Dishing Up Love Read online

  I return a few minutes later after tucking my cock into the waistband of my jeans, since the fucker refused to go down no matter how many times I chanted the National Anthem or thought of saggy old lady tits. Because in my mind those saggy old lady tits would suddenly morph into Erin’s perfect, perky handfuls inside her oversized tee with a David Rose quote from Schitt’s Creek, my favorite TV show of all time. Which means she must really love it too, if she owns a shirt with a quote from the show. And then all I could picture was her and me cuddled up in my big-ass bed binge-watching all the seasons, which led to me imagining doing all sorts of other things in said big-ass bed. So Operation: Get Rid of My Fucking Hard-On was a big, fat fail, and all I could do was hide him away behind my belt buckle.

  “Feeling better, princess?” Carlos asks as I approach, and I shoot him the bird before taking my place in front of the sausages once more. Erin still sports a cute all-knowing smile, and I narrow my eyes at her.

  I roll my head around on my shoulders to release a little tension and then nod at Martin, my director, letting him know I’m ready. After he calls action, I pick up where we left off.

  “So, all we have left are a couple things in the produce section, and then you get to take me home,” I say, the usual flirtatious line I use on the females at this point in the show.

  But instead of the normal reaction from the participant—a stuttered response and pink cheeks—Erin throws the sausage into the cart, grabs hold of the handle, and starts sashaying toward the produce, tossing over her shoulder, “I don’t suppose you’re going to come up with a way to add cucumbers, squash, and eggplants to the red beans and rice, because I’m starting to sense a theme here.” She turns just enough to eye my ever-present but hidden erection before meeting my stare with a smirk.

  I hear Carlos bark out a laugh before covering it with a cough, and Martin murmurs, “Make a note to edit that out,” to his assistant.

  My poor, throbbing dick will soon turn into a terrible case of blue balls at this rate, so I quickly snatch up the remaining ingredients without any more banter. “A yellow onion… celery… green onion... a green bell pepper… and fresh parsley. Boom, time to party,” I say, and hightail it toward the checkout.

  Chapter 4

  Erin

  WHEN WE EXIT the grocery store, Curtis turns right toward the small parking lot just as I turn left to head home. I hear his feet stop abruptly on the asphalt, and then he calls out, “Did you park somewhere else?”

  “Nope, I walked. I’m only a few blocks this way,” I respond, turning around to face him.

  “We have all our equipment and vehicles, so uh….” He looks at a loss, and I tilt my head to watch him with interest. I’ve never seen him like this—on TV, I mean. He’s always sure-footed and perfectly together in every episode. It’s amusing to see him so… fish out of water.

  Usually on the show, Curtis rides shotgun in the person’s car. There’s a cute little getting-to-know-you type scene before they get to their house and start cooking. I guess I’ve thrown a wrench in that plan.

  The cameraman speaks up. “Why don’t you walk home with her? I can follow with the camera while everyone else meets us at her place with the cars. That way we still get the footage between the store and the participant’s home,” he suggests.

  “Good thinking, Carlos,” the director says, and as I’m giving them my address, a tiny woman wearing a headset attaches a small microphone inside the neck of my tee and then does the same thing to Curtis. Martin and the rest of the crew minus Carlos head to the parking lot, one of them pushing the shopping cart full of our groceries.

  I point over my shoulder with a small smile. “It’s just right up here.”

  When we hit the sidewalk, Curtis takes hold of my arm and tugs me toward the building so that he’s the one walking next to the street. When I look up at him, he doesn’t seem to realize what he’s done, and I find it ridiculously charming that the chivalrous act was just part of his nature. Say what you will about girl power, feminism, et cetera. I, for one, always thought it was a shame I missed out on the era of gentlemen.

  I don’t realize I’ve let out a small chuckle until I feel his eyes on me and he asks, “What’s so funny?” with a little smile on his kissable lips.

  “Nothing, really. You’re just… not what I expected you’d be like in real life,” I admit.

  “Oh yeah? What did you think I was like?” he questions curiously.

