Power Trio

“God, it’s so sticky,” Thekla says. “Augh! Evan! Look at my hands. They’re so gross.”

“You just need to keep wetting your palms.” Evan slides the basin of water across the counter. “You heard what the lady said.”

Thekla grunts as her fingers come away covered in dough. “Add some flour for me at least.”

Evan reaches into the crinkly bag of flour between them and sprinkles a handful across their workstation.

“Oh, yeah.” Thekla squeaks forward on the high stool their instructor, a supremely patient woman named Esme, talked her into using. She buries her palm in the shaggy pasta dough and rolls it across the counter. “Now we’re talking.”

“Wonderful consistency, you two.” Esme breezes past them. “Oh, it’s already making me hungry just looking at it. Keep it up, Tecla!”

“This woman is such a sweetheart I don’t even care that she can’t pronounce my name for shit.” Thekla gives the dough a proud slap. “You gonna take a turn?”

“Tag me in,” Evan says, and Thekla hops off the stool, scraping it out of the way.

She perches again and watches Evan work. “You’ve definitely done this before. Unfair.”

“It would be unfair if it was a competition,” Evan says. “As it stands, you’re just very impressed.”

Thekla scoffs. “Just make like a mixing bowl, kitchen boy.”

Evan obeys. “We used to have a family orecchiette night. With a fuckton of broccoli rabe and garlic.”

“What’s ore—ora—”

“Orecchiette. It’s a kind of pasta, looks like a little ear. Well, a human ear. The whole family chipped in on shaping them, but I was always the one who insisted on kneading.”

“Why’s that?”

“You know me. I get off on feeling useful.”

“My dinner job used to be peeling the wings off for the beetle miszkt.” Thekla’s got a smudge of flour on her glasses, and she wipes them down on her apron as she reminisces. “I always loved the crunch, but that was the minority opinion.” She giggles at Evan’s shivering reaction. “Aw, what’s the matter? Big human boy doesn’t wanna eat little bugs?”

“Don’t ask me why,” Evan says. “It’s not like I freak out about shrimp. Can you hit me with some flour?”

“Tell you what,” Thekla says. “You feed me this orketty stuff and I’ll whip you up a batch of the clan’s miszkt recipe. We mash ’em up really small, you won’t even realize.”

“I thought your part of the trade was a tattoo,” Evan says.

Thekla comes up with a handful of flour. “We’ll find some way to balance the ledger on acts of service, I’m sure.” As she anoints the counter, her hand brushes against his. Very subtle, Thekla.

“Okay, folks,” Esme calls. “Let’s finish up and make sure we’re looking at a smooth, shiny, round ball of dough. Then we’re going to cover them and introduce ourselves to a crucial little thing called antipasti.”

They gather their stools in a wide circle, and dig into a spread of bite-sized meats, cheeses, and some truly excellent pickled peperoncini. There’s muted conversation, but the cooking class is predominantly couples, and most are keeping to their own. Esme swans around the circle, taking everyone’s preference for their complimentary wine, pausing in front of Evan and Thekla. “White or red?”

Thekla asks for a red, and Evan follows suit. “I’m never drinking white again,” she murmurs to him as Esme moves on.

“What happened?”

“I got mad drunk on it, yelled at Kell, then she told me everything and took me home and I tried to get her to fingerblast me but she just put me to bed,” Thekla says. “Then when I woke up, I was too hungover to french so we haven’t even kissed yet. Devil drink.”

“That’s a big step, though, right?”

“It is.” Thekla pops an olive into her mouth and bursts it with her razor teeth, ignoring the scandalized look the nice old lady sitting next to her gave the word fingerblast. “Am I in the lead? I’d better be.”

Evan chuckles and says nothing, gratefully taking Esme’s proffered wineglass.

“I’d better be,” Thekla hisses.

“Well, you haven’t kissed her and I haven’t been in her bed. I think we’re tied.”

“If we weren’t in public, I would bite you.”

“Okay, folks!” Esme sings. “I think our pasta has rested long enough. Time to wake her up and roll her out.”

They return to their stations and set up their bristling metal pasta makers. “I roll, you catch, yeah?” Evan says.

Thekla takes up her position and spools the smooth dough as Evan rolls it through the machine. “Thing looks like a Saw trap. Dare you to put your pinky in there.”

“I don’t think it would fit.” Evan eyes the toothy aperture. “Yours might.”

“I’m a guitarist. I do my hammer-ons with this.”

“The pinky is a crucial bass implement. Let’s feed it Kell.” Evan narrows the gap between the rollers and passes the dough through again. “You ever watch those movies? Saw?”

“I, uh.” Thekla’s ears get pink when she’s embarrassed. “I’ve started them. And then Dalma gets bored and leaves the room and it’s very visceral on a TV as big as ours. I don’t do well watching them alone. And Kell doesn’t do horror.”

