"I didn't say that. What is your problem? You came here to, what, apologize? You're sorry for not telling me that you're in a relationship with the head of my program? Or that you were in my bed in a hotel room and also looked down my toga? Or are you sorry that when you cooked for me, mystery solved how come you can cook, you were all oh, I'm showing great restraint because I'm mature--"

"I never, ever used the word mature."

"No kidding. You're getting older and clearly no wiser." She wasn't going to put herself in that category, even if she should put herself in that category.

At the sound of someone clearing their throat, they both turned. Ty. She smiled as if everything was just swell. "Ty, this is Max. He was looking for the lost boys, but they're playing pirate games on the floor below."

Ty put his hand out and shook Max's. "You're Max Gaspard."

Max's head snapped back like Captain Hook had attacked. "Max Holter."

"Oh, sorry. I overheard down the hall. I thought you were Nicola's husband."

Gwen smiled, her eyes still wearing their mean slits. "He is. And what a lovely pair. So, I don't know, warm together. And can you believe he took her last name? That's a man. A real man. Very comfortable in his skin. Well, Max Gaspard, tell Ellen hello for me."

Ty nodded goodbye to Max, and Gwen stepped aside for Ty to come into her room. She gave Max a little wave and closed the door. "Just need my coat."

Ty walked over to the window to look out over the city, and she reached into the closet for her wool peacoat, dropping it when knuckles rapped on the door. She smiled at Ty. "Just a second." That's all it would take her to get rid of Mr. Gaspard.

She opened the door and didn't have a second to register his grasp on her scarf. She was jerked into the hallway and only had time to make a yip of a noise before they were moving to the stairwell. He let go when she yanked her scarf out of his hand and the heavy metal door clamored closed behind them.

Standing on the landing, one flight of stairs to the roof, eight below, she put her hands on her hips. If the son of a bitch had something to say, he could damn well say it, and it better be good. She watched his eyes shift, his Adam's apple bob. He didn't have squat. "You got nothin' past the caveman scarf pull, do you?"

She blew out an irritated breath. "Okay, here's a thought. You go up," she pointed to the ceiling, "and jump off the roof. I'm going out to dinner. I won't worry about bringing a doggie bag back for you."

He pointed to the door with a dramatic flourish then seemed to realize, again, he had nothing. "He's a kid!"

"Who's a kid?" She dipped her head and studied him. What was the man thinking?

"Crocodile Dundee."

Her eyes narrowed. She wasn't going to let him, of all people, malign her friend, a friend she'd made in a program run by Max's amore, for Christ sake. "Ty's not a kid, you pin head. He's not even technically Australian. His parents lived there when he was in elementary school."

"Oh, he's a kid alright. I know a boy when I see one, and frankly, Gwen, I expected more from you." He folded his arms across his chest and looked to the ceiling. "I did not see this coming."

An Australian friend? "What coming?"

"Your cougar years."

"Screw you!" She pointed her finger at him, wished, too late, she'd used the appropriate one. "We are fellow students in the culinary program, you know, Nicola's program?"

He laughed, a kind of unhinged version of ha. "He's not thinking fellow students. Fellow students." He rolled his eyes. "He's thinking," Max made a claw motion with his hand, "rrrrowwww."

"You're a complete and total idiot. How did I miss that? Really, nearly brainless."

"It doesn't take a genius to see what anyone could see on that kid's face."

"He's not a kid. He's probably close to thirty."

"Thirty? Crikey, he's a senior citizen!"

She aimed for the door, but Max stopped her. Her lips thinned, and she channeled the spirit of a big, tough bouncer. "You're not standing in my way."

"Ha!"

What did he think he'd caught her doing? "Ha what?"

"I knew it was a date. You're going out with that, that Australian knock-off."

"I am. And then I'm bringing him back to the dorm, and I'm going to screw his brains out. The entire floor will hear his head pound against the headboard."

She watched his forehead wrinkle as he tried to picture it. "His head?"

She used the distraction to scoot past him and managed to get the door open before he followed. She heard his sharp intake of air as she took off down the hall.

"You're telling me you're on top? That's just cruel and--"

She slowed as she approached Ty, who waited in confusion at her door.

"Hey!" Max yelled from the stairwell.

She turned in instinct, but what could he possibly say after offering the worst apology in the history of apologies?

"That was with me."

It was her turn to study him in confusion. What was with him? And then she remembered Max's R.A. pounding on the door and telling them to for Christ sake, knock it off. Had that really been her, young and in lust, sending Max's head against the end of the bed, looking down at his beautiful face, at the boy she loved more than she knew she could?

"Gwen?" Max waited, a man's sad smile now.

She shook her head and left with Ty.

Chapter Fifteen.

Savory first. Sweet follows.

The plate reminded her of the homecoming bonfire where the wood latticed up like a spiky teepee. The chicken medallions, and they were called medallions, sat atop a pile of matchstick vegetables. She wasn't entirely sure what vegetables were there. They spanned every color from white to purple with oranges, reds, and even a blue in between. They might have been anything, their vegetableness lost in the process. There was no thin imperfect skin of a beet or starchy comfort of potato to remind her of their origins, just toothpicks of color to hold circles of chicken. She didn't know how anyone made poultry that round either. Oval she could believe but silver dollar circles? Surely that constituted an unnatural act against a bird.

"Amazing." Ty breathed in the steamy huckleberry sauce that drizzled the chicken bonfire.

