“I don’t drink,” I warned him. “It’s not really legal for us to drink under 21 here, but I’m not a fan.” After the whiskey incident and the karaoke. Better to stay clean and sober.
“If you ever come to France, you should come to a meal with me there. We will have wine.” He grinned. “The legal drinking age is 18 at home.”
“Ahh…” Wait. “You’re 18?”
“Almost.My birthday is tomorrow.”
“You should have told me.” Not that I would have had the first clue what to get him.
“You are making me my favorite dessert. You have a beautiful accent and a gift for my language. This is a perfect way to spend my birthday, even if tomorrow I will be at school.”
“Here’s hoping the opera cake turns out good.” It would really suck to bomb his favorite dessert.
“I am positive I will enjoy it.” He motioned to the dinner. “Do you like it? Mrs. Wheeler makes the most wonderful roast. Not as good as my grandmere, but much better than Mama.”
I couldn’t help laughing at the very conspiratorial tone, but my first bite of the meat proved him correct. Even after microwaving, it was tender and there was a good spice to it. “This is good,” I told him.
“Excellent.” Relief blanketed his tone. The fact my enjoyment seemed to ease some tension in him relaxed me. All the nerves just drained away. Hewasnervous. Just like me. “I thought it would be wrong to not treat you to a real date before this evening, so I wanted you to enjoy it.”
A real date.
“I’m having a really good time,” I promised him, and he sat a little straighter in the chair. After that, we both stopped trying so hard. While we ate, Mathieu told me about the process of becoming a foreign exchange student, why he’d chosen to come to the States, and what he looked forward to.
He was only here until Christmas. That part kind of sucked. It was a semester exchange, but his host family had been great so far, and he was enjoying his classes. We didn’t share many because he wasn’t taking AP courses, though he did admit a lot of the coursework was pretty simple compared to home. What intrigued him were the people, the culture, and what we emphasized over compared to what he did in his own classes.
Turned out, he also attended a version of a boarding school so the fact he attended a public school here without a uniform—which explained why he was dressed so sharply the first week—was also an experience. After we were done, I rinsed off the plates then pulled the recipe out and laid it down. He leaned in so we could look at the steps for opera cake side by side.
He smelled pretty good, like sandalwood and something a little muskier. Maybe his soap or his cologne, and at this distance, it wasn’t hard to notice he’d shaved. His face looked baby smooth—not that I was staring hard.
Much.
“This takes a bit to make,” he said. “But it chills well and it’s divine. Do you want me to record as you go?”
“Well—” I hesitated. “What if it comes out terrible? I thought we’d just do this for us and give it a practice run.”
“The taste of the food is important, yes. But cooking should be an experience—a sensual one. Because food has so many textures and flavors. Desserts especially.”
Okay, that made my toes curl. There was something a little naughty about filming a sensual experience. “If we record it,” I said. “I’d rather use my phone, so I can do the editing for the project.” I hope that didn’t come across like I didn’t trust him to film me or do something with the footage. I didn’t think he would, but this was a first date and the guys still had that karaoke they held over my head.
“Oui,” he said in all seriousness. “But I will be an excellent director, yes?”
“Fine.” I checked my phone and cleared the messages from the guys then quietly went through and put their individual threads on do not disturb. No sense in having those pop up while Mathieu had my phone. Rolling it over to the video camera setting, I handed it to him.
“One tip I will give you—the best chefs introduce what they are going to make first. We lay out all the ingredients, we film that bit. Then we get the first layers done. And we show them what you did. We take snippets so I will not film the whole time. I want to help, too.”
My work ethic wanted to argue that point, but it was his birthday the next day. “Sounds like a plan.”
Together, we got everything out and then Mathieu wanted me to practice my intro. He corrected my pronunciations a couple of times, but always in good cheer. I kind of wanted to go check my appearance, but he insisted I looked wonderful and that I glowed. Kind of hard to ignore those kinds of compliments. The next two hours flew by as I discussed opera cake and why I wanted to try it and the multiple layers that it required from the sponge cake to the croustillant to the chocolate ganache and coffee buttercream. Each layer took some very specific steps to create. We’d get one done, then move to the next.
Coffee syrup was weird to make—it was basically water, sugar and instant coffee brought to a boil in a saucepan. Mathieu’s mood elevated with each step and there was an eagerness in him that was contagious. The ganache and the buttercream led to more than one mess that he caught on video and I laughed as I pointed out the small flaws in French. It wasn’t until that video segment was done that he cleaned the bit of ganache from the tip of my nose.
“It was adorable,” he insisted. “Don’t re-record, trust me.”
Rolling my eyes, I agreed. Despite all the various layers, I cleaned as I went—the dishwasher would be fully loaded and the kitchen smelled divine. But it wasn’t until we were putting the layers together that I began to think I was going to pull this off.
It had been a blast. Mathieu, as it turned out, was not only easy on the eyes and a lot of fun, he was also very patient as we worked our way through the dessert. Compared to the night before, the evening had been a dream come true. As we put the last layer into place, I lifted my hands at the end in a dance of delight—all on video but who cared? I did it.
It looked perfect.