He had to clear his throat again. The power of the memory was enough to overwhelm him. He tilted his head to wipe his eyes with the back of his hand, and as he did, he looked up at her. He just couldn’t help himself.
He kept staring at her and her beautiful, tear-stained face as he said, “So I went home and got online and printed out some of your dessert recipes. And I don’t know if that’s really what you would have done. I mean, I know you wouldn’t have gone to your website and printed out your own recipes. You know what I mean. But it felt good. It felt good to go back to my first love. To cook because I wanted to cook.”
“Which of Chef Hadley’s recipes did you attempt to conquer, Chef Max?” Marshall asked, his tone and volume having completely transformed into something much kinder and more compassionate.
Max laughed and swiped at his eyes again. “Well, actually, I didn’t have the right ingredients for any of them.”
“Such as,” Marshall prodded.
Max turned back to face him. “Sugar. Butter. Enough cream to take a bath in.” Hadley began laughing and Max added, “That’s actually how she has it written in one of the recipes. ‘Enough cream to take a bath in.’ I don’t know the last time I came up with something truly new, before last night. It was . . . well . . .” He looked at Hadley and matched her smile with his own, and whatever words he’d been preparing to say faded away.
The two of them stared at each other in silence—and somehow the crew’s silence was even quieter than theirs—until Marshall asked Hadley, “Chef Hadley, do you have anything you wish to say in response?”
She smiled and sniffed, and then half-heartedly stirred her dish as she said, “I’m pretty sure these risottos are going to be as unimpressive as all get-out.”
26. Reduce and set aside.
HADLEY
“Not bad,” Max said as he tasted my risotto, after filming had wrapped.
I laughed. “You’re being generous. I hate that the first time I cook one of your dishes for you, this is what we get.”
“Hey, don’t worry. You haven’t tasted mine yet. Actually, I haven’t tasted mine yet either.”
“You didn’t taste it?”
He shook his head. “I was so behind, and I had to get it plated. The whole thing was just a disaster.”
I leaned down and put my elbows on the island. “Yeah. But we should be really proud of ourselves. I doubt any other chefs have ever had a judge say things to them like, ‘This dish is clearly not up to the caliber we traditionally find on Renowned.’ We broke new ground, my friend.”
A laugh burst out of him. “Was that for yours or mine? I can’t remember.”
“Oh, who knows! Now we have only to hope that we will be remembered for our contributions prior to today.”
“Here, here! A lofty goal indeed!” He took my fork and got a scoop of his risotto on it, and then repeated the action for himself. “Together? On three?”
On the count of three we both tried a Max Cavanagh attempt at comfort food, and it took everything in me not to spit it out.
“Oh Max, that’s awful!”
He laughed as I attempted to rub the horrible aftertaste off of my tongue. “That’s right. That’s what they said about mine. Yours was the ‘not up to the normal caliber’ thing.”
We stared at each other for a moment, the smiles remaining on our faces, until I sighed and set down my fork. “Well.”
“Well,” he echoed.
We both removed our aprons in silence and handed them off to a production assistant passing by. And then my desire to alleviate any perceived awkwardness grew too strong to ignore.
“I wonder which moments from today are going to make it into the promos for Sunday?”
He laughed, but there was an unmistakable edge to it. “Yeah, I don’t know. Do you think we gave them anything to work with?”
I put my hand on top of his and hoped my touch would somehow relay the comfort I didn’t quite know how to give him with my words. But in an instant his fingers had spread and mine willingly eased into the gaps he had created for me, and they all curled and interlocked in a way that made it difficult to tell whose were whose.
He was looking down at our hands as he said, “I can just picture it now.” His voice took on the timbre of a voice-over announcer. “Hadley Beckett and Maxwell Cavanagh, as you’ve never seen them before. Finally, it’s all out in the open.”
“You didn’t have to say all of that, Max,” I breathed. “I can’t imagine how difficult that was. And I know you didn’t want everyone to know—”
“No, but I wanted you to know.”
“You could have just told me.”
He smirked as his thumb began gently tracing meaningless patterns on my skin. “We weren’t really talking . . . except when the cameras were rolling.”
I suddenly felt exhausted at the thought of all that had happened between the two of us in such a short period of time. “About that. I’m really sorry I—”
“No.” He shook his head. “I was way out of line.” He took a deep breath and then his eyes, which had still been cast downward, began lifting to look at me. “I have to tell you something.”
I chuckled nervously in response to the foreboding expression on his face. “Should I sit down for this?”
“Maybe.”
He didn’t seem inclined to let go of my hand, but he also made no move to accompany me to a seat, so I just steeled myself and asked, “What is it?”
He took another deep breath and then let it out so slowly. “I’m not quite sure how to say this, so I’m just going to say it.” With his free hand he rubbed his knuckles against his beard. “See, the thing is, Leo Landry . . . well, he started representing me when I was twenty-five years old. He’s pretty much the reason anything ever happened for me in my career, and I guess at some point—well, I’d say he changed, but I don’t think he did. Anyway, the point is—”
“Max.” I released the breath I’d been holding and smiled. There was a little part of me that wanted to watch him keep digging out and sorting through everything that had to be going through his brain, but there was a bigger part of me that wanted to put him out of his misery. And the biggest part of all knew that Max’s misery and concern would have just taken away any lingering doubts or questions I had—if there had been any. “I know that Leo is your manager. I figured it out yesterday.”
He finally released my hand and began pacing slowly in front of the island. “I didn’t know he was your manager until a little over a week ago. I swear I didn’t. By the time we were at the Bluebird, I had myself convinced that you’d known all along, and that you and Leo had actually been conspiring against me.”
I closed my eyes and bit my lip as that thought registered, and then I began nodding as it all started making sense. “That explains a lot.”
That fear had flooded my mind, of course. On the phone with Leo, my heart had broken at the thought of Max thinking he couldn’t trust me. Knowing that was exactly what he’d thought didn’t make me feel all that great, but at least I understood why he was so critical of me that night at the Bluebird.