Chapter 6: The Penthouse

"You're ruining it," Eliot said.

"I'm making dinner."

"You're breaking the sauce. Add the pasta water."

"Why?"

"Because it's an emulsion, and you're boiling it, and the fat is separating from the starch."

August looked down at the pan, and then at him, with a wooden spoon in his fist.

"Everything is chemistry to you."

"Everything is."

It was seven-fifteen in a kitchen on the top floor of a building on West 22nd Street.

The room was long and bare, white tile and steel, with one wall of windows over the river.

There was nothing on the counters except a salt cellar and a knife block.

Eliot sat on a stool in his sweater with his bare feet on the rung, and he had been laughing for ten minutes.

He had forgotten what that felt like.

August added the water.

The sauce went glossy at once, and he stared at it with open-mouthed betrayal.

"I've been making this wrong for eleven years."

"You've been making it wrong in good company. Most men don't know."

"Do you cook?"

"I never was allowed in the kitchen. Eugenia had a woman for that." Eliot shrugged. "I read the recipes, though. I used to read them in bed."

August turned off the burner.

He came around the counter and stood in front of the stool, and Eliot tipped his head back to look up at him.

"You don't have to say it was a prison," August said. "I can see it from here."

"It wasn't a prison."

"All right."

"It was a very nice house."

"All right," August said, gently, and put his hand under Eliot's jaw.

Eliot's breath caught.

The thumb moved over his cheekbone once.

Then August bent his head and kissed him.

It was slow.

It tasted of red wine and basil and cedar, and Eliot grabbed two fistfuls of his shirt and pulled him down until the stool tilted.

They didn't eat the pasta.

The bedroom was dark except for the river light.

It was a huge, plain room with a low bed and gray sheets.

August walked him to it backward, kissing him, with a big hand spread in the small of his back.

He got Eliot's sweater off and the trousers down, and laid him on his back on the sheets.

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