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“Sy,” Jamie spoke up.
“Hm?”
“I think we need to learn how to cook.”
I glanced down at our new dining table. A few roasted blood apples on sticks, coated in different spice mixes, cheeses and bread–sliced, to be fancy, mind you, some sort of vegetable, and cups of tea.
“Are you saying you're not happy with dinner?”
“Dinner’s fine,” he said. “It's just that–”
“I worked very hard on this dinner,” I said. “I had to search to find all of the food groups. And do you know how hard it is to carry a full basket while running?”
“I'm only saying, Sy,” he gestured at the vegetable. “If we knew how to cook, this lettuce might not be raw.”
“Is that what that is?” I asked. “Lettuce?”
Jamie sighed. He peeled a piece of the lettuce off. He wrapped it around his blood apple and took a bite, then chewed, then swallowed.
“Have some lettuce, Sy,” he said. “You need vegetables.”
“Alright then,” I said. I peeled a few leaves off and folded them into my mouth without wrapping them around anything.
“Is it good?” he asked.
“It's fine,” I said.
“We're learning to cook,” he said. “This cannot go on.”
“But what's wrong with it?” I protested. “We have cheese, we have meat. We have a vegetable. Is it that we've been having the apples too much lately? I could get something else next time.”
“Sy, you're going to end up banned from that market for life.”
I plucked off more lettuce and tore a bite from the leaf. “I can just sneak better,” I said. “We don't need to cook. We're fashionable bachelors.”
For emphasis, I pointed at him. “We're just two gay old fellas, living free. We don't need rules. We don't need to cook.”
He sighed again. “If you know how to cook, you might be more popular with girls,” he tried. “You wouldn't necessarily have to be a bachelor.”
“I don't need girls,” I scoffed. “I have you.”
“Okay,” he said. “Great. I'm telling you we're going to learn how to cook.”
“I've decided I no longer want to have you,” I declared primly.
“Shut up and eat your lettuce,” he said. “That's enough conversation for one dinner.”
-
“Well,” I said. “Here we are, shopping where the old women shop.”
“Shh,” Jamie said.
“We're wasting our youth,” I said.
“Be quiet.”
“Are you even going to pick anything to buy?”
“Quiet. I'm reading. And there's nothing wrong with being an old woman.”
“I don't like old people,” I said. “They're all nasty. And wrinkly. And they think they know everything.”
Jamie kept flipping through the book. We were both standing behind the shelf of cookbooks, and he was hunched over slightly, keeping his head from being visible above it. He held the book open in one palm, using his other hand to rapidly flick through it, spending less than a second glancing at each page spread.
No, he actually wasn't glancing at all–he was staring into space, the book merely in front of him as he mechanically flipped.
“You're not going to buy anything at all,” I realized aloud.
“Loudly shouting that we're not going to buy anything in the middle of a shop sounds like exactly the type of thing you would tell me not to do,” he replied, still flipping.
“Jamie!” I said. “You sly dog. You're pulling off a book heist. Put it all in the ole thinker, aye?”
“Mentioning heists is even worse,” he said.
For a moment, as I looked at his face of concentration, I had one of those brief twinges–seeing the old Jamie. The heartfall of it. A searing little moment of hating everything.
They were getting more infrequent. But would they ever stop?
He was, at least, too distracted to notice. I gave myself a second by turning to search the shelf. “This is suddenly more interesting,” I said.
“Whatever gets you to behave,” he said.
I selected a book off the shelf. “How about this one? The Academy Woman's Guide to Cookery.”
“Maybe,” he said. He was reaching the tail end of his book. “What's in it?”
I flipped it open. “Umm. There's weekly meal planning tips for the whole family.”
“Where does the Academy come in?”
“Well, she's very busy with her studies, so these time-savers allow her to create marvelous meals while passing all of her classes with ease.”
He finally looked up from the book, quirking an eyebrow. “Are you reading straight from the text?”
“Our children are going to adore this fast and easy sweet bread.”
“Sweet bread, or sweetbread?”
“That's the same word twice.”
“The latter is pancreas meat. Here, give it.”
