The Fundamentals of Friendship Pt. 01

"Of course not, Clementine." I gave my best and oldest employee a look I hoped conveyed to her my trust. However limited that was. "I'm just here because Riley is unusually hungry, yes I'm being ironic, and this is the only place in the city he can eat for free."

"Oh, yeah, blame it on me." He said, smiling at her. "But she's right. I'm only here for the free food."

"Only for the free food?" Asked a very flirtatious Clementine, eyeing Riley coquettishly.

She had a crush on Riley, as did all my employees. Those being Clementine and a guy named Rudy. I couldn't blame them, poor things. Riley spent a whole lot of time in the bistro and he was a charmer. He also liked his flirting. Flirting was like a second nature to him.

Riley wasn't oblivious to his power, once he learned he had it. What he lacked in standardized male beauty he compensated for in magnetism. The most beguiling thing about him was, for sure, his ability to be so mysterious while also being completely obvious. Only one look at him would never give you the idea he was such an irresistible creature.

Clark Kent was Superman behind the glasses, after all.

"Clementine, you goddess." He leaned over the balcony and took Clementine hands on his, planting a soft kiss on the back of each one. "What is a French toast compared to your majestically beautiful eyes?"

He was such a clown I had to laugh at his batting eyelashes and Clementine's crimsoning cheeks.

Riley was a writer. A rather good one.

He's always been over imaginative, creating crazy, fantastical tales in his head since we were kids.

"My mind won't shut up." He'd say.

Since we were about 13 years old I had been encouraging him to try and put some of his ideas to paper. Finally, in college, he took the time to do it. He wrote a sci-fi, young adult novel about travels in the future, and the end of the world as we know it.

More than on one occasion, he had actually said the book was his break-up project. Something that took his mind off every single moment we had shared as a couple, trying to figure out where we went wrong. An apocalyptic tale inspired by a break up. His main character was a bad-ass survivor (named after me) who traveled between worlds and time, facing unimaginable dangers. Once I read his story I was surprised by how much I loved it. Not my kind of literature at all, but amazing nonetheless.

Riley finished what would be the first of a series of books, found a publisher with no difficulty whatsoever and soon enough he had a contract with a well known publishing house and a book published under the pen name of R.L. Fitzgerald.

"R for Riley, L for Laura and Fitzgerald because I love Ella." He'd said of his name of choice.

The success among kids was immediate. Five more books followed and presently he lived a nice, well-remunerated life as a hipster writer who prefered to remain anonymous.

My bistro was his favourite place to write (that had a lot to do with the free coffee and food). He could spend a whole day there behind his computer; wearing his Kurt Cobain old sweater, his round rimmed, tortoiseshell writer glasses, running a constant hand over his tousled black hair while giving Clementine sexually inappropriate ideas.

"It's the way he runs his hands through his hair." Clementine would argue of her crush on him. "It's just so sexy."

The girl had been working for me for six years now. Clementine was one of those people just wandering aimlessly through life. She used to say she wanted to be a writer (I suspected that had something to do with Riley) and that college hadn't done her any good. All she needed was time to find herself. She was a bright girl and a good manager for the bistro. That much I could say in her favor.

Finally recomposed after being touched by Riley, Clementine remembered we had work to do just as Rudy came in with a client's order. He hardly acknowledged Riley which was, to say the least, weird.

"Thor is back." He said.

"Thor?!" Riley and I both asked in confusion and Clementine exclaimed in excitement.

Rudy turned his overly excited face towards us.

"Oh, yeah. The tall, blond god who comes in everyday!" He jerked a thumb to the only occupied little table outside. "Seems like he's got a girlfriend now. Lucky bitch." He said with his smile fading at the corners.

There was a couple sharing the table outside. The 'Thor' guy was really hard to miss. Chances were, he was one of the most handsome man walking the Earth. Even from afar I could see he was the kind of handsome that made women turn their heads if they happened to walk past him on the street.

I couldn't remember ever seeing him before. Anyway, even if he was a regular I wouldn't have seen him. Most of my time in the bistro was spent in the kitchen. He had the hair, the beard, the height, the bone structure, everything you'd expect a gorgeous man to have. It was almost comical to see a man like that really existed. To me, he looked like an erotic novel imagined male lead.

