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Alastor didn’t know why Vox seemed so determined to manufacture situations in which he was doomed to fail. Of course, Alastor didn’t see fit to discourage him—why would he detract from his own entertainment? In some cases, Alastor even saw fit to egg him on (from a distance) as Vox involved himself in all manner of inane business ventures and raucous bar fights.
This time around at their weekly dinner, Vox had engaged in another doomed pursuit—challenging Alastor to a drinking contest. It was one of his favored pastimes, for whatever reason. Alastor, of course, was winning, nursing half a finger of whiskey, two drinks deeper than Vox and still upright. He stirred his pot of filé gumbo at the stove, while Vox groaned against the kitchen table.
Considering his glass for a moment, Alastor moved to top himself off. He motioned, offering it to Vox. Vox shook his head and watched him in disbelief.
“You’re a fucking freak. What is that, your fourth?”
“I am perfectly normal. You, on the other hand, are a complete lightweight.”
Vox scoffed and sharply gestured for the bottle. Alastor passed it to him and watched as he poured himself a generous two fingers, which he downed immediately, taking it like a shot. Or, it was more accurate to say that he attempted to take it like a shot, with all the dramatic coughing and sputtering that actually occurred. Alastor sipped at his own whiskey and watched the show.
Vox finished coughing and leaned heavily on the table. “Now? Now, we’re tied,” he declared triumphantly, then covered his mouth, looking a bit green around the gills—a turn of expression that, for Vox, was nearly literal.
Alastor hummed and took another sip of his whiskey. “Not quite.”
Vox took his hand away from his mouth. “No. There’s no way you lapped me twice .”
Alastor laughed. “Guilty!”
Vox laughed too, a bit manic. “You fucker. I’m on your heels. Just you wait.” He hiccuped loudly and quickly covered his mouth again.
“On my heels, you say?” Alastor said.
“On your heels! Just give me another twenty minutes,” Vox said, not without good humor. “On a definitely unrelated note, could you bring me a glass of water?”
“Do I look like a busboy?” Alastor continued without pausing for the rhetorical question, “Then why do you expect me to wait on you?”
“Ignoring how you definitely dress like a waiter—Ouch. Lighten up, Al,” Vox said, but gamely heaved himself out of his seat to get his own damn water.
Using the counter as a stabilizer, he stumbled over to Alastor’s sink, where he stuck a glass under the running tap and gulped it down, spilling a bit of the water onto his white shirt. Alastor’s nose wrinkled and he pointedly looked away, turning back to the stove to taste-test his gumbo. It needed more salt, as always.
Vox, ever one to take liberties when tipsy, took half a slice of rye from the cutting board and reached over Alastor’s shoulder to dip it in the pot—careful not to touch any of the meat in the stew. His arm brushed against Alastor’s as he did it, but Alastor allowed it without comment on the basis that all transgressions, when committed in a warm kitchen under the pleasant haze of a good whiskey, seem less serious than when out in the open air.
Vox inspected the dipped bread carefully, double checking to make sure he hadn’t picked up any meat on accident. Finally satisfied, he ate the bread and groaned. “Amazing. Al, I don’t know how you do it.”
“Oh, I suppose I’m just a man of many talents,” Alastor said, not at all humbly. He knew he was skilled and didn’t feel the need to obfuscate when his praises were well deserved.
“In the kitchen, sure. I’ll give you that,” Vox said cheekily.
Alastor’s grin turned a little sharp. “Implying something?”
Vox coughed. “No. Not at all.”
Alastor hummed.
“I’m just awful at cooking, to be honest,” Vox valiantly redirected. “I just never had the knack for it.”
“I could teach you, if you wanted,” Alastor said, a bit thoughtlessly, then paused. Oh, perhaps the whisky was getting to him after all.
Vox didn’t seem to notice his internal conflict. “Doubt it. My mom used to say I could burn water and boil cake, if I wanted.”
“Nonsense! In the beginning, it’s just following instructions. Anyone can manage that, so long as they have two brain cells to rub together. So you might have half a chance. Ha!”
Instead of pushing back as he usually did when his ego was threatened, Vox just shrugged and grinned good naturedly. “I think my odds might be even worse than that.”
Alastor frowned, starting to get annoyed. “Oh, come on. It’s not that difficult.”
