and the silty sun continued to set on Giminattie Street as I closed the door to my house, home from another long day at the academy as a female cadet or something like that. I shrugged off my tough yet feminine blazer and hung it up, and then I relaxed next to a scented candle. Perhaps later I would drink red wine and watch “Murder She Wrote.” Or put my hair up and sink into a bath and balance a piece of chocolate on my tongue. But first I had to prepare some dinner.
There I was, in the kitchen, when someone knocked at the door. “Who could it be?” I wondered, while pensively touching my collarbone. I walked to the door, and there he was. That cocksure young gun I’d sparred with in class today. Everything he did, whether it was jutting his chin out, raffishly high-fiving his fellow cadets, or adjusting his nutsack, he did with a heroic defiance, a take-no-prisoners attitude that was going to take him all the way to the top.
“Oh,” I said. “I was just composing a three-bean salad. Would you care to join me?”
“Sure,” he said, with a mischievous glint in his eyes. I simply knew it: we were going to bone. But not before this three-bean salad was complete.
“What’s in this salad?” he said. “Let me guess. Three beans.”
“Now I know why they say you’re the best,” I said. “Why they say you’re the greatest goddam pilot ever to come up through the ranks. You’ve got that instinct. It can’t be taught. That scare-devil cat-riding instinct that knows exactly when to break the rules. In fact, some say that you’re the best pilot since … your father.”
I knew I’d gone too far. A shadow passed across his face. “You cut to the bone,” he said.
He sank down to the kitchen floor. And I could tell he was feeling a ton of sexy burdens. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed and stared up at the ceiling. He clenched his jaw. He twisted a bandana in his manly hands. He punched a hole through my cabinets. “Please don’t do that,” I said.
“Forget it!” he said. I could see it: he had that glint in his eye. He was going to do something unexpected and outlandish and yet completely asked for in an under-the-radar way.
“Get me some cayenne,” he said.
“The what now?”
“Some cayenne. It’s going in the three-bean salad.”
“You’re going too far!” I screamed. “No one has ever put cayenne in a three-beaner!”
But I knew that he knew that. And I knew that he knew that I knew that. And that he secretly knew that I knew that he knew that cayenne pepper would be just the right accent to take the three-bean salad to the next level. I knew that he knew that I knew that he knew that I wanted him to rip off my tough yet sexy blazer, and cover me in off-the-cuff smooches.
“My God,” I said quietly. “It’s just crazy enough to work.”
I went over to my spice cabinet. I pulled out the cayenne pepper. I approached him. I handed it over.
“This is paprika.”
“My God,” I said quietly. “You’re right.”
I went back over to the cabinet and pulled out the right spice. I walked over and gave it to him. He sprinkled a touch of it onto the salad. We looked at each other. It was now or never. We both took a bite.
“Zesty,” I said, throatily.
“Vaguely ethnic,” he said, with a dangerous smile.
Later that night, our lovemaking surpassed all expectations. It was like a long, improvised bass-guitar groove, and no one could deny its impact. Afterward, he propped himself up on his elbow and pretended to take something out from behind my ear, magician-style. It was a bean. I laughed. He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and said, “Dare me to balance this on the tip of my