Nevertheless, as good as he looked, his appearance wasn't what had me so interested in that scene. It was the way he was looking at the girl sitting across from him.

She was his complete opposite.

Where he was tall and blond she was a short, curly haired black woman. She was beautiful. No doubt he was looking at her as if the sun itself revolved around her.

I could see he affected her the same way he surely would affect any woman. She was all flushed cheeks and shy little smiles, but she didn't look at him quite as dazzled as he looked at her. She looked at him with a caution that had me wondering what the fuck had been done to that girl to make her almost immune to the charms of man who looked like that.

"Earth to Laura?" The snap of Riley's fingers in front of my eyes shook me out of my head.

"What?"

Riley was looking at me with a funny expression. "Let me just wipe this here." He ran his thumb on the corner of my mouth. I slapped his hand right off. "Hey! I'm just trying to help you. You were drooling a little."

"Don't be stupid, Riley."

"Oh, come on, you were gawking at the guy."

"No, I wasn't! I mean, I was, but not at him." I pointed to the girl who was now almost melting into her chair while Thor kissed her hand. "I was looking at her."

Riley's eyes followed the direction of my pointing finger. I saw it in his face when he registered how beautiful she was.

"Wow. She's stunning." He said under his breath.

"They make an improbable couple, don't they?"

He returned his dark eyes to my face, smiling, and I knew he was thinking exactly the same thing I was.

"Kind of like you and I in high school, uh?"

"Yeah." I agreed, remembering what an odd pair we used to make. Two skinny teenagers who, to the outside observer, had nothing in common. "Kind of."

I allowed myself to watch the girl again. She had a look on her face I knew all too well. She might even try to hide it, but that girl was in love with the Thor guy sure as I lived and breathed.

I suddenly felt a little envious of her. Not because of 'Thor'. He was something alright, but not my type. No. I was envious because I wished I were that in love with someone who would be just as in love with me as that guy evidently was with her.

Usually, I told Riley everything. Absolutely everything. Except for this thing I started feeling when my younger sister had a baby about a year ago. I was in my mid-thirties. I worked like a dog. I didn't have a boyfriend, nor any prospect of finding one soon. With each passing day I worried I wouldn't find anyone in time.

My last boyfriend was almost three years behind me, and the only sex I was having lately was with Riley. Riley, who was also the only man I've ever been in love with.

Marriage and children were never things I ambitioned in life, not until I realized I was five steps from being a 40 year old spinster having sex with her best friend because she didn't have anyone else (that if Riley didn't find someone himself by the time we were 40). I wanted to have a family. Maybe a baby or two. And I feared that if I didn't get started on that before long, time would pass me by and I would wake up someday to see my chance was lost.

***

Sophia, after I had voiced my insecurities to her, presented me with the worst solution ever.

"Have a baby with Riley." Said she mildly, while we waited for my flight.

"What?! Have a baby with Riley? Are you high or something? What an idea! To have a baby with Riley! Jesus, Soph!"

"What?! You two are friends." There was something about her tongue whenever she used that word to refer to Riley and I. "You're not getting any younger as you said yourself, and I can't see Riley settling down anytime soon, so why not? He's got money. He can afford to have a baby. You're already fucking, so it could all be done naturally. You could be like those hippie parents with forward thinking ideias. What is it called? Progressive parenting? Anyway, you don't have to marry a guy to have his babies, Laura."

My sister was insane. That was the only explanation for the ideas going around in her head. She was two years younger than I, a mathematician and about ten degrees crazier. There was very little common personality connecting the both of us, although most people thought we were twins. I had my head well glued to my neck, while hers was in fantasy land. Funny thing though, she was the one who was good with numbers and rationality. Always making sure I had the bistro's finances in order.

We shared our mother's eyes, her curly hair, and our father's long legs. Sophia also had been lucky enough to have inherited the big boobs from our aunts.

"I don't want to have a baby with Riley, Sophia! I want to have a baby with a guy I'll be in a relationship with! A romantic relationship!" I rebuffed her mad suggestion. "Anyway, I'm not in love with Riley!"

"If you say so." She muttered.

