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Nick’s working on the playbook when he hears it: Manny’s sigh.
After a couple thousand years, Nick’s got an exhaustive mental catalogue of every single one of Manny’s sighs, and what each of them means: annoyed sighs, sexy sighs, sad sighs, content sighs, longing sighs, frustrated sighs, tired sighs…Nick knows them all. This one is a longing sigh: wistful, judging by how long it is, and with that tiny huff at the end that means it’s a little self-consciously petulant too, like Manny knows he’s being dumb, but he still wants whatever he wants.
And like, there are a lot of things both of them could want that are currently out of reach: literally any football, for example, because as far as they can tell, there’s no ball in play anywhere near them right now. Or going for a drive: can’t do that, on account of the rules against traveling by vehicle. And there are any number of things that are literally out of reach, given that they’re not on the Georgia State field, or on any other nearby field that intersects it.
So maybe Manny wants something that’s currently impossible thanks to the game. Or maybe he wants something that’s legit impossible and dumb besides, like actual living teddy bears, because Nick, how have humans not figured out how to like, genetically engineer actual cute little teddy bears! They’d be like puppies, only teddy bears! It would be goddamn adorable!
Or maybe Manny wants something that’s entirely possible, just really ill-advised. Like maybe Manny wants an enormous ice cream sundae that will give him dairy-regrets shits for the rest of the day and well into tomorrow. If that’s the case, Nick’s vetoing it. There’s only one bathroom in this condo, okay, and Nick has to use that bathroom too.
If it’s something only mostly impossible though, well…maybe Nick can make it happen. The thought gets his heart pumping just a little faster.
Manny sighs again, fidgeting as he ostensibly keeps an eye on the field outside the window.
“Babe, what is it?” Nick asks.
“Oh, nothing.”
“You just sighed twice in a row, it’s not nothing.”
“I mean, it’s not a big deal or anything.”
“So? What is it?”
“Just—I’ve got a craving,” admits Manny.
“Yeah? What for?”
Maybe Manny wants tacos or something. Really good tacos aren’t exactly easy to come by on their stretch of the Georgia State field, and delivery tacos are pretty disappointing, but Nick could probably work something out…
“So, like, way back in like 2000-something, before people stopped dying, I had this fucking amazing dinner at this fancy restaurant up in NorCal.”
“And almost 18,000 years later you’re still thinking about it?”
“I mean, I just kinda remembered it now. Pretty sure I’ve had better food since, but like, this was the first really nice, expensive meal I ever had, y’know? And it was, like, life-changing good.”
“What was the occasion?” asks Nick, because their old lives from before don’t come up that much, and he’s kind of curious.
“You know, I don’t even remember. Is that weird?”
“It’s been 18,000 years, so no, not really. Honestly kind of more weird that you specifically remember the food.”
“Yeah, probably,” allows Manny. “It’s like that thing with the cookies.”
“What thing with the cookies?”
“The French thing with the cookies, you know.”
“I really don’t,” says Nick, baffled.
“It’s—ugh, the guy, in the book, he eats the cookie, and like, his entire life flashes in front of his eyes or whatever—oh my god, don’t look at me like I’m crazy, this is a thing, this is totally a thing!”
They spend five minutes googling things like “french cookie guy” and “book french cookie” and “book memory french cookie guy” before they figure out Manny’s talking about goddamn Marcel Proust and the madeleines, which kicks off a whole other slightly heated discussion about whether madeleines are cookies or little cakes. Anyway, it takes a while before they return to the subject of Manny’s literally ancient craving.
“So what was this amazing meal you had and why is it making you sound all sad and wistful now?”
“It was the most tender, amazing steak—“
“That’s kinda boring,” interrupts Nick, frowning, because if Manny was going to go into raptures over a meal he had millennia ago, you’d think it would be a little more interesting than steak.
“Shut up, it wasn’t boring, it was classic. You know I’m no food snob, but this was the kinda shit that makes people into food snobs. Classic, but like, elevated, you know? Every part of the meal was just perfect. There was the steak, right, but there was fresh bread too, and the best roast potatoes I’d ever had, and you know I’m not a salad guy, but this salad….” Manny sighs again. “And don’t even get me started on the dessert. It was this tiny slice of chocolate cake, only not cake, they had a fancier name for it, and at first I was kinda pissed because what the hell? Why’s this dessert so damn small?”