Vox rolled his eyes. “Not all of us have your gift, Al.”
“Are you not hearing anything I’m saying?” Alastor said. “It’s not a natural talent. Anyone can learn to cook.”
“Says the natural talent,” Vox said, double dipping his bread in the pot.
“Stop being dramatic.”
Vox finished the slice and waved his hand dismissively. “Face it, Al. I’m a trainwreck in the kitchen. It is what it is.”
Alastor paused in stirring, genuinely annoyed. How many times had Alastor encountered this macho urge to reduce the culinary arts to a mere matter of instinct and natural inclination rather than what it actually was—a product of hard work? Sometimes, he really hated the hell out of Vox. Then again, half of the fun of knowing Vox was the slightly masochistic pleasure to be found in despising him. And wouldn’t that enjoyable contempt only grow if he tasked Vox with preparing the meal for one of their weekly dinners?
He paused, considering the idea. How humiliating for Vox—and entertaining for Alastor. Then again, did Alastor really want to be forced to eat whatever mediocre dish Vox could muster?
Still, it might be worth it for the sheer spectacle. There was nothing more hilarious than Vox’s characteristic boundless overconfidence and his corresponding inevitable failures. His first few attempts at a game-show had been fun to bear witness to. He remembered with particular fondness one time Vox managed to flood his entire studio (“Shark Tank: Now with 100% more sharks!”). His monitor had been on the fritz for a month.
Of course, now that Vox had hit his stride and found some reasonable success with Hell’s Wheel of Fortune (and also Torture), things had gotten much less entertaining for Alastor on that front. He had mentioned plans to expand and make a news program, so hopefully Alastor wouldn’t be bored for too long…
But in the meantime, Alastor was forced to make his own fun, so to speak. And in the realm of cooking especially, where so many men had no concept of even the very basics… where Vox, the egotist, had described his own skills so lowly… Alastor felt sure there was ample entertainment to be had. He could easily imagine Vox overreaching his abilities in a futile bid to impress Alastor. He briefly got lost in a fantasy of Vox attempting a flambé and setting Alastor’s apartment on fire.
“Next week, you’ll cook for us,” he said decisively.
Vox put up his hands defensively. “Woah, Al. When I said I wasn’t good at cooking, I meant it. I’m not sure that would be good for either of us.”
“Well, I suppose we’ll have to skip next week then.”
Vox snorted. “Sure, Al. Week after next. But I’m not cooking.”
“Oh, but I’m out of town then.”
“Al-”
“And the week after that, too,” Alastor said, morose.
Vox’s face had gone a bit grey. Well, his face was always grey, but it had gotten a bit dimmer. “Uh.”
Alastor sighed heavily. “And it’s a real shame! I was so looking forward to it,” he needled.
“Alastor, come on. I’m really not very good at it,” Vox said, voice a bit staticy.
“That’s alright. Rain check. Are you free anytime in, say, May?”
Vox groaned. “Fine. You win. But if it’s bad, you can’t blame me.”
“Of course I will. I’m so glad you came around,” Alastor said. He finished spooning onto the two plates. “Now, let’s eat.”
Alastor set down the two nearly-identical dishes—one with a small sprig of cilantro as a garnish to distinguish Vox’s plate from his own. He put the dish with the cilantro in front of Vox and took the other for himself. Vox, extremely tipsy, eyed his plate suspiciously.
“This one’s, uh. ‘Cruelty-free,’ right?”
Alastor laughed. “Is any meat truly cruelty-free? Dig in!”
Vox picked up his fork which did little to disguise his extremely obvious reluctance to put any of the food on his plate actually inside his mouth. Alastor didn’t start eating either, and instead eyed him, grinning.
Then Vox grinned back and reached over to swapped their dishes. Alastor let him do it.
Vox wagged his finger. “You can’t get me that easily,” he said.
Alastor laughed. “You caught me, old pal! What gave it away?”
“You love cilantro. You would never use that to label the one that wasn’t yours.”
“Guilty as charged! Now eat, you idiotic box.”
Vox dug in quite happily, and didn’t seem to consider the flaw in his impeccable logic—that he had already eaten from this gumbo when he dipped his bread in it. And, moreover, that Alastor had only been cooking from one pot, rather than making two meals in parallel, or whatever ridiculous thing Vox expected him to do to accommodate his dietary restrictions. Probably, it helped that he was three sheets to the wind—Alastor watched as Vox refilled his whiskey glass from the water pitcher with mild amusement.
