Page 39 of Daddy's Reckoning
I raised my eyebrows, and she crossed her arms over her chest with a pout. “Listen, I just got spanked and I want chocolate, dammit.”
Of course. If we’d been in the club, I’d have offered it immediately. At home, I didn’t have a stockpile of sweets and didn’t always think about those things, but it was a fair request. I added a bag of mini chocolate bars to have on hand because if I had it my way, I’d be spanking her frequently.
“Done,” I assured her. “On one condition. You can have whatever weird cravings your heart desires each night, if you let me cook you healthy food the rest of the time.”
Her brows shot to her forehead. She cocked her head to the side. “You can cook?” she asked doubtfully.
“Sure,” I answered smoothly. Aside from the odd egg-white omelet or grilled steak, I’d never really tried, but how hard could it be?
Turns out the answer to “how hard could cooking be?” is “a hell of a lot harder than it looks”.
After a restless night in my own bed, tossing and turning while the woman I wanted slept soundly in the other room instead of in my arms, I woke up, stumbled out to the kitchen, and decided to tackle day one of cooking healthy for my family.
My go-to breakfast was a banana, three hard boiled eggs, and a piece of toast, but I wanted to impress Erin, so I’d scoured an online cookbook, put in a huge grocery order, and when it arrived, was sure that I was going to pull off a California benedict worthy of any five-star restaurant. When after four tries, I was still struggling to poach a damn egg, I did what any self-respecting kitchen degenerate would do. I called Nyla.
Of course, it was barely seven a.m. so she listened to my whining and promptly hung up on me. Jasmine was next.
“How do I poach an egg?” I almost yelled into the phone. I was getting desperate. If I couldn’t figure this out, Erin would wake up to a crabby Daddy and a trashed kitchen, when my goal had been to wake her up with a fancy meal and breakfast in bed.
“Theo?” Jasmine asked incredulously. I could almost see her pulling the phone away from her ear and staring at it in confusion.
“Yes, it’s me. I’m trying to make Erin breakfast in bed, but I keep ruining the eggs. If I don’t get this figured out soon, I’m going to have to order more eggs.”
“You… don’t know how to poach an egg? So why are you making poached eggs?” Her voice was still sleepy and tinged with confusion.
“I’m making Benedict. Well, I’m trying to. It’s not going well. Hence the phone call.”
“If you can’t poach an egg, just scramble it. I know you’re used to the fancy life, Theo, but surely you know how to scramble an egg.”
I did. Kind of. But scrambled wasn’t what I was going for.
“Just tell me….” I started to demand, then trailed off when I realized. “You don’t know how, do you?”
Jasmine sighed. “In theory, I do, but it’s a lot harder than it looks. It took me a while to get it just right, and I know you; you’re looking for perfection.”
I sighed. She did know me. I was looking for perfection. Walking over to the sink, I stared down at my discarded attempts. Maybe they would have worked well enough, and Erin probably would have just appreciated the effort, but to me they had been too soft, too odd-shaped, too overdone, and just not good enough. I sighed. Maybe I should just order in and try to pass it off as my own.
“Anyway Theo, it’s seven am on a Saturday, and I wish you luck, but I’m going back to bed.” The call cut off before I could even say goodbye, leaving me staring at my home screen.
I contemplated the list of places I loved to get breakfast from, and if any of them were even open this early. But I didn’t want to give up just yet. I really wanted to do this on my own for her, and thought I could hide containers and pull it off well enough that she wouldn’t know, I really wanted to do this for her.
I knew what I had to do. I had one more call to make. It was a long shot, but I crossed my fingers.
Lennon answered on the first ring, his breath coming fast and hard. I almost hung up.
“Theo?” he called into the phone line. “You there? What’s up? Is this a butt-dial?”
I shook my head, wondering how I’d become desperate enough to go to Lennon, of all people, for cooking advice.
We’d all painted Lennon with a short brush for years, writing him off as the lovable party-boy wannabe frat brother of the group, stuck in the mentality of our college days. And he’d let us, until recently. When he’d gotten together with Zoe, his college art professor and the subject of his wildest frat-boy fantasies, he’d finally given up the façade, admitting that it was just that. We’d learned he had a hefty investment portfolio, a myriad of impressive hobbies, and now he hardly even drank, imbibing only on Fridays at our weekly “business meetings”.
And according to Zoe, he was actually a pretty good cook. I was hoping it was true, because he was my last resort.
“Theo? Hello? I hear you breathing, man, but if you don’t answer me, I’m gonna assume it was a butt-dial and hang up.”
“Wait!” I cried before he could make good on that promise.
“Ah, there you are. What’s up?” He huffed. “Sorry I’m a little out of breath. You caught me mid-run.”