Manny shakes his head, then he sighs, again, downright starry-eyed now.
“Nick, the cake—god, it was so rich and so chocolatey, I swear, I had to spend like a full minute really savoring each and every single bite.”
Okay, Nick’s not sure whether he should be offended or flattered by the fact that the expression on Manny’s face right about now is downright orgasmic. Like, was this fancy, classic meal that good, or is their sex life just on par with a gourmet meal?
“Wow, that good, huh?” says Nick, the first glimmers of a plan already forming in his mind. “You remember the name of the restaurant?”
“Nah, just that it was fancy and expensive. It was somewhere in the Bay Area, I think? Fancy, but not, like, reservations years in advance fancy. I just got a sudden craving, remembering it. Fuck, it was a good meal.” Manny’s face is still soft with the memory, like he’s got all kinds of tender feelings about tender steak, and then the softness turns wry. “Maybe that Proust guy is right. I can’t remember shit about why I was eating that meal, or where it was, just how damn good it tasted, but if I tasted it again, maybe it would all come back.”
Maybe Manny and Proust are onto something, yeah. Nick’s not sure though. Memory and eternity don’t always go hand in hand. People don’t die anymore, but memories do. Not with violence, or pain; they just fade. A lot of people are okay with that—no one really needs to carry the weight of millennia worth of memories, so they let them go, shedding the weight as the years tick onward. Others hold on, hoarding as many memories as they can: their own, the land’s, the world’s. That seems like a fool’s errand to Nick. He figures enough people remember enough things that the important stuff is covered, and what people can’t remember on their own, their patient and resilient machines and computers will. The Commish sure seems to have an exhaustive knowledge of all things football, that’s for sure. So Nick doesn’t sweat it too much; he thinks he hangs on to the most important memories, the ones that matter.
But you can never be sure, can you? He sees that uncertainty now, in the way Manny’s fingers drum rapidly against his thigh. Was the taste of that meal the important memory, or the occasion for it? Not knowing is gonna bug Manny. And if it bugs Manny, it bugs Nick.
“There’s probably a steakhouse that’ll deliver to us, if you want,“ suggests Nick, though he already knows that’s not what Manny really needs.
“No, no, we’ve got the leftover chili from last night, it’s fine. Besides, the steak would probably be all gross and cold by the time it got here. Hey, need any help with the playbook?”
Nick accepts the change of subject. “Sure. Here, come take a look at this map—“
A couple days later, the idea comes to Nick when he’s running on the treadmill and idly channel surfing.
He likes to watch something while he runs, because no matter how many times he’s tried, he still can’t read and run at the same time. You’d think sheer practice would stop him getting motion sick, but no: thousands of years, and still, Nick cannot goddamn read while he’s moving. He just gets all dizzy and nauseous. He’s bitched about it to Manny probably at least a hundred times by now. It shouldn’t even come up so often—they can’t use any vehicles after all, on account of how they’d get DQ’d from the game—but every few months or so, Nick’s on the treadmill again, wishing he could read while running.
I cannot goddamn believe I still get motion sick. Like, I’m immortal! I’m unkillable! But motion sickness is still a thing? What the fuck!
Yeah, no, definitely, this immortality shit is absolutely defective.
I feel like you’re making fun of me.
I’m definitely making fun of you. Take a bio class, babe, or physics, or whatever: it’s a thing, it’s a limitation of, like, the way our eyes work—
Okay, so which is it, biology or physics—
I don’t know! I just know it’s science, okay, like, chickens.
What? Chickens are science?
No, I mean the way chickens’ heads bob, you know? You can move their bodies all around, but their heads, their eyes, they stay steady. Humans can’t do that.
So you’re saying that if I was a chicken, I could read while running without getting motion sick—
Anyway, usually Manny ends up reading to him, so that ends up working out alright.
But Manny’s out scouting right now—nothing urgent, they just like to make sure they’ve got the current lay of the land down—so Nick’s got nothing to distract him but the radio or the TV, and today, he’s chosen the TV.
He skips past the twelve live LARP channels, spends a few minutes admiring Argentina’s soccer team—currently playing in the Atacama though fuck if Nick knows where the match’s current goalposts are—and then he actually watches the end of an episode of Law & Order: Special Ennui Unit, because it’s one of his favorites: the one where the detectives set up an elaborate obstacle course for this lady who got real bored after she read all the books in her house.