She breathed in, inspired by the really amazing way he said amazing as if the second a had more power than in the American version. It did smell good. Not vegetable good, or even chicken good since there wasn't enough left of either to give off their real essence, but the sauce had a kick. There was the dark berry and something alcohol and maybe cayenne. Wow, that would have obliterated anything beneath it, so maybe it didn't matter if she could taste chickens or vegetables anyway.

She raised her glass of something Australian, another appealing import, and toasted, "To a non beef entre."

Ty clinked his glass with hers. "To Gwen telling her story."

She felt discomfort and pleasure in equal measure. A younger, but not crazy younger no matter what Max said, handsome, crazy handsome man wanted to know about her. Maybe Max was right, and Ty didn't think of her entirely as a fellow student. Maybe the one kiss in the doorway wasn't some glitch after all. She felt a little fizz of confidence.

He smiled, the encouraging kind that would make a vulnerable woman give up her social security number. "Tell me all the interesting parts."

There was her first time at Belmar, which was interesting in the completely stupid and fairly tragic way of youth. Then she'd had twenty years of stable that wouldn't register on anyone's interesting scale. And interesting part number two? Mid-life, where things didn't reach fruition, they fell apart.

But she could only tell Ty about the steady years of raising Missy, taking care of Steve and the house. There was also the cooking of all the chickens and vegetables in adventurous meals like... "I prepared a chicken noodle soup that made the sick well."

"I thought that was an old wives' tale."

"So is this."

Dessert definitely tasted like it was low fat. There wasn't a good mouth feel, and she'd learned mouth feel from Deb's lecture on the tongue, and why humans loved and would always love fat. But the pomegranate molasses, again with the drizzling, had a certain charm. This time the artsy squiggles lay on top of tropical fruits and toasted pine nuts. The fruit was chopped into tiny triangles, but she might just pick up a bottle of the molasses and put it on something really worthy, like ice cream.

Ty's eyebrows looked permanently knitted together. "So, you ended up accidentally in the program?"

"Pretty much."

"Wow." He shook his head.

She didn't think it was worthy of a wow. Did he think it was that big of a stretch that she could cook professionally? To be fair, she did. And when she'd told him about needing something to fill her days beside one psychology class, it did sound like her enrollment had just happened, like lightning or shingles.

He leaned closer, his voice strong. "I've just always wanted this. This is it for me. Everything."

"Everything?" Short of raising Missy to adulthood, what could she ever say that about?

"I worked in half a dozen kitchens, moved around hoping that would help. Seattle, Boston, Chicago. But I couldn't ever move up. I'd have a little movement, but still in the same tier of kitchen staff, the bottom. School's always been hard for me, but I see you take the written tests, and you do so well on them, like you're a good student. I knew that to get where I wanted to I'd need a good program. More and more restaurants want that diploma so they can advertise the head chef is a graduate of some place impressive."

"The program's too new to have any kind of reputation, isn't it?"

"Chef Gaspard." Ty said Nicola's name like Gwen might say Brad Pitt or gorgonzola or buy one get one free. "She couldn't be more connected. She's culinary royalty."

As far as she could tell the woman was only a royal pain in the ass. "The Princess Di of duck livers."

"Yeah, she really is."

The woman was ruining her evening, and this time she hadn't even lived with Gwen's date. "Enough about culinary ambitions. Let's talk about something besides food."

Ty laughed. "Okay, you first."

"Oh, well..." what did she have to talk about? Was there anything after husband, daughter, chicken, Nicola?

"And," Ty pointed at her, "no hobbies. They'll involve the kitchen, won't they?"

She smiled, busted. But was her life really just one note? Surely she could do small talk. "My favorite color is blue."

"Everybody's favorite color is blue."

"Not everybody's. Men are biologically predisposed to red." She held up a hand. "You don't want to know."

"Okaaay." He looked around the room. "Something about men. Reveal to me what women really think."

"Oh, that won't take long."

"Maybe it's easy. Maybe men overcomplicate things."

She laughed. "You are quite funny, Ty, handsome and funny. How are you single and wasting your evening with me?"

"I'm here because there's nowhere else I want to be."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "That's what men think women are hoping for, isn't it?"

"What?"

"That we're fish and in need of a good line from a fisherman?"

"Should I write this down? I'm not much of a note taker, but I think I can remember chocolate and flowers."

"Chocolate's easy." She thought of the Belgian bar in her dorm room. "Too easy. And flowers, yes, but not the way men think it will work. It's not about the flowers."

"Of course not. It's the effort, the work, time, money."

She thought of Max, still so confident with the chocolate at her door. No. It was never the object. "It's the vulnerability."

"Sensitive men love flowers?"

It may be harder to explain than she thought. A woman would have gotten it with the word vulnerability. "Okay, on Valentine's Day you know how everywhere you look there are men with flowers in their hands? They pick the bouquets up even at the grocery store. You see them walking down the sidewalk. A man with a bunch of flowers is vulnerable. It's why you propose on your knees. A man who is asking, who has put himself out there and can be shot down so easily... that's what gets us."

Gwen stood beside Ty, the elevator lights blinking them up floor by floor. She felt him lean a little closer, his arm near hers. "Is a man walking a woman to her door also vulnerable?"

"Depends."

"On what?"

"Does the man live two doors down from the woman?"

"Maybe."