”Why doesn't that surprise me?” Lee asked with a teasing smile. Was she being pessimistic about dinner? Yes, but it would be fun still.

Right?

Since they hadn’t in reality bought a whole lot, it really didn’t take long before they were back out on the street and making their way home. And as they walked, Tarin started giving a talk about being positive.

”Well, I’m positive that we’re going to have a good night,” Lee said, smiling up at Tarin. ”How’s that?”

Lee didn’t have much to say in response to Tarin’s pep talk, just that she was positive that they were going to have a great night.

Well that was a given.

Still. The rest of the walk didn’t take very long and they were walking into the lobby. If they were being positive…

”Let’s do the elevator.” he said, making his way towards the obnoxious thing and pushing the button.

If he was ever going to get used to this, he needed to keep trying. As they’d discussed the only thing that made the elevator different from anywhere else was that Tarin didn’t control when the doors opened.

Only, he kind of did.

The doors opened and in they went. Tarin pushed the button and the doors slowly slid shut.

This had been a risk, and the familiar creeping sense of panic started to creep into his chest. Tarin took a deep breath though and reminded himself that he had chosen to enter the elevator and push the button and that he knew about how like it would take to get to their floor.

The slight panic was still there, he was still antsy and uncomfortable, but somehow it was a little bit better, more manageable, less of an entity all its own.

And just like that, the elevator dinged, the doors opened, and as he quickly stepped out Tarin smiled down at Lee.

”It is going to be a great night.”

They got home and Lee was starting to head toward the stairwell as had become habit when she was with Tarin.

Except that Tarin suggested taking the elevator.

Lee stopped and looked at Tarin in surprise, smiling a moment later. ”Sure, we can take the elevator tonight,” she replied, going to stand in front of the doors beside him.

It didn’t take long for the doors to open, the building wasn’t that large, and inside the two of them stepped. Tarin might have even done it without hesitating.

Lee watched Tarin press the button for their floor, and while Tarin was staring at the now closed doors, Lee was watching him. He was definitely still looking anxious and tense. But as the elevator climbed, Lee didn’t see the panic that had been clearly evident the last…Lee wasn’t even sure how many times she’d seen that panic on Tarin’s face, in his eyes in the elevator.

Then the elevator doors opened, and Lee was already smiling as Tarin was quickly stepping out into the hallway. ”It sure is,” Lee said, her smiling widening. Then she stretched up to give him a kiss before turning to head to their apartment.

And just like that they were at the apartment and Tarin was opening the door.

It was a short matter of time to get inside and take everything to the kitchen. Nothing needed to be put away though because they were going to be cooking with it all.

So. The bags went on to the counter and Tarin started pulling out the items and arranging them so that they could figure out the next steps.

First things first. If they were going to cook, they needed to be sanitary about the whole thing so Tarin set about washing his hands.

”We should probably get water boiling first because the pasta takes a while to cook.” he knew that much from making spaghetti with canned sauce at the shop.

The recipe he had found was on his phone and Tarin took a minute to get it pulled up before he stood, staring at the ingredients like they were going to cook themselves.

”That’s the best place to start, right? Or do we cook the chicken first?” he said, then looked at the recipe on the phone, ”It doesn’t say, but it’s got to be one of those things.”

They were home. They were in their apartment. The ingredients that had been on the list were out of the bags and on the counter.

And somehow they were supposed to use the stove to turn this into an actual meal for them to eat.

Lee just continued to stand there staring at the ingredients while Tarin washed his hands. Then her eyes shot to him when he said the recipe didn’t say what to start first.

”What do you mean it doesn’t say whether to boil the water or cook the chicken first?” Lee asked, reaching her hand out for the phone.

”I know chicken nuggets take forever to cook for how small they are, but water can also take forever to boil. Maybe we’re supposed to start with doing both of them?”

A moment later, Lee realized what she had said and her eyes widened slightly. Do two things at once while cooking? When she highly doubted that she could make something edible while doing a single thing at a time. ”I’m trying to be positive, but this is making it harder, Tarin.”

Lee reached for the phone and Tarin handed it over, maybe he’d skipped over something nine or ten times when he’d read the thing.

Regardless they needed pans and pots and things, so he set about getting those out while Lee tried to sort out the order of events.

Lee was talking about chicken nuggets and Tarin shook his head, ”That’s in the oven though. It’s faster on the stove.”

Sure it was.

But they had a pot now and some pans. Lee’s confidence was waning, but a plan was developing in Tarin’s head. They could totally do this.

”Okay. I think if we start the water boiling then we can cook the chicken while it boils. You fill the pot and we will get it going.”