By then, it’s time for his cool down, and he settles on the Food Network, which is playing an episode of Chopped. It’s not too far into the challenge, since the contestants’ 6’ by 6’ plots of land are only just starting to turn green, their crops poking little shoots and tendrils of verdant growth out of the tilled soil, and like, Nick’s no farmer, but one of the contestants has chosen to fill their entire plot with potatoes, which is real yikes. It’s a safe bet, sure, both because potatoes are pretty hardy and because they’re delicious basically no matter how you cook them, but like, where’s the vision? Where’s the excitement? This is why Nick likes Chopped: Hunter-Gatherer Mode best. Now that’s a real challenge, having to strike out into the wilderness to hunt your own meat and gather your own ingredients.
One of the contestants on screen wipes her forehead as she crouches over her plot of crops. “If my spinach comes in strong, then I’ll be able to—“
Inspiration strikes, a lot like that one time Nick got struck by lightning out in the desert and the nanos had only taken some of the blow. He slams the stop button on the treadmill.
Manny wants a fancy steak dinner. Nick can make him a fancy steak dinner.
But not by putting in a grocery order online, or calling in an order from whatever fancy, over-hyped restaurant will deliver to them. No, Nick can do better than that: Nick can cook it himself, with only the ingredients he can get on the field. Now, obviously he can’t go full hunter-gatherer—finding a cow to butcher would be problematic if not impossible, and also, Nick does not know how to butcher a cow—but he can still do this the old-fashioned way. He remembers, vaguely, old episodes of Chopped or Top Chef where the chefs got to buy their own ingredients from the grocery store for the competition.
Honestly, that seems like playing on easy mode to Nick: like, where’s the challenge if they can just get the ingredients for exactly what they want to cook? Then it’s just a normal-ass grocery run. Weak. Nick supposes the contestants could’ve had a budget, that could’ve introduced some difficulty, and if there was a time limit too, that could add some challenge. It still seems way easier than Nick and Manny’s average grocery run though. They don’t bother with setting themselves a time limit, but they do stick to a budget a lot of the time, just to keep things fresh and interesting, almost like a way to keep score. Plus, the whole grocery store isn’t on the Georgia Tech field, so it’s always a bit of an adventure, trying to work around those limitations, and that’s to say nothing of getting there and back in the first place without a car or anything.
And not only will Nick have to acquire all the ingredients and cook this fancy, life-changing meal himself, he also has to figure out what the meal even was. Now that’s gonna be the real challenge, thinks Nick with satisfaction. Hell, it might even be impossible. But Nick’s playing college football for SDSU: impossibility is the entire purpose of playing college football, let alone winning it. If Nick can give Manny this small, only kind of impossible thing, this old and incomplete memory revived to culinary reality, then maybe they can hope for a bigger, even more impossible thing too.
Nick and Manny’s playbook is 30,000 pages long and counting, so Nick’s no stranger to exhaustive, detailed planning and research, and he wouldn’t be a football player if he didn’t love that kinda shit. But finding one specific restaurant in the Bay Area, from 18,000 years ago,, with only the hint that it was “fancy” and that its menu had included steak, roast potatoes, and salad? That’s less research and more like finding a needle in hundreds, if not thousands, of haystacks. Still, Nick tries, because he can’t not try, and after a week of diving real deep into the most ancient nooks and crannies of Google, he figures that assembling a kind of best guess, averaged-out meal out of the fancy steak dinners of every early 21st century ritzy Bay Area restaurant is gonna have to be good enough for his purposes.
At least, that’s what Nick thinks before he remembers: Facebook.
Depending on just when Manny had this amazing meal, it may well have been immortalized on one social media site or another. Facebook is only accessible in the digital graveyard now, behind a bunch of access-restricted digital barriers with grim messages like THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR and NOTHING VALUED IS HERE.
While it’s not usable anymore, and huge swathes of it are gone entirely (lost to data decay and deliberate destruction), it is still accessible, a little time capsule of life from when life was finite. There are other social media websites that have been preserved for their historical value—Twitter and Instagram and Reddit, Google Life, Amazon Prime Citizen—and some people even still use them, out of nostalgia or maybe irony, Nick can’t tell. Facebook is off-limits though. Once so many of the satellites and AIs started developing sentience, no one wanted to risk Facebook doing the same. The Commish is great, Hubble’s chill, and all the other probes out hurtling through space are amazing—Pioneer 10 is teaching college classes! everyone’s so damn proud—and how could they not be, when they’d been given loving, big-dreams names and sent out with all of humanity’s love and hope? But Facebook? No one had ever loved Facebook. Those algorithms can’t be anything but vile, and no one had wanted to see what abomination could’ve sprung forth from that.
