Chapter Twenty-One
“You know, before I got to know you I assumed you were just an attractive idiot who knew how to smile for a camera,” Kai spoke up from the kitchen table, making Wyatt glance up from where he was putting together a chocolate-chip pancake batter.
“Attractive?” he asked with a tiny smile, pleased to hear that coming from Kai. Aside from when it came to food or they were in bed, he wasn’t huge on compliments.
Wyatt didn’t really mind that, but it was still nice to be complimented every now and again.
He was mostly thrilled that Kai was staying for breakfast, after all.
Kai chuckled. “You didn’t even hear me call you an idiot, did you?”
Wyatt shrugged. “I mostly heard you admitting you were wrong about that, so I don’t mind. I thought you were a stuck up dick with a ten-foot pole up his ass,” Wyatt admitted.
“And you’ve learned that you were right?” Kai asked, raising an eyebrow.
Wyatt laughed. “No, I’ve learned that you were trying to give that impression. You’re actually a sweetheart.”
Kai wrinkled his nose, but didn’t argue. Wyatt took that to mean he was accepting it, if grudgingly.
He’d train Kai to accept compliments.
“Well, either way, I was wrong about you. You’re smart, and funny, and great in bed, and making me pancakes,” Kai said. “Which basically makes you perfect.”
“Still can’t use a knife for shit,” Wyatt said.
“Any idiot can learn to use a knife. It’s just a matter of practice. You haven’t really needed to practice yet.”
“Yeah, because I’m a baker, not a real chef. I never went to school for any of this. My uncle was a baker, and I took a job in his bakery when I was sixteen and never even considered doing anything else.”
“And you’re good at it,” Kai pointed out. “It’s a completely different set of skills. I wouldn’t expect a pilot to be good at juggling, either.”
“I would’ve killed to have the education you did, though. International apprenticeships and all.”
Wyatt had read up on all of Kai’s accomplishments after he’d revealed that he’d looked Wyatt up during the first episode, and his head had spun. Kai had gotten into one of the best culinary schools in the country, and then been hand-picked for two apprenticeships, one in France and another in Portugal, which Wyatt hadn’t exactly thought of as one of the food capitals of the world, but Kai’s work spoke for itself.
He was incredibly smart and talented, and if TV hosting was based on those things, he deserved it a lot more than Wyatt did. Of course, it wasn’t based on those things, but it maybe should have been.
Kai was good at what he did. He deserved recognition for that, and people were lucky to have a chance to learn from him.
“I’m happy to write you recommendation letters if you want,” Kai said. “So you looked me up after all, huh?”
Wyatt shrugged. “Figured I should know who I was dealing with. Walked away feeling disgustingly inadequate.”
“And yet I’m the one having little on-air foodgasms at the end of every episode,” Kai smiled wryly.
Wyatt waved his hand over the frying pan he’d been heating, and then dropped a knob of butter into it and watched it sizzle and melt. He actually opened his mouth to explain that he was browning the butter to give it a nutty flavor, but stopped himself in time.
It was just him and Kai this time. They were alone. There were no cameras here.
That was really, really nice. He could get used to cooking for Kai off-air.
“Hey, your food is amazing. I’m just not as expressive as you are, I guess,” Wyatt said.
Kai was strange like that. Either he was completely flat, or really intense, and there wasn’t a whole lot of space in-between. Wyatt was coming to like that about him, that he maybe didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve, but he was happy to show it to you if you did something worthwhile.
Which reminded Wyatt of something he’d been meaning to ask about. “You mentioned your grandma yesterday,” he said, pouring pancake batter into the pan. “She why you became a chef?”
Kai chuckled, but it was the kind of sad, nostalgic chuckle Wyatt was used to hearing over the long-dead. Kai’s grandma had clearly been important to him.
“My family is originally from Wales,” he said. “She and my grandad actually, literally came here by boat, all the way across the Atlantic. One of the things I remember mostly about her was her ability to swear creatively for two or three minutes in a row without repeating herself, in Welsh and English.” He smiled a small, fond smile tinged with the sadness of loss.
Wyatt’s heart went out to him. He’d been right, she was important. Which made it kind of a big deal that he was sharing this.
“When I was ten,” Kai began. “I was the youngest of four male grandchildren. She worked as a cook in a diner, but it was probably the best feature of our small town. People travelled for her food, and it wasn’t complex or trendy, but it was always good. Anyway, one day she handed me an apron and told me that I’d just have to be the girl of the family, and started teaching me how to cook.”
Wyatt chuckled. “I can picture you in a frilly apron,” he said.