Honestly, Alastor had hoped Vox would do something silly like switch their plates, which is why he had primed him with the differing garnishes. Swapping two identical meals to undo some imagined tampering, was, after all, a very Vox thing to do. In that it was complete nonsense. If Alastor had wanted to feed Vox human meat, why would he have cooked the animal version at all? In which case, switching the plates would be a lateral move at best.
Luckily for Vox, his antics didn’t amount to much, as for the past two months of their meetups, Alastor had been cooking with exclusively venison. (To his own detriment, as filé gumbo really didn’t suit a red meat.) But it was one of the few meats both Alastor and Vox could tolerate. A place where they could—ha!—meet in the middle.
Alastor raised his glass in a cheers and Vox, almost without looking up, copied him. Immediately after their glasses clinked he proceeded to chug his extremely watered down whiskey as he did little to disguise how badly the spicy dish was affecting him.
Alastor’s grin widened. He found himself genuinely looking forward to next week and whatever absolute ‘trainwreck’ Vox could muster.
——————
Alastor should have known that being the chef for the evening wouldn’t dissuade Vox from arriving fifteen minutes late at a minimum. The analog clock on the opposite wall ran five minutes fast, displaying ten past six.
Alastor, thankfully, knew well enough to expect this, and so had broken out the morning newspaper to flip through. He was onto the Sports and Dismemberment section when Vox knocked on the door.
“It’s open,” Alastor called, not looking up.
Vox gently kicked open the door, arms full of a brown bag, which he clutched from the bottom. He shuffled over and set it on the counter.
“Doing the crossword?”
“Don’t joke about such awful things,” Alastor said, feeling warm. Vox knew how much he hated the crossword. Alastor banished his paper and eyed Vox, who seemed reluctant to open the brown paper bag he had just dumped on Alastor’s counter.
Vox took a deep breath, then turned to face Alastor fully. “Are you sure I can’t convince you to let me take you out for dinner? I know there’s a new Greek place in Cannibal Town.”
“Hm, I do love Mediterranean,” Alastor said. “But there really is nothing like a home-cooked meal.”
Vox heaved a staticky sigh. “Fine. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He moved to open the bag, but Alastor was so far not very impressed with his lackadaisical attitude.
Vox shifted his weight. “What, are you just going to sit there and watch me?”
“Well, someone has to be ready to put out the fires!” Alastor summoned a tin firefighting bucket, holding it at the ready for comedic effect. Obviously, it was filled with lighter fluid rather than water. Not that Vox needed to know that. Alastor banished it before he could notice the smell.
Vox rolled his eyes. “Get a drink or something, then. So I can at least pretend you’re not just watching me like a creep.”
Alastor summoned two fingers of Pennsylvania rye in a low glass to his hand. “Better?”
“Almost. Where’s mine?”
Alastor sighed, snapped his fingers and a glass with a single finger of rye appeared on the counter before Vox.
Vox set down his bag again to take a minuscule sip. “It’s alright. Do you have any ice?”
“There's simply no accounting for taste,” Alastor said. “What will you be making?”
Vox put down the glass and shrugged, somewhat sheepish. “Soup and garlic bread. And a salad,” he admitted.
All extremely easy items—that could even be purchased ready-made, or near ready. Alastor sighed, staticy. So much for his entertainment. He summoned a cigarette and lit it from the candle on the table—rude before dinner, but God help him if he had just voluntarily signed up to watch Vox reheat some food. Was this really how he was spending his afterlife? “I’ll put on the radio.”
“Sure.” Vox lit the stove and lowered the gas. He put a pot with oil on the stovetop before moving to preheat the oven. “Where are your cutting boards?”
“Bottom left.” Alastor turned the dial to his main channel and raised the volume. He watched as Vox struggled to peel a clove of garlic pinched between his claws. Alastor’s eye twitched as he watched him accidentally score it badly with his claw. Alastor took a drag from his cigarette—then realized he had forgotten to open a window. The shutters across the room from him snapped open loudly, causing Vox to jump.