I handed the book over. He started flipping. “This could be useful,” he commented.
“Book heist!”
“Book what, now?”
I looked up. A middle-aged man who looked exactly like the type of guy to own a bookshop stared down at me.
In my peripheral vision, Jamie shot me a glare and flipped faster.
“Books,” I said weakly. “Nice!”
-
I patted my hands on my knees. “Awful quiet in here,” I said.
Jamie didn't reply.
I hopped up and walked over to where he sat upright on his bed. I stopped short a few feet, though. Didn't tackle him like I would have with the other Jamie.
“What’re you doing?” I asked.
“I'm reading,” he said.
He was staring distantly at the wall across, legs crossed, hands cupping a mug of tea.
“And making a shopping list,” he added.
I set my hands on my hips. “You know, it's real uncanny when you do that.”
“Your face is uncanny.”
“Your face is uncanny," I shot back. "Butthead.”
“I know,” he said.
I froze.
“I didn't mean it that way,” I mumbled. “Sorry.”
“Okay.”
“It's just that you're staring off into space, which is bizarre, but I mainly didn't have any reasoning, I was only saying no-you.”
“Okay, Sy.”
-
“I don't get it,” I said. I was perched on the counter next to the sink, which Jamie had told me not to do, and I had communicated to be a non-negotiable aspect of this living arrangement. “We go to all that fuss about getting books and ingredients, and then you buy part of dinner?”
The part of dinner in question, fried fish with a slightly above average number of heads, sat on a plate on the far side of Jamie. Being on the far side of Jamie meant I couldn't preemptively munch it. Jamie knew this. That was why it was there.
“We needed those ingredients anyway,” Jamie said. He was unpacking ingredients and utensils on the other side of the sink. “I just really cannot stress enough how much we need to have edible things in this apartment.”
“We had edible things!”
“We had tea and three kinds of biscuits, Sy.”
“And that's a very healthy variety. Very mature of us.”
“We can't have a fridge with nothing in it. That's ridiculous. I'd be embarrassed to invite someone over.”
“Who are we going to invite?”
He set down a bulbous purple vegetable, turned to face me, and set his fists on his hips. “What if the Lambs showed up tomorrow, broke in–”
“They wouldn't get past our traps,” I said confidently, although I was only sixty percent sure.
“It’s a hypothetical. What if the Lambs showed up and asked how you'd been getting by? You want to open up the fridge and go, ‘Oh, great, Lillian. We have no fucking food to serve you, because I think lettuce constitutes a meal. Let me pour you some biscuit crumbs and tea. No, don't worry about my mental state, I'm doing completely fine.””
“I could do without the sarcastic imitation of me,” I said. Maybe I was a little offended by the mental image of Lillian not liking my new home. “I don't gesture like that.”
“Yes you do. We needed staples anyway, and,” he said didactically, “it's recommended for beginner cooks to buy part of the meal, so they can focus on learning how to make other aspects properly.”
“Oo-kay,” I said. “Why are you telling me?”
“I'm answering your question,” he said.
“What question?”
“Why we bought part of dinner. And I'm also telling you because you need to learn how to cook. I'm not doing it all. This is going to be a team effort.”
“I'm on board,” I replied. “It's all a team effort. I'm just saying, if I were going to learn how to cook, I would start by cooking the whole meal.”
“Tough fucking shit, Sylvester.”
“You are really feisty tonight," I remarked. "Are you in some sort of mood?”
He quirked an eyebrow. “What mood would that be?”
It was an odd feeling, how I'd been spending so much time with him and still didn't have a thorough bead on his behaviors, or what they said about how he was feeling.
“I don't know,” I said. “I don't know all of your moods yet.”
“My mood is that I would like this to be done in the next forty-five minutes,” he said.
A dodge, I noted. Or maybe that really was just how he was feeling, and he was a guy who thought in practicals.
I saluted. “All-right sir, what's first?”
He picked up a big knife and took some of the vegetables to the cutting board. “Start the stove,” he said. “Set it to medium high heat.”
“You got it.”
I crawled over to the stove and turned the knob.
