up abruptly, so that she slid off him onto the couch, and leaned forward to scrub his face in his hands. “I think I need some cold air,” he said roughly. “I feel…really strange.” He looked at her sideways, wary, his eyes dilated black.

  Oh. She pulled her knees up to her chest, tucking herself tight into a ball, wondering what had possessed her. Oh, God, she was such a stupid geek. How could she have said all that? But it was all true. She put her hands up to her face again to hide how true, but it was too late. It was all out there, and it was still true.

  This thing between them was like this beautiful fairytale of a dessert constructed out of work and caution and risk and whimsy. Leaping and twirling, full of color and taste, a wrong breath could break it. And yet night after night, in the kitchens, they made such fragile magics and waiters got that fragility all the way to the tables they were meant for.

  Exactly like those magical fantasies she made under his tutelage, did hers only look perfect to her?

  “It’s too big.” He rubbed his chest, as if it hurt. “It – I don’t think it can fit in me.” And indeed, he was taking huge breaths, as if trying to force his ribs to expand. He gave his head a dazed shake. “That’s what I look like to you?”

  “Different perspectives?” she offered, with a shy test of his same ruefulness, hugging her knees, not sure what was happening.

  “Clearly.” He swallowed. “I have to take a walk, Sarah. I – might be a while.” He started to push to his feet, stopped, and turned to grab her wrist. “Don’t go while I’m out. Take a bath. Take a long, hot bath and don’t–” He pressed his thumb between her eyebrows. “Don’t. Just enjoy the bath. Really. Sarabelle. I’ll be back.” He leaned in and kissed her, a quick, fierce kiss, except that right at the end of it, when he was drawing back, his hands flew up into her hair and spasmed so tightly that they wrenched the roots and she drew a little gasp of pain. “Pardon,” he said. “Pardon. See? It might take me a while. But I’ll be back.”

  He got to the door before she saw him do it – pull up the easy grin, the lazy shrug, as if this was all just light play that didn’t matter. He turned and sent her a wink. “And no kinky stuff in the bathtub without me, chérie. I’ve got more plans for you later, and I want you to be hungry for them.”

  And then he was gone.

  Chapter 23

  It was really – just too much. He didn’t know if he could handle this. So many years of not revealing even to himself what mattered the most, of not letting anything matter the most, because he couldn’t. No matter how much steady work Luc had put into showing him it was okay, Patrick just couldn’t overcome that ingrained conviction that if he let anyone know – let even himself know – exactly how much something mattered, it would be ripped out of his hands and destroyed to punish him, held out of his reach to taunt him for not having jumped through somebody else’s fucked-up random hoop.

  And then there was Sarah.

  Who said she was sorry, when she realized she had given him an unfair hoop to jump through.

  Who, who said he was–

  His throat clogged too much for a public street. He couldn’t even think about what she had said directly. And yet he couldn’t stop thinking around all its edges.

  His chest felt as if that sugar heart was swelling and swelling on the underside of it, as if someone was pumping too much air in, only this sugar was harder than his bones, and it was about to burst his sternum out of his body.

  He kept walking, hoping Sarah was in that nice, big bath in his bathroom that he never used but that he had anyway, as if some prescient fantasy had made him install it long ago, just so he could imagine her in it now, warm and pampered, while he walked this off.

  He paused before a luxury bath product store, then went in and bought a little bag of scented capsules that someone as pretty as Sarah should have dissolving in her bath, and shoved them in his jacket pocket as he headed on. She probably wouldn’t like this present either, but – he liked the thought of their scent surrounding her as she soaked in that bath, of the oils softening her skin. Let me give you perfumes and soaps so that you’ll know that everything that makes you feel easy, everything that makes you feel good in your skin, comes from me.

  Sometimes it was oddly reassuring to know that he wasn’t the only screwed-up man in the world. His whole damn sex was. And most of the others weren’t lucky enough – or tricky and manipulative enough – to find someone like her.

  Sarah, don’t get your feelings hurt. Be just a little patient. Be there when I get back. I’m trying.