So it’s preserved like the last sample of some terrible virus: still available to study for educational purposes, or to access any of your own data on, but no one wants to risk letting that shit loose to wreak havoc again. Not many people are eager to revisit their 21st century selves anyway, those fearful, stressed people who’d struggled to survive and who’d thought they had no reward or rest but death awaiting them. Nick sure as hell doesn’t miss it. In this case though, it might be Nick’s best chance at pinning down this mysterious meal of Manny’s.
It takes some effort to even find Manny’s literally ancient Facebook profile, and when Nick does, it’s disappointingly empty. Looks like Manny only really used it for a few years, and mostly for wishing people happy birthday, RSVPing to things, and commenting on wedding and baby photos, plus there’s whole swathes missing thanks to the archive’s slow, digital death by entropy. Damn. Nick can’t be too mad about what remains though, not when he still gets to see a bunch of photos of a Manny he’d never gotten the chance to know. A Manny who’d had some real unfortunate haircuts back in the day, thinks Nick with a grin, and saves the photos.
He’s about to call this digital research expedition a bust when he gets a jolt of inspiration: if Manny’s Facebook doesn’t have the Dinner, maybe one of his friends’ does. Clicking through Manny’s millennia-old social network is monotonous, tedious work. That’s alright. Nick’s used to monotonous, tedious work, because college football involves a lot of it. At least, it does if you’re doing it right, in Nick’s opinion.
It takes a couple more weeks of furtive Facebook searches until Nick finds it in the glitchy depths of one of Manny’s many cousins’ photos: Manny, beaming with a wide and dimpled smile, a full glass of wine in hand, with an open menu just visible on the table in front of him. Nick gasps. Is this it?
“Computer, enhance!” Nick hisses, which doesn’t do anything, naturally, but it makes him feel better as he zooms in himself.
Bless the classy, minimalist menu design of fancy restaurants, because despite the bad angle and the less-than-ideal photo quality, the menu is just about readable: he can make out something something duck breast and below it, finally, filet mignon. Alright, yes, finally he’s getting somewhere. Now if he can just spot the restaurant name somewhere…
It’s easier now that he has a date, so after a little more clicking around, he finds a photo that actually has a location attached: absolutely delish meal at Finch tonight!!
Finally, Nick has cracked this case wide open.
The internet may be forever, but restaurant menus from 18,000 years ago are not. Armed with a restaurant name and a date though, Nick can dig enough to get a general idea of the meal Manny could’ve had, or something close to it anyway, and so he begins to assemble a menu.
It takes some time. Not least because no one will just fucking get to their recipe, it’s always preceded by hundreds of words about the first time they made it in 15786, and how it reminded them of their first vacation to Paris and then there’s a whole long digression about the fat contents of various different types of butter and then the recipe suggests churning your own butter and, like, no. Nick loves Manny, Nick is gonna make a fucking amazing meal for his husband, but he is not going to churn butter for him. He will get the fancy butter for this herb butter to go on the steak though.
Once he’s assembled his whole four-course menu, it’s time to map out how he’ll acquire all of the ingredients, if he even can. Most of the closest grocery stores are on the field, but the whole stores aren’t, and they move displays and things around sometimes. If he gets unlucky, there’s every chance that, like, the potatoes could be out of reach. And based on these recipes, he’s gonna need some fancy stuff too, like duck fat and truffle salt. Their local grocery store is nice, but it’s not quite that nice. Between the Kennesaw and Sandy Springs stores, he should be able to find most things though, even if Nick might have to get creative if he’s gonna find some of these ingredients while staying within his self-imposed, football-based limits.