  We stop at an intersection and push the button to cross the street. “No offense, but you come off kind of cocky on the show.”

  He lifts a brow. “And I don’t in person?”

  “Well, sort of. You’re more playful than cocky. And I wouldn’t have thought you to be the kind of guy to take the time and conscious effort to make sure you’re the one walking closest to the street instead of me,” I confess.

  He smiles broadly. “My yaya would love to hear you say that.”

  “Your yaya?” I prompt.

  “My grandmother raised me,” he replies quietly, and oh how I’d love to dig deeper into that, but now doesn’t seem like an appropriate time, with the camera rolling and all.

  “She taught you well then,” I say instead, grinning up into his gorgeous blue eyes, and they twinkle back in the setting sun’s light.

  “I even open doors and pull out chairs,” he adds, playfully puffing out his chest, and I giggle.

  “The opening doors thing is nice, but I never understood the chair thing. Like, when is the lady supposed to sit? Does she sit down after he pulls it out and he has to like, shimmy her forward until her legs are under the table, or like, is it perfectly timed to where he pushes it under her butt just as she’s sitting down? You’d think that could be quite the gamble if the timing was off.” I pooch out my lips in contemplation.

  He laughs loudly. “How about I show you once we cook this meal?”

  I nod once. “Deal.”

  We cross the street, and the sidewalk narrows, his muscular bicep bumping into me as he avoids the many posts along the way. “Sorry.” He reaches out and steadies me. “The balconies of all the buildings are gorgeous, but the sidewalks aren’t quite wide enough to share with guys like me,” he says, looking up at the cover above us.

  “Galleries,” I correct absently, hopping over a crack in the cement.

  “What?”

  I meet his curious face. “A balcony doesn’t have these posts or columns and doesn’t stick out as far from the building. A gallery sticks out about as far as the sidewalk and has these to support them,” I explain, pointing to the iron poles that go from the ground up to the second story.

  “Learning has occurred,” he repeats my earlier words with a crooked grin. “What else you got?”

  I bite my lip, thinking of some fun facts to tell him about the area. “Well, back in the day, people could tell how wealthy you were by the number of posts you had holding up your gallery.” At his lifted brow, I continue, “They charged a tax for every post you had, since the sidewalk was owned by the city. So if you had enough dough to pay for a shi— crapload of poles, then you obviously had lots of money to blow.” Carlos is so stealthy behind us I totally forgot he was there until my potty mouth almost showed her ugly head.

  “Hm! You’re full of cool information. I seriously wanted to take one of those ghost tours while I was here, but I might just ask you to be my tour guide instead,” he says, nudging me gently with his arm, and the contact instantly hardens my nipples to a painful degree. I’d been trying my best to ignore the physical reactions my body was having to his accidental bumps, but this purposeful one cuts through my defenses.

  “Psh! Those ghost tours are fun as hell. Let’s just go on one together. I know a couple of the guides with the best stories, and like ninety-eight percent of them are true.” I lift my brows with excitement before understanding I basically just asked him out on a date.

  And that’s exactly what he thinks too, because the next words out of his mouth are
“It’s a date.”

  Thankfully, I don’t have to awkwardly find an excuse to correct my blunder before we reach my house. “This is it,” I tell him, and he looks up, then at the door, and then takes a few cautious steps out into the middle of the narrow road after looking both ways even though it’s a one-way street. He takes in the glory of Emmy’s and my home, eyes and mouth wide open.

  “This is where you live?” he asks with awe in his voice.

  “Yep,” I reply, popping the P.

  “Like… is it like in New York, where it’s offices or a storefront on bottom and then your place is a super tiny apartment above?” He tilts his head, his eyes on the second story.

  “Nope.” I pop the P again, pulling out my key and unlocking the front door.

  I turn to watch his head bob up and down as he counts, his eyes going from the left side of the building to the right. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. You have seven posts holding up your gallery. You must be loaded,” he jokes.