  I’d try anything for you, Sarabelle. Even this.

  The jagged thoughts that kept shooting out of him seemed to scratch the heavy underbelly of the clouds, and the sky dripped rain down on him in scattered reproach. The streets were full and a little bad-tempered, a workday for most people made worse by the cold half-rain, but he barely noticed the people he moved through, having spent twelve years of his life easily negotiating too many bodies in too small a space: Métros, his foster home, these Paris streets, and, above all, kitchens.

  He walked north through the Marais because the walk along the Seine invited far too much introspection, but he began to regret his walk pretty quickly, because – they had the day off. Together. Both of them. And all the stores were putting up their Saint-Valentin displays, and even though all that extravagant flaunting of hearts gave him the cold chills, he wanted to show them to Sarah. He bet she loved looking at displays; he bet she even sketched ideas into her little notebook to save later for her own shop.

  They both had the day off, and tomorrow off, too, and it was stupid to be out here wasting that instead of cuddled up. Or enjoying that bathtub. He let himself imagine Sarah in it right now – although his brain flashed a far more plausible vision of her pulling on her coat in angry hurt and heading back to her apartment. He took a photo of a pretty bouquet of flowers displayed before a florist’s shop and texted it to her with a little heart symbol after it, because it was hardly articulate or brave, but maybe if a woman got a text like that, and her feelings were hurt, she wouldn’t be so…hurt. She could feel more patient.

  She didn’t answer the text, which he hadn’t really expected, even if he did keep checking his phone over and over just in case. It was hard to imagine Sarah doing anything as stupid or shallow as communicating emotions via texting. No, you were inside her focus or you were out of it, no games in between.

  Anyway, maybe she was in the bath. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Instead of out in this cold, with the sky spitting like a pissed-off cat, she could be soaking in all that hot water she loved so much, dreaming, her eyes closed, her mouth softening, her body as relaxed as he had left it last night. Maybe her hands would stroke down herself, just to make sure it was still her body, after she had given it so completely to him, and she would feel her breasts, that he had owned, and slide her hands over her stomach, that he had kissed, and cup between her thighs, an area that was definitely his, but he could see Sarah wanting to re-assert her self-possession. Maybe she was touching herself carefully, curiously right now, thinking about him and what he had done
to her, wondering who she was today, and he–

  Mmm…her eyes drifted open to find him watching her, sitting astride the chair that conveniently appeared in the bathroom for his fantasy, his chin on his folded arms, and he said, low and deep, Go ahead. And she did.

  Sexual fantasies were so nice. A man’s life would be shitty without them and involve far too much focus on the gritty, dangerous emotions that lurked within them. Shards of diamonds, those emotions. They shone so bright, they promised such richness, and yet they hurt like hell to crawl through naked.

  Just for one horrifying second it flashed through his mind what it must be like to be a woman and not able to distract yourself with sex nearly so easily, and he shuddered. Poor Sarah. No wonder he felt so protective of her. While he was busy imagining bending her over counters, she was probably worrying about her dreams. Her mom. Getting things right. She needed somebody like him, to ratchet up the sex in her life by some exponent of ten so that it could take over even her brain.

  Really.

  Kind of.

  Merde, she did need him, all right?

  His hands flexed involuntarily in his pockets, trying to squeeze over hers. Her poor little hands. The pressure on Sarah’s hands, the thing that pleated her eyebrows, that drove her and drove her and never let her relent with herself, ever. She was worse than Luc, for God’s sake. No wonder it relaxed everything in her to have him take her over, to not allow her hands to do one damn thing.

  He thought he might be able to end this walk just so he could go back and kiss her hands all over. Take possession of them. Stroke his body with them. Just let himself feel how beautiful they were, unharmed, his.

  He paused, umbrellas bumping his shoulders as people kept passing by, and looked back toward the south. But his insides tightened in reflexive panic and he gave it a couple more blocks, breathing. Sarah.

  He gave his head a shake, laughing at himself, trying to get himself to act like a sane adult and not some screwed-up kid.

  Sarah.