Vox glanced up and saw Alastor staring at him and his garlic mishap. His screen went a bit snowy, embarrassed—and good, he should be. Fortunately, once the clove was peeled, he had no further problems with the garlic, cutting it quickly with his gaze firmly on the task at hand.
“Who’s on tonight?” Vox said, breaking the silence.
“Chuck.” A newer sinner with a marionette body, who Alastor had mostly just contracted for the hell of it. But he was decent at managing the station and smooth enough with the transitions between LPs—a skill that Alastor was quickly finding to be a dying art among younger demons.
Vox put the minced garlic in the pot. He began peeling an onion, thankfully with greater ease than the garlic.
“Nice. I like Chuck,” he said.
Alastor twitched, suddenly feeling a bit aggravated. He tapped his cigarette against the ashtray even though it didn’t really need it. “I told him to stick to my setlist.”
“It’s always your setlist,” Vox said.
“Yes, well.” Alastor paused. “Why do you like Chuck?”
“Uh, I don’t know.” Vox didn’t look up from his dicing. “He’s got a nice voice.”
As if on cue, the song ended and Chuck’s voice came through the speakers.
“Ladies and gentlemen, that was The Man I Love by Marion Harris. Next up, we have Black-eye Blues . But before that, a brief word from our sponsors.” A few seconds of some pre-recorded screams. “Thank you again, listeners, for choosing 66.6—the best and only radio station in hell.” The next song began.
Short, sweet. Taken directly from Alastor’s playbook, almost word for word. So why did he now hate it?
Vox shrugged. “See? Nice voice.” He tilted his head. “What’s wrong with the signal?”
Alastor realized that the audio quality had worsened quite a bit. He tapped his cigarette on the ashtray and the static eased up. “Sounds fine to me.”
Vox shrugged. They fell into a comfortable silence, radio playing softly in the background.
After a minute or so, Vox paused his cutting and tapped the edge of his screen, which Alastor had long learned meant he was thinking hard about something. Often something that wasn’t actually that complicated, knowing Vox.
“Penny for your thoughts?”
“Selling me short,” Vox said, but resumed cutting the onion. “It’s just—it doesn’t sting anymore.”
Alastor rolled his eyes. That was it? “You really are an amateur! It’s only bad when your knives are dull. If they are properly sharpened, the effect will be very mild.”
Vox paused to stare at him. “Alastor, my face is made of glass.”
Alastor didn’t blush, but it was a near thing, rare as it was for Vox to one-up him, verbally or otherwise. “Right. Well. Could be either one of those things, I suppose.” Something occurred to him. “You haven’t cut onions since you died?”
“Nah.” Vox moved on to the next tomato. “Mostly microwave stuff.”
“How hellish.”
“Well.” Vox shrugged. Alastor laughed at the pathetic non-joke.
Vox finished and added the onions to the heated oil in the pot, where they began to sizzle immediately. Then he began chopping the tomatoes, moving more quickly than before. As he did so, he twisted the handle of the pot to the side without looking. The motion looked habitual.
Then, he paused, looking down and tugging at his sleeve. He shrugged off his coat, draped it on one of the dining chair backs, and rolled up his sleeves.
Alastor could see, clearly, that the white of his sleeve had been stained. The tomatoes. Again, amateurish. And for what? He had seen Alastor take off his coat and roll up his sleeves before cooking probably a hundred times.
It was pure vanity, to try and cook a three course meal while wearing a three piece suit. Then again, Vox had always been a bit vain, in that annoying, slightly upper-class way.
Sure, he had never said as much to Alastor plainly, but based on his pickiness about clothing—and a hundred other small, aggravating things about him—Alastor had long since guessed that Vox, when he was alive, was not a working class man. Far from it. His taste skewed expensive and excessive. Even now, when he truly didn’t have the means for it, Vox still changed his suit every season, often forced to pick cheaper fabrics to support the finicky habit.
Meanwhile, Alastor had the means, but had instead been wearing the same tatty coat for the past half-century. And he would keep wearing it until the lining wore through. Old habits, he supposed, died hard. He tapped his cigarette again.
He watched as Vox started to mince more garlic—too much, in fact. Unless… He stood to glance inside the paper bag Vox had brought and saw to his mild surprise a loaf of fresh bread. No pre-made garlic bread here—though he supposed it wasn’t very difficult to make. But still, interesting.