  I shake my head. “Nuh-uh. Corner lot, baby. We got thirteen of these bitches.” I grimace and cover my mouth. “Oops, I mean—”

  “Bitches is fine. We’re a cable network.” Curtis chuckles, jogging back up onto the sidewalk and coming to stand behind me in the doorway just as a van and two cars stop in front of the building.

  Martin rolls down the window of the van. “Where should we park?”

  “On that side of the street wherever you see open spots. Hope you’re good at parallel parking,” I answer, and he nods, giving a little salute before he pulls forward slowly to find somewhere to park.

  The last car stops next to us and the trunk pops open, showcasing all our paper bags. Following Curtis’s lead, I grab two bags as he grabs the last one and the cardboard box containing the Instant Pot before using his elbow to shut the trunk. The car then pulls forward to find parking as we head inside the front door.

  Curtis

  “This place is incredible,” I murmur, taking in the bottom floor of Erin’s home. The décor is a museum’s worth of architectural finds, pictures, and paintings, and I instantly recognize photos of Amelia Savageman’s parents.

  “Have you met them before?” Erin asks, obviously reading the recognition on my face.

  “Yes. Fascinating people. I met them when they came to watch Dean and their daughter accept a network award for their show. But the question is, why do you have all their stuff in your house?” I ask, taking in all the Egyptian artifacts around the foyer and living room, still holding the grocery bag and Instant Pot in my arms, because I haven’t made it to the kitchen yet. There’s just too much to take in.

  “Emmy and I are roommates. Well, sorta. We’ve lived together since we graduated high school. Her parents relocated to Egypt when she was little and she lived here with her grandma. And when she passed away, I promised I’d stay here so Emmy wouldn’t be alone. But when she met and married Dean and joined his show, she basically demanded me not to move out. So I guess I’m the groundskeeper of the manor,” she says the last bit with a put-on British accent, and I grin.

  “So ancient Egypt isn’t your décor of choice?” I ask, my eyes meeting hers.

  She scrunches her nose with a shake of her head. “Definitely not. Em gets irritated with me when I don’t remember half the shit she tells me about all this.” She gestures toward a photo of a statue that looks like a dog head on a human body. “If it were my house, it’d be Joanna’d the fu—reak out.” She side-eyes Carlos still standing in the foyer, his camera aimed at us.

  “Joanna’d?” I prompt.

  “Joanna Gaines? Fixer Upper? She’s like, my ultimate girl crush. Oh crap, wait. Different network. Sorry.” She shrugs.

  I wave my hand, dismissing her worry. “That’s like, farmhouse stuff, right? Shabby chic?”

  She nods. “Exactly. I love it. All whites and grays, black-and-white buffalo plaid, silver tin canisters, shiplap everythiiing,” she singsongs. “But, alas, this isn’t my house, so pyramids and hieroglyphics it is. At least down here. My room looks like Joanna herself decorated it. I’ve tagged her ass in like, fifty-eight thousand Instagram posts, but she’s never responded. By now she probably thinks I’m some creeper stalker and is ready to serve a restraining order if I show up in Waco, Texas. And I totally wouldn’t blame her. After all, I did start growing my hair out and parting it down the middle, so it’d be just like hers.” She puts her pointer finger up to her lips as if it’s a secret, winks up at me, and then spins on her heel, leaving me to follow after her while my brain is still stuck on the mention of her bedroom.

  We enter the open concept kitchen with a big island in the center that’s lined with barstools along one side. I set the bag and Instant Pot next to the two bags Erin brought in and vaguely notice as Carlos moves to the far corner of the room with his camera on his shoulder.

  “So, what now?” Erin asks, glancing between the grocery bags and me.

  “Normally, this is when most women would go into panic mode and go change their clothes and put on as much makeup as humanly possible while the crew gets everything set up for the kitchen scenes,” I tell her, and I watch as her nose scrunches adorably.

  “I always thought that looked funny while watching the show. One minute, they look like normal people who just went grocery shopping, and the next, it’s as if they’re cooking dinner dressed for a night out on the town,” she admits, and I chuckle.

