Only You by K.T. Quinn

41

Molly

The Day I Made Soup

I wasn’t sure what to do without Donovan. It was like someone had reached inside my brain and turned a switch off. Was this how co-dependent girls felt without their boyfriends?

I walked on the treadmill for a few minutes, but I didn’t enjoy doing it alone. I only tolerated it because it was an excuse to watch Donovan jogging shirtless on the treadmill next to me.

I left the gym and walked the loop around my floor, just like I had done before Donovan and I had hooked up. But every time I walked by his door I began worrying about him all over again. I changed my route and walked down the stairs to the first floor, around the pool, up the elevator to the second floor, into the lounge, then back up the stairs to the third floor. That route kept me from having to pass his door.

But it didn’t stop me from thinking about him.

My news podcast was focused on the pandemic, because of course it was. I’d been listening to updates every day for the last three weeks, but now it was no longer an abstract idea. The descriptions of helpless patients hooked up to ventilators now carried a grim reality.

I turned off the podcast and listened to music instead. That worked for ten minutes before my mind drifted back to what Donovan had told me. He didn’t have a dry cough or a high fever. His only real symptom was that he was tired.

“He’s going to be fine,” I said out loud, just to hear someone’s voice. “He has to be fine.”

After spending the last three weeks together, being without him was excruciating. It was a taste of what things would have been like if I had been stuck in the hotel alone. It made me realize how lucky I was to have found him.

Mom would have called it fate, if she were still here.

At exactly noon, I knocked on the dividing door. “Rise and shine. What do you want for lunch? And don’t you dare tell me you’re not hungry.”

“Soup is fine,” came the muffled reply. He sounded even more tired than before.

“Do they have, like, cans of Campbell’s downstairs?” I asked. “The kind you dump in a bowl and microwave?”

He laughed weakly and said, “I’ll text you directions. I promise it will be easy.”

I went downstairs and followed his instructions. I diced up a carrot with one of the kitchen knives. Donovan had a fancy way of chopping veggies, but my way was slow and clumsy. Then I boiled dry spaghetti in a pot of chicken stock. I chopped up some of the leftover chicken Donovan had cooked for dinner last night and dumped it in the pot with the carrots.

“How much of these spices do I add?” I asked him on the phone.

“A pinch or two of each.”

I stared at a ring of measuring spoons. “What’s a pinch?”

“How much you can grab between two fingers. You know. A pinch.”

“But the thyme is fresh,” I replied. “It’s not like pinching a bunch of salt.”

I heard him laugh on the other line. “Maybe I should come down and finish it…”

“No!” I insisted. “I can do it for you. I’ll figure it out.”

I hung up and added a little bit of ground pepper, oregano, thyme, and basil. I stirred it together then tasted it on the spoon. I winced—I had used too much of something, but I wasn’t sure of what.

I tinkered with the soup for ten minutes, adding more broth and salt, before deciding it was as good as it was going to get. I filled a bowl with the steaming soup, placed it on a plate, and carried it upstairs.

I knocked on the partition door between our rooms and said, “It’s not as good as what you make, but it will have to do. I added some crackers. These aren’t your normal saltines. These are fancy Italian crackers I found in the pantry. I went the extra mile.”

“Put it in the partition,” he replied.

“I’m wearing a mask. I can bring it in to you.”

“Molly,” he said, “this is how it has to be. If you want me to eat…”

“Fine,” I grumbled. I opened the door, placed the plate and bowl inside, then closed it.

“You aren’t going to wait until I open my door,” he said slowly, “and then try to jump through, are you?”

“No…”

“I don’t believe you.”

I went over to the bed and sat down. “Hear those springs? Squeak squeak squeak?”

“Do they squeak that much when we’re having sex?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I’m usually distracted.”

I heard the dividing door open, then close a second later. I got off the bed and sat next to the door.

“How are you feeling?”

I heard a slurp of soup. “I’m still really tired. My nose is congested.”

“That’s good! Maybe it’s just a cold or something.”

“Wow, these crackers are fancy.”

“Only the best for my quarantine boyfriend,” I replied.

“Quarantine boyfriend. I like that.”

I listened to him eat for awhile.

“When was the last time you took your temperature?”

“Before you got back.” Another slurp. “Thirty-seven Celsius. Totally normal.”

“And still no dry cough?”

“Nope.”

I nodded to myself. “See? This is just a cold, nothing to worry about.”

“You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself, not me.”

“Maybe I am.” I rested my head against the partition door. “We’ll laugh about this when it’s all over. How you got a cold during the pandemic and we panicked over nothing.”

“You’re bored without me, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Oh my God, so bored. I was tempted to take another inventory of all the food in the kitchen.”

“Wow, you’ve got it bad. You don’t have any work you can do for your store? Accounting or something?”

“The store has been closed because of the lockdown,” I said. “There’s nothing for me to do but accounting work, and I do not want to look at the sales numbers.”

“Better than my situation. I don’t have a job to go home to.”

“Hey, that’s a good idea.” I pulled out my phone. “I can help you look for a job. I still have the jobs app on my phone from when Andrea and I hired a new restocking girl. Let’s see. Boston and the surrounding area, twenty-mile radius because I don’t want you to have to commute very far, restaurant services…”

I trailed off when I saw the results on the screen.

“There’s nothing out there, right?” Another slurp of soup. “Nobody’s hiring. Every restaurant is running on reduced staff. It’s kind of a good thing I’m stuck in Rome, because if I was back in Boston I wouldn’t have a job. At least here, the room and food are free.”

The hot soup must have been invigorating him, because he sounded a little more energetic now. That made me smile.

“Things will open up eventually,” I said. “I have a friend back home named Sara.”

“The one whose number you were going to give me?”

“You’re lucky I can’t smack you right now. As I was saying, Sara knows everyone in town. She can definitely help you find a job when we get back.”

Donovan’s spoon clinked on the side of the bowl. “Molly? Are you asking me to go back to Elkhart with you?”

I cringed. I had been speaking in a rush because I was worried, babbling on since talking was literally the only thing I could do with Donovan. I hadn’t realized what I suggested.

What do I do? Take it back? Make a joke about Sara?

“I was just babbling,” I said with a nervous laugh. “I wasn’t trying to… That is to say, I wasn’t necessarily… You know what I mean.”

A long silence stretched.

“How’s the soup?” I asked.

“It’s… fine.”

“Ouch,” I said with a chuckle. “I know I’m not a very good cook. Tell me what I should have done differently.”

“I don’t really know,” he replied in a strange tone.

“Come on. You know that the best way to improve is to get constructive feedback. I’m sure they gave you plenty of criticism at your cooking school. Does the soup need more salt? Is the broth too thin?”

“No, Molly, that’s what I’m trying to tell you,” he insisted. “I can’t taste the soup at all. I just realized I can’t taste anything.”