“I see I have work to do as your third.” Evan shakes his head. “You can’t be a punk rock drummer and not do horror.”

“You see yourself as the third, huh?” Thekla passes Evan the sheeted dough, and he engages the teeth on the roller to cut it into fettuccine. “Very bassist of you.”

“I’m just being realistic,” Evan says. “Kell says you two were basically a couple already.” The wine has done a wonderful job of loosening him up a little. “But if I gotta be the one in the hotel room chair, I bet it’s a fabulous view.”

“Evannn. You freak.” Her ears are very pink. “It’s not like you’d watch, anyway. Every time I catch you peeking you always avert your eyes. You’d just be pretending to tie your shoes the whole time. Gah!”

Evan puffs a pinch of flour at her, forcing her to scrub her glasses again. “I am going to banish you to the cuck chair,” she says. “I’ve decided.”

“Whatever you say, bull.” He turns the crank. “Catch the pasta.”

Esme goes into great detail about the small batch marinara they’ll be using as the water comes to a boil. Evan and Thekla hide the strands that fall apart in the water out of a shared impulse to make the elegant Italian instructor maternally proud of them. As Evan strains the long fettuccine from the boiling pot, he feels a small hand snake up the back of his thigh. Thekla stays stone-faced and watches the presentation, even as her hand creeps into his back pocket and stays there.

They both agree that it might be the best pasta they’ve ever tasted.

“Do you want to hit up a dive somewhere once we’re through here?” Evan daubs overpriced tomato sauce off the corner of his mouth. “Or am I still the one in charge of steering the ship?”

“I don’t think so,” Thekla says. “I think I’ve made my decision. Let’s head home after. Maybe we pick up a nightcap. But this–” she indicates the meal they made together. “This has been quite lovely, Evan H.”

They ride back to Thekla’s apartment in the same relative silence they headed to the cooking class. The goblin has a look of pensive concentration on her face, like she’s solving a complicated equation in her head.

Dalma is watching the last few minutes of a black-and-white German impressionist film when they return. A craggy-faced troll stoically watches as a dancer in a gauzy gown pirouettes and slowly shaves her own head.

“This looks visceral,” Evan observes.

“It was garbage,” Dalma says. “Wanna rewatch?”

“I’m beat, I’m afraid.” Thekla yawns as she crosses to her room. “Night, everyone.”

“Good night, Thekla. Good night, Thekla’s imaginary friend.” Dalma heads to her penile door. “I cede the couch.”

Evan waits for both goblins to ensconce themselves, then flicks the lights off, steps out of his jeans, and tucks himself into the couch, below the patchwork quilt the goblins provided him. He isn’t tired, but he resolves to sleep.

Thekla’s door creaks open. From his position on the couch, he doesn’t see the diminutive woman enter the living room, but he hears her bare feet on the hardwood floor.

The crescent of light coming from her room illuminates her silhouette as she climbs onto the couch and straddles him. Her thighs smush softly outward from the weight she places on them. It’s a light pressure; she can’t be more than fifty or sixty pounds. He can see the outline of her body beneath her baggy button-down pajama top.

Her fingers brush his shirt. “Take this off.” 

He obeys. Her eyes linger on his stomach, flat and firm, the graceful brackets of his obliques reasserting themselves over once-stark ribs, the V of his Apollo’s belt disappearing below his waistband. With her pointer finger, she traces the downy dusting of hair on his chest, where the pecs he was once proud of, before the months of hunger, are finally resurfacing. Her gaze lingers on the tattoo over his heart, the one she smirked at the first time she saw it.

She’s not smirking now. Her lips hang open. Her eyes are pools of amber hunger.

“Don’t look away from me anymore,” she whispers. “I want you to look. I’m giving you permission.”

She unbuttons her top slowly and slides it off her body. She wears nothing underneath. Her chest is rising and falling with a conscious effort to slow her breath, and the light picks out the goosebumps on her skin. Her clavicle, her shoulders, and her full, heavy teardrop breasts bear the same galaxy of dark green freckles as her face. Her evergreen-shaded nipples are hard and pebbled. Across her midsection is a tattoo of a fortress in flames. Beneath its drawbridge, her belly button sits on an adorable little outward curve of stomach. She’s so compact that with both hands he could encircle her waist completely.

His fists ball up the sheets instead. She said nothing about touching.

Thekla’s hips flare out generously, almost as wide as a human’s, and he feels the plump round perfection of her ass against his thighs. Her skin, at the agonizingly narrow point of their connection, is furnace-hot. In the pool of shadow where their bodies meet, he can see another tattoo, cushioned between her thighs, but there isn’t enough light to make out more than its delicate contours. He can feel her pulse drumming against him, as if she was one throbbing heartbeat. She swallows. He stares at the cords of her neck moving in concert.

They gaze at each other in the warm dark for about a minute.

Then she pulls her top back on and pads back to her room. The door clicks shut; the light vanishes.