“Whoops,” I muttered to myself.
I watched the stove for a few moments.
Then, I asked out of idle curiosity. “Jamie, why does the stove do that thing it does sometimes, where it makes the hissing noise? And the fire doesn't start?”
Jamie's head whipped around. “Turn that off,” he commanded. “You're going to start a fire.”
“Yes,” I said. “That's what I'm trying to do?”
He set the knife down. “You cannot be serious,” he said.
“About what?”
“You don't know how to start a stove? You really–Sy, turn that off, before you start a gas fire.”
“I know it uses gas,” I said, somewhat bewildered. But I reached over and turned the knob back off, stopping the hiss noise.
Jamie was frozen in place, hands cupping the sides of his face.
“What?”
“You said ‘sometimes,’” he said slowly. “You mean to tell me this happens regularly, while you're trying to use the stove?”
I shrugged. “Sometimes.”
He dragged his hands down his face, stretching out his lower eyelids.
“What?”
“How are you alive?” he asked. “How have you not killed yourself yet?”
“Um,” I said. That felt kinda crappy to hear.
“No, you're fucking with me. I don't believe it. I don't believe that, after everything I've seen you do, you don't know how the stove works. Turn it back on. Medium high heat. Do it properly. Put a pan on, add a few pats of butter.” He turned away, throwing his hands in the air. And went promptly back to chopping his vegetables.
Well, I understood the gist of a stove. I understood it used gas, and the hissing was the fire not starting properly, probably gas escaping. But why didn't it start properly? What was I doing wrong? And why was the eventual resulting fire such a big worry? Geez, he wanted a fire.
Confusing guy, in many ways.
-
“Okay,” Jamie said. “Do you see how the greens have wilted?”
From my position crouching next to the stove, I prodded the contents of the big pan with the wooden spoon. “Mhm-huh.”
“And we've already reduced the glaze. So go ahead and add in the chopped shellfish.”
He handed me the cutting board with the meat he'd made me chop up on it. As I scraped it into the pan, he kept talking.
“Shellfish cooks fast, so we add it last. If we cook it too long, it will be rubbery. Toss it with the spoon to coat it in the sauce and heat it evenly.”
“I feel like this has mainly just been me cooking and you ordering me around,” I said. I listened, of course. Jamie knew the recipe, and I didn't want dinner to be rubbery.
“I'm having fun,” he said.
The pan did smell nice. It was sort of satisfying on a tactile level to mix everything around with the spoon and watch the simmering. “I'm having fun, too,” I said.
“Reduce the heat a little,” he commented.
I turned the knob down a smidge. “We're very seafood-y tonight,” I said. “Main-dish-fish, and in here.”
“Tynewear sits along a major river,” Jamie replied. “It’s plentiful for seafood, so you can get it cheap and fresh here, and a large part of the city’s cuisine focuses on integrating it.”
I looked up for a second, glancing at the river through the window. It was dark, flowing steadily.
“The river you can see from our house?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“The one we saw a two-story long tentacle drag a man into?”
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“The one they feed the Academy waste into?”
“That would be the one.”
“Huh,” I said. “What type of shellfish is this, again?”
“That's a good question,” he said.
I poked the meat with the spoon.
It sizzled.
“We'll take it off the burner, now,” he said. “The residual heat will finish cooking it. If we leave it on longer, even if it's good when we take it off, it could overcook as it sits.”
I turned the stove off and hefted the pan to move it to the other burner. “Round of applause, please, gentlemen,” I said.
“We don't know that it's any good,” Jamie pointed out. “We could have messed something up, or it could be a bad recipe.”
“You need to lighten up,” I pointed at him. “Round of applause for effort, if nothing else.”
“I don't think I'm really a ‘round of applause’ type of person,” Jamie said.
That was true. When the second Jamie liked something, the most you got out of him was an approving nod, a calm ‘Good work,’ or a fractional smile. And I wasn't sure if he liked many things in the first place.
“Just one clap,” I insisted. I gently patted my hands together in demonstration. “Please?”
Jamie contemplated this for a moment.
