Chapter 54

Valerie’s headache lingered, much diminished, into Sunday. The exertion of a run that morning would have been cathartic, and she had no lack of stress to work out; but the mere thought of pounding feet on desert regolith to match the pounding in her head was almost enough to bring back the previous day’s dizzy nausea.

She skipped running, and nervously asked Lucca’s permission to draw a hot bath, instead. They responded with immediate assent and polite annoyance that she even thought there was a question.

The day disappeared into memory quickly and quietly; Lucca worked on projects of their own in their basement lab, and Valerie passed the time continuing to refresh her knowledge for the next day’s work.

She was still researching, taking notes, and fiddling with the finer details of her laptop’s configuration when Lucca knocked politely on her open door.

“It’s past seven,” they told her, their tone strongly implying that it was time to stop working.

“I know, I just…”

“Your dinner’s gonna get cold,” they interrupted, gently.

With a mixture of regret for the work she felt she was abandoning and embarrassment for her ingratitude, she closed the laptop lid with a plasticky snap and left it behind on the bed.

Dinner was a rich stew of butternut squash, shreds of chicken, and something spicy that she could not identify. Lucca had baked some kind of crusty brown bread along side, and they had set out a small dish of butter.

“It smells good,” she offered, with a note of hesitance as she nudged a particularly large shred of chicken.

“Something wrong?”

“No, no… it’s just… I guess I’m so used to eating whatever Dana eats.”

Lucca suppressed an exasperated sigh.

“You, too? I don’t have anything else tonight, but I can make you something plant-based tomorrow.”

Valerie’s sense of ingratitude redoubled, and she shook her head.

“No, no, that’s okay. I don’t actually mind.”

Lucca relaxed a little bit.

“Alright, good. That would’ve been a pain in the ass, to be honest.”

Valerie ate quietly for a few minutes. She skipped the butter, dipping some torn-off chunks of bread into the soup instead. It was quite good, and the chicken added a depth and savoriness that Dana’s cooking, for all her skill, frequently lacked.

“Why don’t you cook something for us, later in the week?” Lucca suggested casually, as they ate.

Valerie blanched, that familiar shame climbing red up her neck. Heather used to needle her about her lack of skill in the kitchen. The prodding had been gentle and good-natured at the beginning of their relationship, a little bullying accompanied by a small smile.

Toward the end, the fact was fired at Valerie as some sort of gender failing, Heather’s own internal misogyny twisted around to be a cudgel against Valerie’s identity. Those jabs always hit Valerie particularly hard, because a part of her believed it.

“I don’t really know how to cook,” she responded, her voice small, and ashamed. “I just… I never…”

Lucca shrugged, absolutely unfazed.

“No sweat,” they replied as they refilled their own bowl. “I’ll teach you.”

Monday morning arrived, and Valerie’s phone alarm went off around eight. She had been awake and staring at the drywall of Lucca’s guest room for an hour or so already, her mind twisting itself into knots of fear and anxiety.

She rinsed off in the shower, careful to keep her hair as dry as possible, and joined Lucca for breakfast, which for her part was black coffee and toast with some cinnamon-spiced pear preserves.

A little past nine, she started work; first and foremost by tidying up her designated corner of Lucca’s otherwise oppressively messy office.

For most people, the morning would have been a fairly ordinary Monday experience, starting work on a new project. For Valerie, it was all deeply strange, and tinged with a lingering sense of guilt that she could not shake. She felt, in some way, like she was breaking Dana’s rules.

She had been sent there to work, of course, but Lucca’s arrangement for her compensation seemed like a deceit; and for all that her situation with Dana had been more challenging recently, she still felt she owed a great deal to the woman.

The work itself was unremarkable, but the novelty of getting to bury herself in technical tasks was refreshing and focusing. She did not remember the last time she had worked free of the stress and anxiety of school or the hypercritical micromanaging of her old boss.

Lucca, sternly, dragged her away from work at the end of the day.

“You’re already making good progress, you don’t need to work twelve hour days.”

Valerie looked up, blearily, and realized her posture, crouched over the small laptop screen, was atrocious. She had a dull headache from staring at a screen for hours, and was only just realizing she had not eaten lunch, or had anything to drink other than her morning coffee.

“I… yeah. I just… it’s actually been fun, for once?”

“It’ll be just as much fun tomorrow, but right now you need to eat.”

“No, yeah, I know. I know. I’m actually pretty hungry.”

“All the more reason to wrap up. You’re cooking tonight.”

“I’m… what? I hope you like burnt toast.”