“No meat?” Alastor said, keeping the wistful note out of his voice as best as he could.
Vox twitched as if he was about to smack Alastor’s hand away from the bag, then wisely thought better of it. “As if I trust any meat around you.”
“And what does that mean?”
“You’d be trying to swap it out—or add something in—the moment I turned my back.”
Alastor shrugged. “Guilty as charged,” he lied. “What recipe are you using?”
Vox barked out a laugh. “Yeah, yeah. Laugh it up.”
Alastor had meant the question seriously, obviously, and didn’t particularly enjoy being laughed at, least of all by Vox. “By all means, let me in on the joke.”
Vox rolled his eyes. “It’s just garlic bread. And soup. You don’t need a recipe for that.”
Alastor’s grin widened and he took a drag from his cigarette. So the night might be salvageable after all. If Vox wanted to improvise—well. Far be it from Alastor to get between a man and his own arrogance.
He watched as Vox added salt to the pot. Would it be better for him to undersalt it, or oversalt it? Oversalting had the added benefit of making the dish utterly unsalvageable—meaning Alastor would have to remake the whole dish from scratch. His way, this time. How humiliating—for Vox. And gratifying, for Alastor. Undersalting has its benefits as well, of course, in that Alastor could easily fix the problem. There was something appealing about helping a struggling Vox who would never be able to accept the help with grace and poise and would instead struggle with his ego the whole long road to admitting Alastor was right all along. Why, it had to be one of the main attractions of their friendship.
Alastor ground out his cigarette and left it abandoned in the ashtray, leaning forward to watch more intently.
The rest of the preparations passed quickly as Alastor drank and watched. The salad seemed simple enough, as Vox simply layered some lettuce and shredded carrots in a bowl, spooning globs of mayonnaise throughout. Alastor didn’t bother to pay too much attention to that part, as he obviously wouldn’t be eating it—Alastor was a lion, not a sheep, regardless of what his hellish body’s non-human parts might imply. Vox put the bowl in the fridge to “settle,” because he was clearly a psychopath.
Vox cycled seamlessly between the pot, the cutting board, and the oven. And, well—it wasn’t that Vox was particularly good at cooking, but he definitely wasn’t nearly as helpless as Alastor had hoped. Alastor watched as Vox forcefully mashed the minced garlic into a stick of butter. The butter wasn’t nearly soft enough—Alastor never had this problem, seeing as he stored his butter on a cloche on the counter—but Vox seemed to take it more as a challenge than a deterrent.
Once the butter mixture had been spread on the bread loaf, Vox put it on a tray and set it aside. He then cycled back to the pot, skewering a bit of onion and holding it up to get a closer look. Seemingly satisfied, he opened a box of broth from his shopping. Alastor glimpsed the label—venison stock. Despite himself, he felt mildly touched.
Once the broth had been added to the pot, Vox leaned back against the counter, regarding Alastor as Alastor, in turn, regarded him.
Finally, Alastor lowered the volume on the radio until it was nothing but a background murmur. “Who taught you to cook?”
“Flattering you think anyone taught me,” Vox said, in an increasingly less rare show of humility. “But, yeah. My mother.”`
Me as well, Alastor thought but didn’t say. “That’s good. Everyone should know how to cook.”
Surprisingly, Vox laughed. “Yeah, sure. I fucking hated it.”
Alastor felt his teeth sharpen slightly of their own accord. “Why?”
Vox either didn’t notice the shadows deepening in the room or he was braver than Alastor gave him credit for. “I mean, it’s just a nightmare. You spend ages working on it and at the end, everyone fucking hates it anyway.”
The shadows receded somewhat. “That has not been my experience,” Alastor said, a bit smug, resting his head against his hand.
“Yeah, yeah. You’re very special and talented.” Vox bent and opened the oven. He hovered his hand in front of it for a moment before putting the garlic bread inside. He straightened and looked around. “Where’s your food processor?”
Alastor felt his smile slant. “My what?”
After a brief argument about what constitutes basic kitchen equipment or not, Alastor summoned his food processor out of storage. He vaguely felt like this was cheating, but he couldn’t malign Vox too much given that he used it as well, from time to time. It really was just more convenient. And he couldn’t be too elitist about it—he certainly had a few anachronisms that had found a permanent place in his kitchen. For instance, the refrigerator.
