Free Life From Scratch by Melissa Ford Page A

the numbers on the slip of paper before tucking it into his pocket.
    Is it terrible that I’m thinking, through bites of my cupcake, about how this will make a fantastic blog entry? How I can’t wait to write about him which is just an adult substitute for writing Mrs. Rachel Paez one hundred times on the inside of a math notebook? That I wonder if I have it in me to try cooking ham just to have an excuse to have him over again? Which is the most sex-worthy pork—serrano, jamon, or chorizo?   I pluck one of the tiny chopped strawberries off the top and hope I look sexy eating it.   Aren’t strawberries supposed to be an aphrodisiac?
    And at that moment, Pete’s voice breaks into my thoughts with “Who the hell eats Canadian bacon?”
    Which seems to end the party. Polar Pete knows how to cool off a conversation. Arianna collects her coat, my brother gives me a quick kiss on the cheek while he slips the leftovers out of my refrigerator, and Pete gives my hand a final limp shake. Gael grabs me in a spontaneous hug before he catches the waiting elevator with the rest of them. He thanks me for the dinner and conversation.
    I realize after everyone has left that I forgot to tell Arianna about the Bloscar email. Though it doesn’t really matter, because the phone rings once she gets home and relieves her babysitter. We spend an hour on the phone dissecting the dinner party, until Beckett howls for his
midnight
bottle.

. . . And that is how I made the pancakes. I’m never going   back to a mix again.
     
Off the topic of pancakes, I’m trying to keep this as vague as possible in case he ever stumbles upon my blog, but I met the most delicious man in the world recently. Literally, I could have eaten him. He smelled like cinnamon and coffee and chocolate and sex, the man just reeked of sex. Not that he smelled like he had just dismounted, but he had that Marlboro Man without the cigarettes, soccer player who just scored a goal, sprouting stubble manliness about him that made me realize that if I were a different kind of woman, and I met him on the street, we would have ended up doing it in the alleyway.
     
Not that I've had great sex in . . . oh . . . almost thirteen years. Fine, Adam and I had some early good years, but the last few caused a fine layer of dust to settle on my nether regions.
     
So these are my questions, oh brilliant people of the Internets: (1) if you just had dinner with said man, how long would you wait for him to call you before you tried his cell? (2) Would you ever call his cell or would you take his lack of phone call as a sign and just polish off the entire stack of pancakes by yourself in a pity party? (3) How many dates do you need to have before it's kosher to have sex these days?
     
Not that I'm thinking of taking a bite of that chocolate, cinnamon, soccer-playing concoction or anything . . .
     

    Chapter Four
     
    Preparing the Thyme
     
    I am actually humming. I am walking through the food store, collecting the rest of the ingredients for the angel food cake I’m finally going to tackle this afternoon. My first true excursion into the terrifying world of baking, and yet I’m humming. This is the hum of a woman who is in that zone where it is probable that the man she gave her number to will call her.
    Two days post-dinner-party. Which is a very different window than the five days post-dinner-party time period, which is not hum-worthy. That window contains obsessive Googling and ice cream eating. But I’m not in that window of time; I am still in a happy, full, self-satisfied place.
    It has been a long time since I’ve been in this place. Anyone married who laments their single years is only thinking of this chunk of the continuum. The excitement of knowing that someone is holding your telephone number (okay, perhaps he isn’t literally holding it, perhaps the paper is on his night table, or in his pocket, or . . . shit . . . at the bottom of a garbage can . . . ), that they could