If he let the anger slip away, if he forgot why he was here, he would have no one but himself to blame for ending up alone. Again. Someone who betrayed you once would betray you again. Always.
Rubbing her hands up and down her arms, Ashna looked at DJ with the kind of affection that made Rico forget what he was trying to forget. The red chef’s jacket made it hard not to follow along as her skin paled and blushed in turn as she found her way from fragility to strength then back again, over and over, giving him whiplash.
The cameras panned toward them and DJ threw the warmest smile her way. “Next up is Chef Ashna Raje and her partner, the greatest striker in the history of football, Frederico Silva.”
The audience went wild, their share of applause noticeably louder than everyone else’s. DJ made a production out of waiting for the applause to die down without seeming like a hack. The network had done well with their choice of host. The man had a deep, sophisticated voice and a London accent that moved comfortably between posh and working class. He grinned at Rico with the friendliness of someone Rico had not been an arse to just recently.
The person who had provoked him enough to make an arse out of himself turned to him and seemed to read exactly how guilty he was feeling. That of all things seemed to loosen out the knots she’d been tied up in since they had arrived at the studio today.
“Bonus points for calling it football, mate,” Rico said, and the crowd booed playfully.
“And by football they both mean soccer,” Ashna added. “This is America, guys!”
The crowd went nuts.
In high school she had sounded almost American, with only a little bit of a colonial lilt accenting some of her words.
Now she sounded completely American.
Rico had never been able to drop his accent, as they said here. With an English mother who had completely assimilated into Brazilian culture, he had grown up perfectly bilingual. Living in Northern California and then London might have altered how he spoke, but you didn’t so much drop accents as pick them up. The belief that the way you spoke was how language was supposed to be spoken and that everyone else had an accent was much like all belief systems: it was a way to benchmark yourself as normal and categorize everyone else as strange, coveted or inferior. Accents were your native garb, and the only way to get one that wasn’t yours was to pick up someone else’s, either by association or because you wanted to sound more like them.
“Soccer, then,” DJ said finally—in the accent that had obviously gotten him the job.
When DJ moved on to the next pair, for all her bravado earlier, Ashna’s body sagged with relief.
She had never been the most social person. Rico hadn’t either. They’d been two self-contained teenagers who had somehow cracked each other’s shells and further destroyed each other’s ability to need other people. This version of her, the one who was so acutely aware of people’s reaction to her, made him want to break her loose.
Once the last of the competitors were introduced, DJ recapped last week’s audience votes, starting with Ashna and Rico’s position at the top. Ashna pushed the loose lock of hair off her face and smiled diffidently. Rico braced himself for the look that told him exactly how much she hated the advantage their viral video had given them. It never came.
If anything, she looked grateful for the advantage. He hadn’t really believed her when she said she was here to win. Now suddenly he did.
DJ moved down the scoreboard and Rico studied the competition. The chefs all looked ready to do battle, keen on winning. The celebrities kept their focus on appearing affable and entertaining and upping their fan base. This was a marketing exercise for everyone. As for Rico, he didn’t have anything left to market, nothing left to prove. He tried that word out in his mind, the one he’d been avoiding: retired.
The only celebrity who seemed somewhat unsure of how to navigate this particular landscape was Song. She beamed at him and he smiled back. Being an outsider was something Rico was intimately familiar with. When he’d moved to California, the first person who had not treated him like he was nothing more than his accent and his looks was Ashna. She had never told him why her family had moved, but he knew it had been devastating to her. Recognizing devastation in each other had been the magic that tied them together.
Finally, DJ was done and it was time for their second challenge, and Rico realized that twelve years of being separated from Ashna had done nothing to take away his ability to feel her devastation.
“Let’s take a brief break before we move on to the challenge,” DJ announced but she didn’t seem to hear him.
Her shaking hands gripped the countertop. Then she seemed to realize that her hands were visible and hid them behind the countertop. Rico picked up a rolling pin and handed it to her.
She grabbed it and squeezed it so hard that it was a miracle it didn’t splinter.
“Hey,” he said, but again, it didn’t reach her.
Over the years Rico had seen a lot of rookie nerves. That wasn’t what this was. But it was definitely something. Something he had to figure out.
“It’s just throwing ingredients together,” Rico said, repeating her words from long ago.
His words seemed to strike her like a physical blow. Her gaze on the rolling pin in her hands sharpened, came back into focus.
“That’s just something people who can’t cook say.” She was right. She had said it when she’d avoided the kitchen at all costs. He’d told himself it was her quiet rebellion against her father, the natural need for a teenager to seek an identity outside of their parents. Asking her about her parents had been off the table.
“But now you can cook, right? You made that journey, no matter what it cost.” She stiffened. Maybe he shouldn’t have said that last part, but it snapped her out of whatever this was. “You said you were here to win. To win you have to play the game.” He jumped into pep talk mode. “Just stay inside the game and shut everything else out and you’ll be fine.”
The pep talk fell like a spark on her temper. “Must be nice,” she snapped, her tone so cold a shiver ran through him, “to care only about what you want. To be able to shut everything else out. To have nothing to lose.”
She thought he’d lost nothing?
When he’d first arrived here, all he’d wanted was for her to believe that. That she had taken nothing from him. But to see her actually believe it . . .
He knew his eyes had gone as cold as hers. “It’s the orphan’s advantage. No one to please. Nothing to lose.”
She paled. His first offering of guilt from her. Fuck that. She could keep her pity.
“It’s the only way to win,” he said before she let out the apology hovering on her lips. He didn’t want it. “It’s the only way to stand back up when someone knocks you down. Or throws you out because you don’t live up to some bullshit benchmark.” Rico never let his heart rate rise. It was his greatest strength, being able to stay in the moment. “If I hadn’t learned to shut everything out, where would I be?”
Instead of turning the pity in her eyes to anger again, all he managed was to make her go completely blank. Nothing, that’s what she gave him. Nothing but soul-deep exhaustion. Not being able to read her drove him only a little crazier than seeing everything inside her.