“You’re making pasta. It’s easy; I’ll walk you through it. Does take a while, though, so…” Lucca made a hurry up motion.

Valerie sighed, nervousness creeping in around the edges. Working hungrily while a headache slowly built behind her eyes seemed like a much better alternative; at least she knew how to do the work.

She saved the file she had been working in, synced it to the server, and closed her laptop, pushing back from the small corner table that served as her desk. The only chair Lucca had for her to use was a dusty folding chair that had been stashed in one of their sheds; it had not done her posture any favors, and her back ached sharply as she twisted and stretched.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she muttered, as she followed Lucca into the kitchen.

The cooking went better than expected, and Valerie was surprised that Lucca did not run out of patience and either take over or give up and order pizza for them. Valerie was unsure if delivery was even an option, as far away as they were from any kind of city or town.

The recipe was simple; Italian sausage, which Lucca had defrosted that morning, was sautéed with onion, carrot, celery, and garlic. Lucca taught Valerie the correct way to hold and use a knife to dice the soffritto. Valerie was slow, but she managed to finish without cutting herself, which she counted as a win.

At least one past attempt, following a recipe she had downloaded from the internet, had ended in frustrated tears and blood-splattered raw ingredients.

The sausage and veggies were set aside, and Lucca had her add tomato paste and stir it until it began to caramelize; and then deglaze the pan with a little red wine before returning the sausage to the pan along with tomato sauce, salt, and a half a dozen different dried herbs.

While the sauce simmered, Valerie brought a pot of water to a boil and then dropped in wide, flat pappardelle noodles. Lucca sampled the noodles alongside her as they cooked, until they declared them done and directed Valerie to dump the whole pot through a strainer.

They finished the bottle of wine together while they ate.

“It’s kind of a Tuscan ragú,” Lucca explained to Valerie, standing across the kitchen island from her while she perched on the single bar stool.

At some point earlier that day, or perhaps on Sunday, Lucca had fixed the wobble in the bar stool, and it felt about as stable as one could expect from that sort of furniture. Valerie had not noticed them working on it, but the thoughtfulness of the act warmed her slightly, even if the warmth was, at the same time, a little confusing.

“Like the stuff in jars?”

Lucca made a disgusted face, somewhat over-dramatically, and nodded.

“Like the stuff in jars. Ragú just means meat sauce. If you want to make this for Dana you can use mushrooms. It’s usually better to let it simmer for a few hours, but I wanted to eat dinner some time before tomorrow’s breakfast.”

“It’s… really good. I can’t believe I made this.”

Valerie felt a mix of emotions she could not quite decipher, staring down at the bowl of pasta. Some of it was wonder; cooking like this had always seemed so far out of her reach that she was afraid to try. She had always feared that the most likely outcome would be wasting money and ingredients and going hungry anyway.

Now, having done it, even with Lucca practically holding her hand every step of the way, she felt weirdly confused about why it had seemed quite so intimidating in the first place. She might tackle something even simpler on her own, but it no longer seemed like some kind of inaccessible witchcraft.

Mixed in with the wonder was gratitude toward Lucca, for their patience if nothing else. She had started cooking more nervous that she would upset them than that she would make a mistake with the food. Their seemingly endless well of grace as she asked stupid questions and made small mistakes, along with their calm and methodical guidance, had been unlike any learning experience Valerie had ever had.

She was more accustomed to her parents’ yelling, the frustrated disapproval of her teachers, or the burnt-out annoyance of colleagues that saw helping a junior engineer as some kind of war crime. Even Dana, teaching her to make espresso, had barely concealed her frustration as Valerie made mistake after mistake.

She realized she was crying into the pasta; she wiped away her tears with her napkin.

“Are you okay?” Lucca asked, softly, concernedly.

Valerie waved her hand dismissively.

“I mean, no. Not really. But right now, yeah. I just… Thank you. I mean it. I know it doesn’t seem like much, but…” she gestured toward the kitchen behind Lucca. “This really means a lot to me.”

“I just don’t want to be on the hook for cooking everything we eat,” Lucca muttered, but they blushed slightly and looked away; and Valerie could tell the response was just deflection.

Valerie ate the last few bites of her pasta in slightly embarrassed silence, then cleared the plates and stashed the leftovers in the fridge for lunch the next day.

Lucca grabbed their glasses and the now half-empty bottle of the same wine they had cooked with.

“We never did watch that movie,” they suggested, gesturing toward the living room with its barely-used television.

Valerie nodded quietly, feeling a strange sense of idyllic calm, and followed them to the couch.