Sophia's theories about how unaware Riley and I were of our eternal childhood love for each other annoyed me sometimes. Actually, it annoyed me all the time. Luckily for me, the calling for my flight saved my ears from more of her babbling.

"That's me. Bye, Soph." I hugged her, already wanting to cry just thinking about a whole month away from her craziness.

"Find some Frenchman to fuck while you're there, will you?"

"Shut up, Soph."

"Or did Riley fuck you goodbye so good you don't even want sex anymore?"

"Bye, Sophia!" I walked away from her only half faking my irritation.

"Bye, Lo! I'll miss you! FUCK SOME FRENCHMAN!" She screamed at my back.

I put my middle finger in the air and left a giggling Sophia and her foolish theories about whom I should have babies with or whom I should fuck behind.

***

When Paris was just an idea, I had been stupid enough to think a month would be way too much time to spend there. When I lived and breathed the city? I wanted to stay forever.

Riley had been right, as usual. There was so much to see, so much to do, to eat, to drink. Oh, to drink. I didn't know how on earth I'd keep myself from being twenty four seven drunk on French wine. And it was so cheap, too! I made a mental note to research just how much it would cost me to import some of that wine for the bistro.

The weather was interesting. Not as hot as I would've liked, but nothing uncomfortable, too. The only trouble was that my French wasn't all that good. The little I knew was rusty and I knew very little.

S'il vous plait!

Au revoir!

Bonjour!

Ça va?

Pardon!

Those little expressions were probably all I knew for sure. Needless to say I was having a hard time keeping up with my French cuisine (though I suppose in France you simply called it cooking lessons) teacher's fast tongue.

The lesson of the day was pretty classic. Coq au vin. A dish I had made a bizillion times at home, but as I had just learned (or rather seen from what the teacher was doing), I had been doing it the wrong way. Shocker.

Apparently, the very first thing I did wrong was to buy a chicken that was already dead and frozen. Can't do that. The right way was to get a living, breathing cock and kill it yourself.

"Oh, Jesus! I won't kill a damn cock!"

I thought I spoke this at a low enough voice that only I would have heard. But I was wrong yet again. Seemed I had been loud enough to catch my teacher's ear. What became very clear when he marched my direction.

He stopped before me with his hands clasped behind his back like a general before his recruit. I almost gave him a military salute.

"Mademoiselle, avez-vous dit quelque chose?"

Shit. What the fuck did he say?

"Non." Was the first thing that popped into my mind and rolled out of my tongue.

I didn't even know whether he had asked me any yes or no questions, but I figured a No was a pretty classical answer that would make him realize I didn't know any French and let me be.

The teacher looked at me like I was stupid. Which at the moment I probably was. He was a tall, bulky man wearing a mustache I didn't deem all that sanitary for a cook. He squinted his eyes, tilting his chin up as if judging me a useless creature.

"Comprenez-vous?" His intonation hinted at another question.

I decided that sounded enough like a question. From what I remembered from my short French lessons he was asking me "Do you understand?"

How do you say "I don't understand a fucking thing!" in French, again?

That was a question I surely answered with a "Non.", shaking my head and feeling like the dumbest being on the planet.

He surveyed me for a long moment with a look of disdain, than yelled something to the rest of the students. "Y a-t-il quelqu'un qui parle anglais?" My limited French told me he'd asked them if anyone knew any English.

He looked around at the others. There were about twenty of us standing in the little henhouse behind the school building. Most of them just assumed a blank expression as if the man hadn't said a word.

So much for helping a neighbor in need, uh?

I just silently cursed myself for not putting more effort into learning French, but then again where would I find the time? I just figured somebody here would know some English. Everybody everywhere knows English, right?

I was just staring at my feet feeling my face in flames when the teacher spoke again.

"Parlez-vous anglais?" He asked someone.

I couldn't see who. The teacher had his back to me and was standing directly in front of whomever he was talking to.

"Oui." A deep, husky, male voice replied.

Then they plunged into a conversation that happened way too fast for my brain to process.

Finally the teacher turned to me, said something I would bet my toes on being very rude, and left. At the spot he'd been standing a second ago another tall man stood. This one far more pleasant looking.

"Hello." He said in a accented voice. "I'm Rocco. I'm to be your partner and help you with your linguistic difficulties."

