Free Hot and Cold by Paige Notaro Page A

ago, when he showed me the site for it on the Internet. I’d completely refused to sign up, of course. I had almost no classical training to speak of, and this was a professional competition.
    Sean had used skills…other than words to change my mind. I drifted to the memory of him scooping me into his lap and pulling me into his hard kiss, while his fingers tiptoed into my pants.
    The heat of the memory just made the chill before me even colder.
    “So what are you cooking?” Sean asked after a while. It might have been his first unprompted words of the evening.
    “A gumbo recipe from my mom with some added flair.”
    “Gumbo. You mean that okra soup?”
    “Yeah, you had it that time you came over.”
    “I remember. It had plenty of flair already. Why are you adding more?”
    I’d wanted attention, but even this was cold. His gaze felt like a scalpel.
    “I can’t use a recipe without making it my own.”
    “Mixing things up might mess it up.”
    If there was some darker implication behind that comment, I couldn’t make it out. But the words themselves weren't that great. I bit back a flare of anger.
    “Maybe I’ll make a bit of each and you can do a blind taste test.”
    “I don’t know, Gabi,” he said, studying his food. “I’ve got to hit the gym hard for a bit.”
    “I didn’t mean like tomorrow.”
    “Tomorrow, next week. It’s the same. Soup’s not going to fill me up.”
    “It’s just a taste…”
    He wasn’t listening anymore. His eyes flickered to the phone by his plate. I searched for any indication of a message, but all I saw on creen was the time.
    He had nothing, and he was still ignoring me. That was a new low for the evening.
    Maybe, in some messed up way, it was good that I’d be going back to school in just under a month. Flames needed air to burn. Ann Arbor wasn’t exactly Beijing in terms of distance, but it still sat a good forty, fifty minutes from Detroit. Maybe what we needed was just some space.
    Actual physical space. Cause it wasn’t like I was suffocating him now. We’d seen each other only twice a week this month. How little time together would be enough?
    What I couldn’t understand was what had changed. It was only a month ago that we’d still been at it like bunnies. There’d been weeks where I’d woken up every morning tangled in his sheets, sometimes with one of his thick, warm arms tight around my bare chest.
    A few times, he’d already been inside me.
    It was like having this wonderful dream about being swaddled in a gentle warmth. It seemed to nestle your very soul.
    Then you wake up and find it’s all real.
    The perfect man is wrapped around you. You’re smothered in a cloud of his heat and his scent – the traces of his musk, his cinnamon cologne. His strength lands hard on all the places you can feel it the most: an arm clasping the flesh of your chest, his lips brushing the most tender part of your neck, a firm palm on your thigh fastening you to him where it matters..
    The warmth at your soul? It’s physical – oh god, do you feel the hard certainty of it. When he started to move, it was the closest my soul ever was to being touched.
    Those months had stretched into one endless wave of pleasure.
    Then the waters stilled, suddenly and all at once. We hadn’t had sex in a week, and the last time had been about as cold and stiff as the ice jangling in my diet coke.
    “Anything interesting happen this week?” I asked. I’d probably asked it before our food came, too.
    “Just the usual,” Sean said. “You know my schedule. Train, eat. Train, eat. Train, eat, fight.”
    “When is your next fight?”
    “Why?”
    “Why?” I didn’t know how to answer that.
    “It’s gonna happen when it happens. I’ll let you know if I’m busy or not.”
    “I’m just wondering.”
    “Don’t worry your pretty little head about that,” He flashed a grin. “It’s not needed.”
    I hadn’t attended a single match after the first time. It’s not