  “Yeah, and that’s just what actually aired. We’ve had women come down dressed in straight-up ball gowns, because they thought they needed to put on the nicest thing they had in their closet. Luckily, we got them to change before we started shooting again.”

  She looks up at me with curiosity. “Do you think I should go change?” She brushes back a strand of her long hair that’s fallen over her shoulder in her ponytail.

  I immediately shake my head. “And miss replaying one of my favorite episodes of Schitt’s Creek in my head every time I look at your shirt for the remainder of the evening? I think not.”

  Her eyes light up as if I just told her she won a million dollars. “David Rose is my spirit animal,” she breathes.

  “I love David, but Moira’s accent and vocabulary give me life,” I confess with a grin.

  “Such an underrated show. Like, I wish everyone in the world watched it so they could experience how amazing it is, but at the same time, I kind of love that it’s just got a cult following. Like… it’s our dirty little secret.”

  She giggles, and it’s the sweetest sound I’ve ever heard. I can only imagine how great her full-on belly laugh would sound, laughing out loud while watching the riches-to-rags family figure out simple tasks like how to “fold in the cheese.”

  “I would have a field day shrinking them if they were real people. The way they grew as people from the first season to the last, oh my God. It was a beautiful thing. At first, you thought there was no hope for them. They were… spoiled and selfish human beings with absolutely no relationship between the parents and their two grown children. But then losing all their money and being forced to live in adjoining rooms in a rundown motel in a town Johnny bought David as a joke because of its name—Schitt’s Creek—it was such a pleasure to watch their fish-out-of-water story. Pure genius.”

  I’m nodding the entire time she’s speaking, watching the passionate expressions play across her beautiful face. And when she’s done speaking, I latch on to something she said. “You’d enjoy ‘shrinking’ them?”

  Her head bobs once. “I’m a psychologist. It’s kinda my thang.”

  My eyebrows shoot up in surprise.

  She smirks and props a hand on her hip. “What? Don’t I look like a highly respected doctor of the mind?” She gestures to her messy hair then her leggings.

  I almost swallow my tongue trying to reel in my shocked look. “No, no, no… it’s not tha—”

  “No, no, no, I don’t? Wow, Curtis. Way to make a gal want to go throw on one of the ball gowns she has just lying
around….”

  Before I realize what they’re doing, my hands are cradling her delicate jawline, tilting her head back so she looks up into my eyes as I bring our bodies almost as close as they were when she ran into me at the store. “I’m sorry. I made the poor, sexist, chauvinistic judgment that a woman as incredibly stunning as you wouldn’t choose a job as difficult and consuming as what I imagine a psychologist to be. I would think it’d take extremely hard work and dedication to become a highly respected doctor of the mind, as you so eloquently put it, which in my experience, women near your beauty tend to avoid or choose an easier route in life, like a profession that utilizes the way they look, not how great their minds are.”

  Her eyes dilated not even halfway through my little apology, and the weight of her head in my palms grew heavier as she melted against me. My lips twitch as she whispers, “I was just fucking with you,” but she doesn’t move away, seeming hypnotized. “And you’ve been in California too long if that’s what you believe beautiful women do.”

  I say only loud enough for her to hear, “If there wasn’t a Virgin Islander with a camera standing fifteen feet away who loves nothing more than to make gag reels and give me shit for things that happen while recording the show, I’d kiss you like you’ve never been kissed before.”

  Her throat moves near where my hands still cup her jaw as she swallows deeply, and my eyes watch her mouth as she speaks. “While that kiss sounds wonderfully tempting, it’s the mention of a gag that makes me want to meet you in the pantry for a round of Seven Minutes in Heaven.”

  My knees nearly buckle as my cock stands at full attention when I see her face morph instantly from its drooling hypnotized state to a wicked smirk as she finally takes a step back.

  Holy. Fuck.

  Is she still fucking with me?

  I can’t tell for the life of me if she’s playing some sort of game or if she really is a naughty minx who wants to meet me for a quickie.