Linguistic difficulties?

I was about to tell Mr. Linguistic Difficulties I had no such difficulties, when I, belatedly, caught on his irony and his looks.

He was handsome. Oh my, he was handsome.

My interpreter was evidently older than I. One of those men who only get better with age, like a good whisky. A few strands of silver hair brushed his temples giving him an extra charm. I was gawking up at him when he smiled me a graceful movement of lips that wrinkled the corners of his deep green eyes. So deep, in fact, I'd drown in them if I wasn't careful.

Like a robot being turned on, I introduced myself extending him a sudden hand. "Hi. I'm Laura."

I only hoped I didn't look as stupid as I thought I did.

He looked down at my hand, amused, then took it. His hand engulfed mine with warmth. "Laura. Nice to meet you, Laura."

"Likewise, Rocco." When he said my name I expect him to put that French purring on the R. I was still holding his hand when I asked. "You're not French, are you?"

This time he laughed freely and I found the sound to be very pleasing to my ears. "Only half."

"What's the other half?" I asked bluntly, making him lift his eyebrows and his mouth twitch with the smile he tried to keep inside it. I silently scolded myself for interrogating a man I had met only five seconds ago. "Oh, god. I'm sorry. Forgive me. I talk too much."

Rocco pulled his hand, which was still in mine, and gently made me release him from my hold. "The other half is Italian, Laura. And don't worry. I like a girl who can chat."

Half French, Half Italian? Was he even real?

What happened next was the most embarrassing thing I could have done. I presented Rocco with the laugh Riley liked to call Laura's piggy squeal. There was an oinky noise there somewhere.

I promptly covered my mouth with my hand, feeling like my face would melt from the heat and apologized to him for a second time.

"I think you and I will get along really well, Laura." Rocco's mouth smiled at me, and the heat from my cheeks travelled way down south.

Yeah, we'd get along fine he and I.

****

Excluding the part where Rocco snapped a chicken's neck, everything he did had a sort of grace to it. It seemed to me like he was way too good a cook to even need to take a course in French cuisine. He moved around like a man used to commanding a kitchen. I had developed a bit of a crush on him, which I could already tell he didn't reciprocate.

He was extremely polite with me. Most of the time he spent in the gigantic culinary school's kitchen was used translating the teacher's command into English so I could keep up. I didn't know much about him except he was 43 and had come from a part of Italy called Valpolicella. Every evening, when class was over, he'd say goodbye with a chaste kiss on my cheek and just leave. No "Hey, Laura. Wanna grab a bite?" or "Laura, would you like to have dinner with me?"

So my first week in France was marked by my struggle with the language while I absolutely kicked ass in the kitchen once I understood what I was supposed to do (thanks to Rocco). The mean, nazi teacher even started to look at me with some sort of silent appreciation when he realized I could, if not speak any French, at least make a decent souffle.

One surprising evening, around the middle of my second week, Rocco didn't give me my so anticipated goodbye kiss. Instead he did something much better.

"Laura." I just loved the way he said my name with that accent of his, prolonging the first syllable and elevating it before dropping the last one. "Do you like Italian food?"

I had to physically keep myself from jumping up and down, screaming YES! YES! I LOVE ITALIANS!

"Who doesn't!" I said with amazing exterior calmness.

His mouth, that looked like it had been made for smiling (or maybe something else entirely), crooked at one corner. The act was pure sexyness and brought about a delicious feeling down below my belly. "I'm feeling homesick lately. I wonder if you would like to eat some pasta with me?"

I sank my teeth on my bottom lip to keep myself from answering him too fast and eager. "I would absolutely love to eat some pasta with you, Rocco." I said, smiling broadly.

"That's wonderful. Here," He reached behind him and his hand emerged holding the little moleskine he used to write down recipes. He scribbled something down on it and ripped the page, offering it to me. "Here's my address."

"Oh, right. Your address." I just eyed the paper extended to me with some reserve.

Rocco laughed. "I just thought I'd cook for you. To impress you, maybe."

"Of course." I finally took the paper from him, smiling awkwardly. "I'm sorry, Rocco. I'm not used to guys cooking for me. I'm usually the one doing the cooking."