Page 42 of You Had Me at Chocolate

Ten minutes later with a monster pumpkin on board Jude turned his vehicle back onto the road heading home.

Home. How was it that in a month, Clementine’s house felt more like home than the East Village loft he’d lived in for five years? That he looked forward to decorating the porch almost as much as he did the friendly waves from neighbors as he walked to the Graff every morning.

“Thanks for today,” she said with a sigh. “It felt so normal after the past month.”

“Good.” Jude glanced across at her to find her looking at him. The air vents blew out a steady stream of heat and her hat and scarf had been removed and she was all loose and relaxed in the seat. He smiled at her before turning his attention back to the road. “I’m glad.”

“You’re not like the Yes, Chef Jude at all, are you?” she mused.

The intensity of her gaze was like a brand on his profile and Jude’s hands tightened around the wheel. “No.”

“You’re just like the boy I remember.”

She said it so wistfully, it grabbed big handfuls of his guts and squeezed. “I’ve always been him,” he said. “He just kind of got caught up in the spin and celebrity of a television show. Then started to believe some of his own press.”

“I suppose it would be hard not to.”

It was generous of her to give him an out but he’d brought a lot of his downfall on himself. “It was hard, actually. I could feel myself becoming this arrogant version of myself but didn’t seem to be able to stop. Reality TV is a strange beast, they edit and manipulate footage until suddenly you’re appearing one way and they really push it, especially if it becomes popular with the viewers. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy with you behaving the way they’ve cultivated because you want to be popular, you have to be popular to win and the more outrageous the better because that’s good for ratings, right?”

Even now, a year after getting away from the person he’d become thanks to Yes, Chef, echoes of that time persisted.

“And no one pulls you up on it,” he continued, staring at the road ahead, his mood suddenly as bleak as the weather. “Lotta yes people around stroking your ego, telling you you’re right and everyone else is the problem while they stuff your pockets full of money and promises and endorsements. And you can’t stop, you can’t take a break, you can’t want to slow down because you can’t be a quitter. Not when so many people, so many great chefs out there, wanted what I had. I couldn’t squander that, I had to keep going.”

“I’m sorry.”

Her hand landed on top of his on the steering wheel. It was fleeting but it brought him back from that time and his knuckles relaxed. Hell, his body relaxed. “It’s fine. I had a privileged life, I shouldn’t be complaining.”

She shrugged. “A gilded cage is still a cage, Jude.”

There was such a depth of understanding in her tone, like Clementine knew all about gilded cages. “Is that how you felt in Marietta? Trapped?”

“No, not trapped. Just… stagnating. I’d been perfectly happy here, living the life I’d wanted since I was a little girl. Working hard at a career I loved, seeing a nice guy. But thirty was looming and I started to feel… I don’t know… unsettled? Then a librarian friend of mine got a job at the Met in New York and another friend got breast cancer and I realized I hadn’t really lived and that it was okay to want something different at almost thirty than I did at eight.”

“Changing the status quo isn’t always easy.”

“Nope. My mom wasn’t impressed.” She stared out the window. “I worry that maybe… my mom was fit and healthy… maybe the stress of me moving away played some part in the stroke.”

“What?” Jude threw her an alarmed look. Had she been blaming herself for this? “No. Clementine… don’t do that. Strokes happen to fit and healthy people, too.” Yeah, he’d done a bit of googling. “You can’t put that on yourself.”

“I know. God, I think I could write a thesis on all that I’ve learned about strokes recently.” She shook her head as if to clear it of her guilt-laden thoughts. “Ignore me.” She turned to look at him. “Talk to me about Africa. You said it helped?”

Jude nodded going with her change of subject. “It took me a while to unwind, to shed the Jude I’d been conditioned to be. But, yeah… looking around I realized how far up my own ass my head had been. How much I had compared to these people who lived in this incredibly beautiful, incredibly raw, incredibly hard country.”

“What did you do exactly? Where were you situated?”

“All around central Africa.” It was hard to believe on this freezing, Montana day surrounded by low, dark skies, brittle gray branches and towering, snow-capped mountains, that six weeks ago he’d been in the sweltering heat surrounded by dry earth, vast swathes of ravaged land, and about a million flies. “I was part of a volunteer not-for-profit that worked on various construction projects in villages from wells to housing.”

“You… built stuff?”

Jude honked out a laugh at the rich vein of disbelief in her voice. “What, I don’t look like a construction worker?”

“I picture you more in an apron than a tool belt.”

He was quite at home in both but that wasn’t the important part of her statement. “So…” He quirked an eyebrow. “You picture me, huh?” With another woman this might have been considered flirting, but it wasn’t. It was teasing. He and Clementine had always teased each other.

“Ha! You wish.”

When their laughter settled he said, “I did help out where I could, actually. I can wield a hammer and work a screwdriver and know when to get out of the way. But my role was to cook. Volunteers need to be fed. In down times I sometimes ran basic, informal cooking classes for anyone from the village who wanted to join in using whatever was available locally which could sometimes be a real challenge. At one of the first villages there was a woman who taught at the school who saw me folding a paper crane and she asked if I’d come and teach the kids so I did and they loved it.”

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