Alastor’s ears pinned involuntarily during the loudest stages of the blending but it was soon over. He took another sip from his whiskey.
Vox poured the blended soup back into the pot. He then taste-tested from the wooden stirring spoon and put it back in the pot. Which was disgusting, but again, not a sin that Alastor himself was innocent of. So he let it slide. The face Vox made after tasting his own soup, however, was truly delightful.
“Eh, I’ve fucked it up,” Vox said with a grimace.
“How so?” Alastor said, positively giddy.
“Not enough salt.” Alastor’s heart sank as he watched Vox add more salt, carefully, tasting as he went. He did the same with pepper, only adding a small bit at a time.
Eventually, Vox shrugged. “Something else. Uh.” He hummed and, to Alastor’s genuine surprise, went to his drystuffs cabinet.
“What are you-” Alastor started to say when Vox pulled out a jar of white sugar.
“Ha! Yes.” Vox pried open the lid, and, much less cautiously than with the salt, added one heaping spoonful of sugar to the pot. Huh.
He saw Alastor watching and his screen stuttered. “I know, I know. Could have gone sour. But I like sweet better.”
Me too, Alastor didn’t say. It was strange, the picture he was looking at didn’t add up to anything like the Vox he knew. It’s true, Vox’s skills clearly didn’t come anywhere close to Alastor’s, who was a genuinely accomplished chef in a truly objective sense—but, well. His actions betrayed experience: to not have to think to turn the pot handle inwards, to know when to push a soup in the sweet or sour direction…
Alastor had met men who knew half as much as Vox in the kitchen who boasted their abilities to every woman they met. Especially after the 70s, when it became either cool or appealing to women for their bachelors to be a little more, well, uh. Anyways.
But here was Vox, uncharacteristically humble—it didn’t sit right. Something about the situation made Alastor want to turn Vox inside out and figure out the mechanism behind it all. He felt vaguely discomfited by his own curiosity as he realized that this was probably how Vox felt about him, in all his aloof mysteriousness.
Alastor didn’t especially enjoy the sensation. He had expected to find Vox entertaining, not interesting.
“How many recipes do you have memorized?” Alastor said, purposefully casual. He was betting that, despite Vox’s unexpected competence (Alastor didn’t deign to call it skill), he was still the type of cook who thought of recipes as something to be memorized and replicated, rather than learned and perfected.
Vox didn’t look over, absorbed in stirring and taste-testing his soup. “Seven. One for each day of the week.”
“And I suppose hard-boiled eggs is one of those,” Alastor said, dryly.
Vox laughed. “Okay, asshole. Eight, if you count eggs.”
“And… you like cooking? You’re not good at it,” Alastor saw Vox roll his eyes, but he continued on, “but you enjoy it?”
Vox shot him a weird look. “No? Obviously not.”
Alastor sipped his whiskey.
“I mean…” Vox turned to face him. “No offense, but it’s pretty boring. I mean, I’m bored and I’m the one doing it. I have no idea what you get out of this. Or even what you’re getting out of this now! I mean, you’re just sitting there. Watching me.” He gesticulated with the wooden spoon before seeming to run out of steam in his rant, somewhat trailing off. “Anyways.”
Alastor’s grin didn’t waver.
Vox shifted under his gaze and scratched the back of his cabinet with his left hand. “And it doesn’t help that I’m pretty useless at it.”
Alastor hummed.
Unfortunately, those few moments of distracted conversation clearly cost Vox greatly. Vox’s eyes went wide right as Alastor started to smell burning. “Ah, shit.”
Vox crouched in front of the oven and cracked open the door. A thin stream of grey smoke spilled out.
“Ah, fuck,” Vox said, and grabbed the tray with his bare hands and put it on the stovetop.
Vox shook out his hands, staring at the pan. Alastor couldn’t see it from over his shoulder.
“It’s, um, it’s. It’s a little crispy.” Vox winced. “God. Fuck. I’ll just—it’s burnt, okay? I’ll make another one.” He turned abruptly and shoved the pan to the side of the stove. He pulled out the other half of the loaf of bread from the paper bag. “Just—just give me a few minutes. Ten minutes.” Then, quieter, “Fuck.”
