I squeezed his hand and I didn’t care who saw. I also blinked my eyes furiously to try to keep more tears from falling, but it had the exact opposite result. I couldn’t bring myself to care too much about that either.
Nearly thirty minutes later we were nearing the end, and it was taking everything Max and I had in us to keep it together.
“We have one final Tweeter message for our chefs,” Simons was saying, as he read from the cards in his hands.
He’d called it Tweeter four times already, and not a single person on his crew had spoken up to correct him. At first, I thought maybe they didn’t know either, or that they were too scared to speak up, but the smirk on his face made it clear that at least one cameraman was fully aware, and perfectly willing to let Marshall Simons embarrass himself.
“This message is from ‘At Symbol FoodieShipper’—ah! A member of the food industry, perhaps?” he asked Max and me.
It was all just too good. I wished I was still holding Max’s hand so I would have something to squeeze. As it was, the inside of my cheek was probably going to be bruised in the morning.
“Actually, Chef,” I replied, turning away from Max so I couldn’t see his only moderately successful attempts to contain the laughter—currently consisting of a vicious rubbing of his face with both hands. “I think ‘shipper’ is a slang term for someone who wishes two people or characters would get together. As in, ‘relationshipper.’”
And it’s Twitter. And you can just say “At” rather than “At Symbol.” “Hashtag”—not “Pound Sign.”
“Is that so? Interesting,” he said, clearly not interested. “Well then, ‘At Symbol FoodieRelationshipper’ says, ‘At Symbol TVRenowned, Pound Sign HadBeck has rewritten the recipe of At Symbol ChefMaxCav’s life. Pound Sign MaxandHadley. Pound Sign FoodieLove.” He stared at his card, and then his lips began moving in silence. Finally, he looked at Max and me with a smile. “Indeed. Thoughts?”
Too much! I crossed my legs and shifted around uncomfortably. My stomach was beginning to cramp from maintaining my decorum.
“Thank you for that, FoodieShipper,” Max said into the camera, the hilarity etched all over his face. We were gone. One hundred percent. “You’re right. HadBeck”—he turned quickly to me—“Although, shouldn’t you be ‘At Symbol HadBeck’ rather than ‘Pound Sign Hadbeck’?”
I squeezed my fingernails into my knee as his twinkling eyes and mischievous grin pulled me into the conversation. “I’m not on Tweeter, actually.”
He shrugged. “I’m still going to start calling you HadBeck.” Then back to the camera. “HadBeck has completely rewritten the recipe of my life. She took her sloppy, delicious, maddening technique and got flour all over everything. And now I can’t even imagine a version that doesn’t have as much butter.”
I don’t know how he managed to keep such an earnest expression on his face, but I was completely done for. I grabbed a pillow and put it in front of my face, but there was no way to hide my bouncing shoulders.
Why, oh why, did Max and I have to be the subjects of Renowned’s first horrible attempt at being hip and modern?
Chef Simons carried on, oblivious. “And with that, it is now time to say goodbye. And not just until next season. Renowned has been a staple of culinary entertainment for nearly forty years, and I’ve savored every moment.”
I grabbed Max’s arm and dug my nails in. All the humor had vanished for both of us.
“Being invited into your homes, year after year, was an honor I will carry with me always. But all good things must come to an end. As for this season’s featured chefs, you know where to find them, of course. Continue to follow Chef Hadley Beckett on her hit Culinary Channel series, At Home with Hadley, and we’re just a matter of weeks away from the hotly anticipated return of Chef Maxwell Cavanagh on the highest-rated cooking program of all time, To the Max.”
Max cleared his throat. “Actually, Chef Simons, To the Max will not be returning.”
My head jerked around to face him. He looked at me and smiled nonchalantly, and then turned his attention back to Chef Simons.
Chef Simons, meanwhile, had just given up. He stood from his chair, muttered, “I’ll record a sign-off in postproduction,” and walked out the door without another word.
“Well, how do you like that?” Max mused as the crew began feverishly breaking down the set. “We killed Renowned.”
“Did we also kill To the Max?” I asked, pulling him aside. “I’m so sorry. What happened?”
He opened his mouth to speak, but instantly shut it again. We simultaneously offered sideways glances at the camera about three feet away from us.
“What are you doing?” Max asked.
The operator shrugged. “Lowell said to keep rolling.”
Max and I both groaned and, without a word, took off together toward my bathroom. Once we were locked behind two doors I repeated, “So what happened? Did I make you too boring when I rewrote the recipe of your life?”
He grinned. “Something like that.”
I hopped up on my vanity and continued to prod. “But seriously. What in the world happened? I thought you were heading off to the Great Barrier Reef next week.”
He returned to his position on the edge of my bathtub. “I was. Now I’m not.”
For the first time in probably twenty years, my stomach experienced the precise messed-up gravity sensation that used to occur when we’d hit the top of the Dulcimer Splash log-flume ride at the Opryland USA amusement park. He wasn’t going away. And the way those blue eyes were staring intensely at me, dancing with humor and challenge under cocked eyebrows, made me think maybe it had a little something to do with me.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to. Not right now.” He took a deep breath. “Things are settling down. You have a new manager; I have a new manager. Not the same manager, thankfully. Your At Home with Hadley contracts are settled, you’re keeping the house, things are good with all the restaurants—yours and mine. Let’s see . . . did I forget anything? Oh yeah. Renowned is over. For good, apparently.”
He stared at me and I just stared right back. I had thought that when Renowned wrapped, life would go back to normal. But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what normal looked like. Normal had been replaced by Max, and when I looked at him, looking at me, it seemed like he mattered more than anything else that I’d considered normal before.
“Okay, Max . . . say for just a second that you and I gave this a shot. Say we figured out how to keep from fighting—”
“We don’t fight much anymore,” he protested, rising from the tub.
I laughed. “We fought yesterday!”
“You overcooked the polenta!”
“Say we didn’t have to be rivals and we didn’t have to compete for the best time slots. Don’t you think, even if all of that was out of the way, you and I both carry around too much baggage to try and store all in one closet?”
“No. I don’t. I think we would just need to build a bigger closet. Or sort through all that baggage and see what we can get rid of. We could just store it all in your shower.” He looked behind him. “That thing is enormous.”