Chapter Seventeen
“Miss Winslowe,” a man hissed. The tent shook.
“Miss Winslowe Emily,” he repeated. I flipped over and popped my head out of the door. It was Cook-Phurba.
“Doc Teresa’s in the kitchen,” he said. “Eggplants. Red sauce.”
I groaned. Doc used to do an eggplant parmesan extravaganza once a season for us at Winslowe Expeditions. And by extravaganza, I mean a kitchen disaster of epic proportions.
“Please, come,” Cook-Phurba begged.
“Okay, I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
I reluctantly crawled out of my sleeping bag and put on my camp boots. I was tired from the workout this morning and could have used about three more hours of napping in the nirvana of my sun-warmed tent.
If I was going to be sucked into the latest reiteration of eggplant parmesan extravaganza, there’s no reason Luke shouldn’t be, too. After all, Doc was one of his clients.
I retied my ponytail and marched over to the UW section. I shook Luke’s tent with a one-two rhythm, which had always been like a secret doorbell between us. Groggily, he poked his head out.
“Surprise! It’s eggplant parmesan night, and Doc needs help.”
“No,” he groaned.
Doc’s beloved eggplant parmesan recipe had been a thank-you gift from a knee restoration patient who claimed his family owned an Italian restaurant in Seattle. Although it was the world’s most complicated recipe, it never tasted very good, and Luke and I had a theory that the “secret recipe” had come straight off one of those chintzy cooking websites where they don’t even test their own recipes.
“Come on. Get up,” I said.
Doc spotted us the second we stepped into the big top, waving us over to where she was grating a monstrous pile of parmesan. Luke and I exchanged a knowing look.
“Where’s Randall?” I asked.
“I told him to take the night off. He went down to Lobuche for a hit of oxygen and civilization.”
Good thing. Eggplant parmesan for the number of people at Global was quite an undertaking. Already, the kitchen was destroyed. Cook-Phurba looked on, wringing his hands.
“It’s okay. She does this every year,” I assured him in Sherpa.
I eyed the two boxes of eggplants that still hadn’t been cut. There were probably forty of them. “I can’t believe Jim let you order all this stuff.”
“This is nothing compared to what Randall orders daily.”
“Randall’s a professional, Doc.”
The parmesan rind flew out of Doc’s hand. She lunged to grab it, almost knocking the entire pile of grated cheese to the floor. “Are you going to get in here and help or not?”
Luke and I each carried a box of eggplants to one of the largest tables. He mangled his first eggplant, so I slid closer and walked him through the steps of slicing them properly. We had a lot of eggplants to get through and quickly settled into a rhythm. Other than being outside in the mountains, cooking was my happy place. Being alongside Luke made it even better.
It took the entire afternoon for Cook-Phurba, Doc, Luke, and me to work through the cursed recipe, which included from-scratch marinara sauce and handmade breadcrumbs. The tent heaters had been going full blast in preparation for dinner, and with all the heat from the stove and ovens, I had to strip down to my short-sleeved undershirt.
“Please tell me you made the dessert ahead of time,” I said to Doc as I set a pan of finished eggplant into a steam tray.
She glared at me, some parmesan still stuck in her sweat-dampened hair.
“We’ll make no-bake cookies,” I said. “If we put them outside to set, they’ll be ready to cut in thirty minutes.”
She nodded her approval. And gratitude.
“Come on,” I said to Luke as I headed to the adjoining walk-in pantry. “Let’s make sure Randall has all the ingredients.”
He squeezed inside with me. Thankfully, the pantry was arranged with the same basic logic as Mingma’s, and I easily located the rolled oats and vanilla.
“Do you see any chocolate?” I asked, trying not to be distracted by his proximity, by his smell, which made my body buzz with the desire to step even closer.
“Powdered or solid?”
“Randall has vegetable oil, so either will work.”
“There’s chocolate chips on the top shelf,” Luke said.
“Perfect.”
He stretched tall to grab them, and that’s when I noticed something.