Vox began buttering the new loaf, movements a bit jerky. Alastor crept over and peered the old, supposedly burnt garlic bread, and—
It was truly just a little crispy. Maybe a tad charred at the edges, but certainly nothing unsalvageable.
“Vox, this is perfectly fine. Let’s just eat already.”
“Just give me ten minutes,” Vox said flatly.
“Vox,” Alastor said, starting to get annoyed. “Stop with the dramatics. Let’s eat.”
“It’s fine. Just give me ten minutes,” Vox repeated. He glanced at the clock, then froze. Alastor looked at it too—five past seven.
Vox twitched and tensed up, gripping the butter knife white-knuckled.
“Sorry. I should have been paying more attention.”
Alastor gripped his glass tightly. “I already told you, I don’t care. Just sit down. Let’s eat.”
Vox nodded.
However, instead of filling the plates directly at the counter and carrying them to the table, Vox took down some serving platters from Alastor’s top shelf and started arranging the food. The soup went into the tourrine with the matching ladle. The garlic bread, burnt pieces cut off, was sliced at one inch intervals and placed at a slight angle on a serving platter.
Alastor reached out to take the tourrine but Vox intercepted him before he could, smoothly carrying it to the table. Feeling distinctly uncomfortable and a bit useless, Alastor followed him. They both sat.
Vox, although he had snapped out of whatever panic had gripped him after the burnt bread incident, was still moving quite strangely. A faint hum filled the air, like a distant fan, or—in this case—like a TV that had been left on for too long.
Vox served Alastor’s plate, and then himself. And then just… sat there. Watching Alastor.
Alastor carefully picked up his spoon and took a sip of the soup. That seemed to break some kind of tension for Vox, because he, too, picked up his spoon and began to eat.
They ate in silence for a while. The soup was—fine. Definitely miles better than any canned version. But a bit bland for Alastor’s taste. He tended to prefer his soups with a bit of kick to them. But the sugar had added a satisfying, warm quality to the tomato flavor—reminded him of being a child and picking a slightly overripe tomato off the vine at the height of summer, the skin delicate and soft beneath his teeth, the flesh sweeter than a fruit.
Clearly, Vox had a competent enough sense of balancing flavors. Even if his taste was a bit childish. (Soup and garlic bread?) But none of that explained… this.
Vox opened his mouth as if to speak. Then closed it again. Then, “I left the salad in the fridge.”
Alastor rolled his eyes to cover how grateful he felt for Vox being the first to break the silence. “I wouldn’t have had any anyway. I don’t eat leaves. I’m not a cow.” Not to mention, it had looked disgusting.
“You eat people but you draw the line at leaves?”
“Why must you fill the silence with questions you already know the answer to?”
Vox went quiet again and Alastor belatedly remembered that he did, in fact, want Vox to fill the silence.
After a minute or so, Vox spoke again. “Um. Sorry.”
Both of their whiskeys were sitting on the table, unfinished. Alastor took a sip of his.
“It’s quite alright,” he said, a bit lost at what he was even absolving Vox of.
Thankfully, Vox perked up slightly as the meal went on, but remained mostly subdued for the remainder of the night, excusing himself early when he usually would have stayed another hour or so for a drink or a smoke.
As Alastor shut the door behind him, he felt a bit odd. He looked at the brown shopping bag Vox had left on his counter. He made his way back to the kitchen table, which was still cluttered with dishes, and wasn’t that just like Vox, to leave without cleaning up? Alastor felt a stab of something parallel to guilt—somehow, even marveling at Vox’s incompetence had momentarily lost its charm.
Alastor made to relight his abandoned cigarette, then thought better of it, and lit a new one. He took a deep breath.
Strangely, Alastor had in fact discovered something tonight—that there was an upper limit to how much Vox could suffer before Alastor stopped enjoying it. And apparently that threshold was low enough that something as benign as making dinner could cross it. Alastor wasn’t sure if he particularly liked this new knowledge. It left him feeling overly observed. As well as a bit itchy.
Alastor again extinguished his cigarette without having smoked it much. He found himself resolving that next week he would cook steak, or whatever ridiculous macho meal tickled Vox’s fancy. And maybe substitute the meat for human flesh. He had to keep Vox on his toes, after all.