Begrudgingly, he raised his hands in the air and neatly clapped them together to produce one single note of applause.
I threw my hands in the air. “Whoopee! Yay!”
Jamie nodded. And fractionally smiled.
-
“It's ready to come out now?” I asked. I pointed into the oven.
“Yes,” Jamie said. He was doling out remarkably even portions of the side onto our plates. The fried fish sat in the center of the little table, where we could grab what we wanted.
“You'd better not be giving yourself all the good bits over there,” I said.
“I'm not,” he said calmly.
I watched as he tipped the spoon to distribute half of the meat on it onto my plate, and the other half onto his. Exactly half. There looked to be exactly half of the overall meat left in the part he hadn't served out yet, too. Probably enough for leftovers.
“It sort of looks like you are,” I said, offended.
“I'm not. Get the bread out.”
He still sounded calm. I relented and turned back to the oven. Hot air blustered in my face as I opened it.
I blew on my hands.
In one swift movement, I reached in, snagged the sides of the tinfoil bundle with the tips of my fingers, yanked it out, and dropped it on the top of the stove.
“Hoo,” I said. It only burned a little bit.
“Sy,” Jamie said, with a funny tone in his voice.
I turned my head. “Hm?”
“There's oven mitts in the drawer on the left,” he said, holding the pan and spoon helplessly aloft.
“Oh,” I said.
“You don't have to do that. Ever.”
“Well, why didn't you stop me?”
“Why did you pretend to think I wasn't giving you your fair share?”
“Let's talk about something else now,” I said.
-
“Sy, don't get crumbs in the butter. It's rude.”
“How am I supposed to not get crumbs in the butter while I'm buttering my toast?”
Jamie reached out a hand to point. “Y–”
“You know,” I said. “Reaching out over the table like that is pretty rude of–”
“You get the butter you need with the master butter spreader,” he continued, pointing at the funny-shaped butter knife that came with the butter dish. “Then you use your individual butter knife to place that butter on your bread and spread it.” He pointed at my knife. “That way, you don't contaminate the butter in the dish. That's why you have a butter knife in the first place.”
“I just don't think it's that much of an issue,” I said. “I don't think it matters so much if there are crumbs in the butter.”
Jamie frowned meaningfully. “I’m not even commenting on how you're sitting,” he said. “Can't you just agree not to get crumbs in the butter?”
I looked down at myself. One leg was folded underneath me, squishing my foot beneath my butt, and the other was propped up so my foot braced against the wood and my knee came up near my chin.
“What's wrong with the way I'm sitting?” I asked.
“Can you just agree not to get crumbs in the butter, so we can start eating?”
“You can start eating,” I said. “I don't see how me still being on the bread stops you.”
“You have to try it first,” he said. “In case we screwed everything up.”
“I could take offense at that,” I said. “But I choose to take it as a compliment towards my invaluable skills as poison-tester.”
Then, because I did want to know, I set aside the bread and gathered some of the food we made on my fork. I set it in my mouth.
Jamie watched. I thought from the attention in his eyes he might have actually been pretty invested in how we did.
“‘s good,” I said, intentionally speaking with my mouth full.
“Hmm,” he said. He poked it with his fork and then took a bite as well.
Then he smiled a little. “It's good,” he proclaimed.
“That's what I said.”
“I've seen you eat off the floor,” he said. “Pardon me for not immediately trusting your judgment.”
“I'm not wasting perfectly good food! That's something you would tell me not to do.” I made my voice a little deeper and way more monotone in a Jamie imitation. “‘Sy, don't waste good food. Food is expensive, Sy.’”
He took another bite of the food, ghost of the smile on his face. “Rationally, I acknowledge that you won't get sick, so it's an alright decision. Also rationally, I acknowledge that it really says something about you that you call food off the floor ‘good food.’”
“Well,” I said haughtily. “Then I suppose you can ignore me when I say this is pretty good food, too.”
Jamie rolled his eyes behind a sip of water.
“Are you happy?” I ventured. “With our newfound abilities, good sir?”
“Let's try hotcakes for breakfast tomorrow,” he said.