That said, Tarin put the pan on the stovetop and turned it on high. Chicken needed to be cooked all the way through, so that made sense. Now they just had to decide which chicken to use. The precut one seemed the easiest, so Tarin grabbed it and opened it.

Tarin handed his phone with the recipe over and after taking a breath, Lee read it over. Then read it again, frowning. What kind of recipe was this?

”It doesn’t say when we’re supposed to cook the pasta,” Lee told Tarin as she set the phone on the counter and washed her hands. ”But in step 5, it says to save some of the pasta water. Do you think that means it should be cooked by then?”

Lee thought that made sense. They would just call it ‘water’ and not ‘pasta water’ if the pasta wasn’t cooked by that point, right? But if that was the case, why didn’t the recipe just say when to cook the pasta? And for how long?

But Tarin seemed to agree that at least starting the water to boil was a good idea, she could always read through the recipe again while that was happening. So Lee filled the pot Tarin had pulled out with water.

As Tarin moved away from the stove to get the chicken, Lee carried her pot of water over and set it on top, turning it up to high as well.

”I don’t think the recipe says how long the pasta is supposed to cook, either,” Lee said as she watched Tarin dump the pre-sliced chicken into the pan he had put on the stove. Then she made her way back over to his phone to read through the recipe again. ”Do you have any idea how long the pasta needs to cook for?”

The recipe didn’t explicitly say when they were supposed to cook the pasta, but Lee’s deductive reasoning skills were better than Tarin’s and the fact that she noticed they needed water from the pasta in step five meant that they needed to cook the pasta.

The recipe also didn’t say how long to cook the pasta, but Tarin knew the answer to that one as he dumped the chicken into the pan. It all kind of sat there in a clump in the pan. Maybe it would come apart as it cooked. It was sizzling in there, that was a good thing.

Turning from the stove, Tarin moved back to the pasta he’d set on the counter, ”I know this one.” he said, picking up the package and looking at it for a few moments before finding what he was looking for and showing it to Lee. ”Nine to eleven minutes.” he said, After the water boils. I learned that one the hard way once.”

The distinct smell of something burning hit Tarin then and he turned, wondering if Lee had made
good on her promise that she could burn water, only to see smoke rising from the pan he had been responsible for. ”Dammit!” he exclaimed.

Dropping the pasta and quickly moving back to the stove Tarin pushed the pan off the hot burner. The chicken was still in a clump and it was definitely still raw.

Digging in the drawers until he found a spatula, Tarin tentatively tried to turn the chicken over, but finding it stuck to the pan. That didn’t bode well.

Applying a bit more pressure to kind of scrape the meat off the bottom of the pan, Tarin managed to get it to flip, leaving the whole top layer behind and it was definitely burnt.

”Okay, so maybe high was a little too high…” he said.

Tarin knew how long the pasta cooked. That was good, and Lee looked at him expectantly, waiting for the answer. But all he did was pick up the package of pasta.

But then Tarin showed her…And yeah, that made a lot of sense now that Lee thought about it. There had been a lot of different pastas in the store, and the recipe didn’t actually specify what kind of pasta.

Still, couldn’t all of the directions be in one place?

Lee was still mentally complaining to herself about that when she heard Tarin again. And a second later she smelled the burning.

It wasn’t the pot she’d just put on, there wasn’t even the beginnings of bubbles for it to start boiling yet. Then Lee saw Tarin working at the chicken, and when he managed to flip it, the meat was very clearly burned on the one side, while being completely raw still.

”Um…” Lee said as she looked back down at the phone and the recipe. ”I think so. This says ‘medium-high.”

Leaning over to look in the pan, Lee then looked up at Tarin. ”Think we can just…get rid of the burnt pieces and salvage the rest of that?”

”Medium-high…” Tarin echoed as Lee pointed out a very important detail of the instructions that Tarin had missed.

Lee looked up at him and asked if they could just scrape the burned pieces off and as he looked back down at her Tarin had to laugh.

”I think most of it stayed stuck to the pan.” he said, scraping at the black pieces of charred meat stuck to the pan. They did come off and the rest of the chicken looked pretty okay so once the burned stuff was discarded, Tarin turned the burner down to medium.

Poking at the chicken pieces, they came apart from the rather large mass they were initially concentrated in. ”Does it say anything about seasoning or how to make it not stick? I feel like there was something about oil that I forgot about…do we have oil?” They definitely hadn’t bought it.

Regardless, the chicken was cooking again, just not as intensely as before. ”See, live and learn...no harm no foul, if at first you don’t succeed…” he said, grinning down at Lee again.

Tarin had missed the part where it said to cook the chicken at medium-high heat. That was obviously a very important detail with hwo quickly the chicken had burned.

