Page 5 of Epidermis

Anything was better than sitting at a candlelit table, dressed like a street urchin. Jasper’s cardigan was fraying at the edges from years of wear, and his boots were scuffed to hell and back. Konrad, on the other hand, wore a crisp navy suit with such a subtle plaid pattern that Jasper could only see it when the dark lines caught the light. He followed Konrad back to the kitchen and shouldn’t have been surprised that it was just as grand as the restaurant itself. Fresh herbs hung above a massive prep table, bundles of thyme and basil and such, presumably taken from the massive herb garden that Jasper had seen on the back wall of the restaurant.

Konrad shrugged out of his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He was talking as he walked over to the sink to wash his hands up to the elbows, but Jasper wasn’t hearing the words. He was hearing the accent. It had the same rounded vowels as a British accent, but the words came to soft stops, like each word was being placed down with care rather than thrown out carelessly.

“Where are you from?” Jasper asked.

He’d interrupted Konrad in the middle of a sentence, but Konrad didn’t seem to mind, which was unusual. Jasper tended to latch onto things that weren’t relevant at all to what someone was saying and totally derail a conversation, solely to sate his curiosity. It was rude.

But Konrad answered easily as he dried his hands. “Denmark. Though I spent much of my boyhood being schooled in France, and attended culinary school in Rome, and learned the languages while I was there.”

“Of course you’re a polyglot.”

“Why ‘of course?’” Konrad asked, taking a glass pan from one of the ovens with a folded towel.

“Because you’re fancy.”

Konrad laughed as he set the pan down. “I will take that as a compliment. You seem like a rather learned man yourself.”

Jasper found a spot on the wall to stare at, his jaw clenching while he picked at a loose string inside his pocket. He couldn’t tell if Konrad was patronizing him. Jasper was knowledgeable about a few things. While most of that came from a natural curiosity and obsessively consuming information about something if he’d taken an interest in it, some came from overcompensation. Trying not to be the dumb Southern boy people categorized him as the moment he opened his mouth.

“Your glasses suit you,” Konrad noted.

The observation only threw Jasper further off balance than he already was. He took compliments as gracefully as one would take a brick to the face. “They’re just reading glasses.” Not that Konrad had asked for further details, but Jasper would rather pretend he did than acknowledge the compliment.

Konrad seemed to sense his growing discomfort and backed off. He allowed them a reprieve of silence as he chopped rosemary and swept it to the side with a broad swipe of the knife. Jasper simply watched. He surprised himself by being the one to break the silence, but once Konrad wiped stray pieces of rosemary from the blade onto the cutting board, and spun the knife one-handed to repeat the action on the other side, Jasper couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

“You said my hands are steadier than yours,” Jasper said dryly.

“Perhaps they are.”

Jasper’s mouth twitched. “Yours are certainly steady enough to put in an earring.”

“I suppose we’ll never know.”

Jasper regretted broaching the subject. Now there was an awareness between them, that Konrad had returned to the shop unnecessarily, and that begged the question of why. Which Jasper didn’t intend to ask. He also didn’t want Konrad to get any ideas about volunteering that information, so he changed the subject. “What brought you to Maryland?”

“I’ve been in the States for some time. I lived with my sister.” Konrad’s eyes grew distant as he sprinkled the rosemary over a pan of… something. Jasper’s culinary knowledge mostly began and ended with whatever he could get delivered. “When I decided to open a restaurant, I chose Annapolis for this very building. She and I got a house together just outside the city.”

Jasper couldn’t blame him there. It was a beautiful place, and prohibitively expensive to lease, hence why so many businesses had come and gone. “Is that her earring?”

Konrad straightened from putting dinner in the oven with a look of unguarded surprise. It was only for a moment, but it made Jasper wave a hand to dismiss his own question. “Sorry, that’s none of my business. I just—the uh, the way you mentioned her, it was the same way you looked when I put your earring in.”

“Yes. It belonged to her.”

Past tense. Jasper nodded, glad that Konrad didn’t seem upset by the subject, at least. “It’s nice.”

They returned to the candlelit table once Konrad set a timer and washed his hands again, and Jasper awkwardly slid into the curved booth, unsure how to pass the time until dinner was ready. He wasn’t a great conversationalist. Things just… tumbled out of his mouth. He was passable when he was working, but that was a very specific mask that he hadn’t equipped today.

Konrad sat next to him—and a respectable distance away, thankfully—and half turned toward him, giving Jasper his full, dreaded attention. “May I see your tattoos?”

Jasper didn’t want to be the subject of conversation, but at least it saved him from figuring out what to talk about. He swallowed and slid one arm out of his cardigan, the one covered in ink. “It’s a lot of black, I know,” he said, heading off the comment that so many people liked to make.

“Exactly the right amount, I would say.” Konrad studied each and every one, his fingers occasionally hovering over the one he was looking at, but never touching. “This is your own work?”

“Yeah. Hiyori, the owner of the shop, did the actual tattooing. Since this is my dominant side. But I drew them.”

“Exquisite.”

Jasper’s stomach twisted. Praise landed on him like a thorny vine, snagging and tearing the more he tried to escape it. “Do you have any tattoos?” he asked, subtly sliding his arm back into his cardigan.