Kai would have been an adorable ten-year-old.
“There was only a frill on the pocket,” Kai responded. “But I didn’t mind. I loved her, and I loved the attention, and I loved it when she announced proudly that I’d done half the work for family dinners, even if I’d only scrubbed potatoes or something. She was a hard taskmaster, honestly, but she taught me everything I know and it was all out of love.”
Wyatt’s heart swelled at hearing that. It was the kind of thing that didn’t end up on a Wikipedia page, and he felt as though Kai was telling him a secret.
“That’s adorable,” he said, flipping the first pancake.
“It was,” Kai agreed. “She died when I was sixteen.”
As quickly as Wyatt’s heart had soared, it sank again. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s been over a decade and I still… miss her. I dunno. I feel like she understood me like the rest of my family didn’t. All the other men in the family are either fishermen or lumberjacks. I was too soft for them.”
Kai was anything but soft, but Wyatt understood what he meant.
“Anyway, when she died I kind of, uh, lost my way a bit. And ended up on first-name terms with the sheriff and spent more than a few nights at the station for little things. It was a small town, so I got away with apologizing and replacing the locks I’d picked or cleaning up any messes I’d made, but…”
“Whoa, wait, hold on. Go back to the part where you were a little tearaway.”
Kai grinned at him. “I knew you’d like that part,” he said. “I bet you got into all kinds of trouble when you were that age.”
“Mostly the kind that involved climbing into and out of bedroom windows.” Wyatt shrugged. “I hated to date anyone that I was allowed to be seen with.”
“Yeah, somehow that’s not a surprise.” Kai grinned, obviously thrilled by this information.
“What you see is what you get,” Wyatt said, sliding the first pancake onto a warm plate.
“Anyway, around the time I found myself staring down the wrong end of a shotgun barrel for trespassing, I decided it was a good time to take a long, hard look at my life. I was seventeen and a half.”
Wyatt swallowed. He knew there was more to this story, more pain, but it wasn’t his place to ask. Not yet, anyway.
What Kai was sharing was an honor. Wyatt doubted many people knew any of this about him.
“So I found a culinary school halfway across the country that would take me, and a job as a dish washer in a busy kitchen, and then… everything you read about on my Wikipedia page happened. Mostly out of luck.”
“No,” Wyatt said. “Luck is just a function of how many rolls of the dice you take. And it sounds like you took plenty of them.”
Kai sighed softly, but when Wyatt looked up from flipping his second pancake, he was smiling. “Do you actually have to try to be ridiculously kind, or are you just like that?”
“Just like that, I guess,” Wyatt said, shrugging. He was glad Kai thought he was kind. As it turned out, Kai could clearly use a little kindness. “She’d be proud, you know. I bet she’s looking down on you and tuning into the show every week.”
Kai snorted. “She hated TV. Or I think she actually just hated my grandfather wasting his life away in front of it.”
“I still think you’d be proud. You’re sharing the love of food she taught you with the world.”
“I’m just grateful she gave me a way to escape,” Kai said. “You know my dad blamed her when I came out? His first words were this is because of that damned frilly apron, isn’t it?”
Wyatt winced. “Jeez. That’s really not how this works, huh?”
“It’s really not,” Kai said. “But he wasn’t interested in understanding. I was busy telling him that I was going to France for a year at the time, though, so I didn’t care. I just walked away and I haven’t spoken to him since.”
Wyatt nodded, wanting to encourage Kai to keep sharing if he felt the need. This felt like getting somewhere with him, like they were moving past coworkers-with-benefits and into something bigger, more real.
As heartbreaking as it was to hear what Kai had suffered through, it was also nice to know that he was ready to talk about it with Wyatt.
That care he’d been trying to show him had obviously paid off.
And this explained a whole lot about the way he was as a person, too. It explained why he seemed closed-off and skittish and like you’d get burned if you got too close to him.
But something about him had made Wyatt want to be close, and he was glad now that he’d gone along with that feeling. Even if it’d taken him a while to figure it out.
A soft, comfortable silence fell between them as Wyatt cooked the remainder of the pancake batter, and suddenly this was a nice, normal morning-after breakfast with someone he definitely wanted to see again.
Which was true, Wyatt supposed. He did want to see Kai again, and he wanted more breakfasts like this.
“These pancakes are incredible,” Kai said between mouthfuls. He was already on his second one, having inhaled the first without even pausing. “I need this recipe. I’m gonna learn to do pastries.”
“They’re just pancakes,” Wyatt said, blushing at the way Kai appreciated his cooking even when he wasn’t playing it up for the camera. “But I’ll write it down for you sometime.”