So Lee read the recipe again more thoroughly as Tarin was scraping the burnt chicken off of the pan. And just as Tarin was asking if the recipe had said anything about oil, Lee was looking up at the cabinets after having just read that, trying to think if there was any.

”Um…Yeah, it does say to add oil,” Lee said, still staring at the closed cabinets. ”It’s possible we have some. If Rachel left some here when she moved out. I know she didn’t take a lot of kitchen stuff when she moved in with Matt.”

That said, Lee stepped forward and started opening cabinets, peering inside to see if she could find any kind of oil. Or anything. ”Do you think that butter would work if we don’t have oil?” Lee asked, glancing at Tarin before turning back to searching the cabinets.

Tarin started spitting out optimistic cliches at that point and Lee looked at him again, an eyebrow raised this time. ”What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger?” She asked. ”Because that’s not true.”

Ugh. They hadn’t gotten oil. Why hadn’t it been on the ingredient list? Lee thought that they might have some though and was studiously looking through the cabinets to see what she could find.

Would butter work? Tarin had absolutely no idea. ”It’s probably better than nothing….” he said. They were supposed to use butter in the sauce too, so it would probably be fine.

”Let’s try it…” Tarin said, retrieving one of the sticks of butter from the counter, cutting some off, and dropping it into the pan. It sizzled happily and Tarin kind of poked at the chicken, moving it around. At least it wasn’t burning this time…

The water was also starting to get bubbly too.

Lee responded to his positive clichès with something far too serious for the night they were trying to have. Tarin gave her a bit of a look, ”I didn’t say that one because it’s dumb.” he said.

”I think the water is ready for the pasta.” he said, pushing the chicken around some more.

Tarin agreed that butter was probably better than nothing. But still, Lee was searching through the cabinets for some oil. Rachel had done some cooking over the 5 years she lived in the apartment. If cooking was such a common thing that the recipe hadn’t even put it on the ingredient list, there had to be some here, right?

Lee was just pulling a bottle out of the cupboard to turn around so she could read the label as Tarin was dropping a chunk of butter into the pan. ”Extra virgin olive oil,” Lee said now that she could read the label. ”I guess we did have some.”

But apparently, her cliche was ‘dumb’, and Lee just rolled her eyes at Tarin as she put the bottle on the counter. Though, that cliche was dumb because it very simply wasn’t true.

She was up again, now. Tarin said he thought the water was ready, so Lee grabbed the package of pasta and opened it up as she made her way to the pot. ”How much of this, do you think?” Lee asked, because again, the recipe hadn’t said how much pasta to cook. It simply said to use the cooked pasta.

Eying the long pieces of pasta, Lee glanced up at Tarin. ”Half the package?” Looking at the pasta again, Lee mentally split it into quarters. That seemed like it was a good amount to be swirled around into a bowl.

Oh, they did have oil. Good to remember for next time, Tarin supposed. As of right now, the butter seemed to be doing just fine with the chicken. It seemed right to keep stirring it around in the pan so he did that and was pleased to see that the little strips appeared to be getting done on all the sides.

Lee rolled her eyes at him and Tarin frowned a bit, he hadn’t meant to upset her with the comment. He’d thought she was saying that one was dumb too.

Lee had the pasta now though and was trying to decide how much to cook. Half?

”Half definitely sounds right.” Tarin said with a shrug, ”Make sure to set a timer. I think this is starting to look right though.” he added, nodding to the chicken in the pan.

It had been a rough start, and things still had plenty of time to go south, but it did seem like they’d sorted a few things out. If all else failed, they’d learned a little bit.

”Is it time to start reading about the sauce?”

Tarin agreed that half of the pasta sounded right so Lee pulled as close to half of the pasta out of the package as she could. And some extra pieces came out with it, but it all went into the pot.

Set a timer? Yes, very good, except that since she didn't cook, she didn't have an oven timer like she'd seen Adele use on every visit she'd taken to Texas.

And her phone was still in her purse, in the entryway. So Lee grabbed Tarin's phone as she looked at the pasta package. 9-11 minutes? Which was it? How was she supposed to know if it should be cooked for 9 minutes, 11 minutes, or somewhere in between?

Deciding to split the difference, Lee split the difference and set the timer for 10 minutes. Hopefully that would be good.

That finished, Lee set both the phone and extra pasta back on the counter. And it's a good thing that she did because otherwise she may have dropped them.

Lee took a deep breath and shook her head when she heard Tarin speak again. ”Tarin. I love you. But if I had known you hadn't even read the recipe, I never would have agreed to this,” Lee told him, though there was a hint of a laugh in her voice by the time she finished speaking.