Like me, Luke had stripped down to a T-shirt, an extreme rarity on this mountain, even while inside a heated tent. And there, on the bare wrist of the hand reaching over the top of my head for the chocolate chips, was the cord bracelet I’d tied there two years ago.
All the noises out in the big top ground to a halt and blew away. It couldn’t possibly be the same bracelet. Mine had fallen off such a long time ago. But there was no denying that it was Dad’s vintage cord, lavender with turquoise flecks. It was faded appropriately with age, and the bumps of the singed knots were dark and slick like beads.
I told myself it didn’t mean anything—that it simply hadn’t fallen off yet and he’d never bothered to cut it off. But when I looked from the bracelet to his face, it was clear that he had been watching me stare at it. He held my eyes, locking them into place with a depth of intention.
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t breathe. Did this mean what I thought it did?
That constant sensation this season of being separated halves of Velcro, always reaching back for each other—what if no part of that had been wishful thinking?
Then, somebody was talking to us. Doc. “Hey, you two, can you grab me another package of napkins?”
I grabbed the napkins, my face burning.
Luke and I hurried back out to the kitchen, where we rushed to melt the chocolate chips on the stove, then measure and mix the rest of the ingredients. Even though we were completely wrapped up in the task at hand, there were so many questions hanging in the air between us.
Jim found Luke at the stove, needing to talk to him about one of the UW clients. Luke’s face was a question mark as his eyes met mine.
“I can finish the rest. Go ahead,” I assured him.
His expression didn’t change. He hadn’t been looking for permission to leave; he needed to know what my reaction was to what had just happened in the pantry. My mind was still spinning, but I managed a small smile. What did all this mean, and what should I do?
By the time I’d finished the cookies and put them outside to cool, most people were almost done eating. I slipped into the empty chair Luke had saved for me at the table with the UW team and the Walkabout crew. Red-haired Theo was in the middle of some story about a past film shoot, and everyone was dying with laughter.
“If you think that was bad, I should tell you about the time April—”
“No, Theo, really, they don’t need to hear this one,” April protested.
But Theo had already started, and he kept talking right over the top of her protests. By the time he finished, the whole table was roaring, April included, and even I was dying of laughter.
This was nice. Laughing took the edge off my nerves about Luke.
The atmosphere in the tent was as celebratory as it was the night before the eve of our first acclimatization rotation. This was the night to cut loose because tomorrow at this time, all of us would be in bed so we’d be ready to start through the icefall at three a.m.
Over at the other table, the A-Team was even rowdier than usual, and Claudia and her brother, Juan, had hijacked Doc’s grunge music and replaced it with Latin music on the karaoke machine. A few of their Cuban teammates had gotten up to sing and dance.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dad walk into the big top.
“Touch of empty-nest syndrome, Greg?” Doc yelled from the kitchen.
“Hi, Dad,” I said, giving him a hug.
“How’s everything going?”
“Great.”
“I don’t want to interrupt. I’ll catch you in a bit, okay?” He shook hands with Luke before going over to the kitchen where Doc dished him up a plate of eggplant.
Most of A-Team and some of the UW clients were up dancing with the Cubans now. Ernesto, another of the Walkabout crew, dragged a protesting April up to dance.
As I sat back down, I scooted my chair closer to Luke, trying to get him to turn toward me. I was testing the waters, looking for an extra smidge of confirmation to make me braver. I scooted even closer. Our pants brushed. That got his attention.
“What did your other email say?” I asked. “The one you didn’t send.”
Once again, he held my eyes. Heat spread through me like an Etch A Sketch wand.
“You really want to know?” His voice wobbled, like he was nervous.
“Yes.”
He leaned in to whisper in my ear, but we both retracted immediately. Whispering would attract too much attention in a tent full of gossip-starved clients.
Instead, he grabbed an adult coloring sheet and a blue marker from the caddy in the middle of the table. He flipped it over to the blank side and wrote something. He folded the sheet twice, hesitating briefly before slipping it under the table to me.
The paper was crisp in my fingers as I unfolded it.
My stomach did a free fall as I read his words.
My heart still belongs to you.