And he is gonna stick to those limits. Because what the hell is the point, if he’s not achieving something with this dinner? If he just orders all the ingredients for delivery, like any other grocery order they put in when they don’t feel like hauling back all those groceries on foot, then what’s he even doing? Nick wants to put the effort in, he wants to make this mean something. A nice meal on its own doesn’t mean much of anything—hell, Manny spent what felt like two whole days laboring over a brisket the other year, and it had been delicious, but also, like, just a meal. But if Nick goes the distance and recreates this particular meal as perfectly as he can, if he makes this a game within a game and wins it…then that’s something, that’s gonna matter. It’ll matter to him, and it’ll matter to Manny, and that’s the kinda thing that sweetens centuries of marriage.
Alright, thinks Nick. First off, the ingredient list:
Filet mignon, two pounds just to be safe
Butter, the fancy shit
Yukon gold potatoes, two pounds but they come in five-pound bags, right? Plus, roast potatoes are fucking delicious, Nick’s pretty sure he can demolish two whole pounds just by himself. So he’ll just get a five pound bag.
Carrots are easy too, though he’s gonna have to try to get the nicer, multicolored ones if he can, none of this baby carrot shit.
Duck fat. Fuck knows where he’s gonna find that. The grocery store has a butcher who’s in-bounds, maybe Nick can ask him…?
Assorted fresh herbs: rosemary, sage, thyme, tarragon, parsley, chives, basil. He’s got the dry herbs and salt and pepper covered, those are in the pantry already, except for the truffle salt, shit, maybe he can make his own? Only if he can’t find truffle salt, is he really going to be able to find truffles…he’ll deal with that once he’s done some recon.
Salad mix, because listen, Nick doesn’t care how fancy a dinner is, there’s no point in buying the arugula and the radicchio and the baby spinach and shit all separately when someone has already put it all together in a helpful little bag.
Hazelnuts for the fancy fuckin’ salad, plus pecorino cheese, and he’s gonna need red wine vinegar for the dressing, do they have any in the pantry already…?
He’s gonna need baking ingredients too: flour (because they gotta stock up anyway), yeast, sugar, chocolate, more butter for the dessert…
Heirloom tomatoes, shit, he’s not sure he’s ever seen those in the grocery store.
Cream, and lucky for him the dairy section is always in play.
Nick keeps building his list, cross-checking it meticulously against the contents of their small kitchen, until he’s got every single ingredient covered. Now, to figure out if he can actually acquire all of these ingredients.
After sketching out maps of the Sandy Springs and Kennesaw grocery stores from memory, and matching them up to the map of the field, Nick plots out his course as best he can without actually going to the grocery stores first. He’s not gonna have a ton of time to do this without making Manny suspicious, so he’ll have to know sooner rather than later if any of his necessary ingredients aren’t going to be achievable. It looks like the fresh herbs are in some weird out-of-bounds corner in both grocery stores, so that’s gonna be a problem. Getting the salad mix is going to require some eye-catching stretching maneuvers as it is. As for the hazelnuts, he’s gonna have to hope there are some available in the baking aisle, because the bulk food bins are out of reach. And the raspberries to garnish the dessert with? Well, Nick’s rolling the dice on those being accessible in one of the little island displays.
And shit, getting the duck fat and truffle salt? That’s shaping up to be the hail mary play of this particular game.
“Hey babe, I’m gonna go make a grocery run, be back in a few hours!” says Nick breezily, hoping to get away with this without any questions.
No dice. Manny looks up from his laptop, where he’s been doing homework. This semester he’s chosen a class on the “Internet Meme History of 2010-2020” to maintain his enrollment at SDSU. It’s a weirdly intense class, given the subject matter, but according to Manny, meme history overlaps a lot with actual history during that decade, and there’s a lot of actual history to cover for such a short period of time. For his part, Nick’s taken the easy out of a film class about the cinema of the 2050s, which only requires him to watch some movies and submit a page-long write-up about them.
Listen, he cares a lot more about the football part of college football, okay? He’s not in this to get yet another degree.
“What? We’re not due for a grocery run for another week. And I thought we were just gonna put in a delivery order anyway.”
“Got a craving for some chips, figure I might as well go. Get a nice run in, you know? It’ll be good to practice in urban conditions. And running back with the groceries is good prep for running with footballs.”
Manny sighs, but he nods, already getting up. “Yeah, alright. I’ll come with.”
“No! No, you gotta stay on lookout, you know? Watch the field. And you’ve got your homework. Don’t worry about it, I’ve got this.”
“There is jack and shit going on on the field right now, Nick,” says Manny, incredulous, hands on his hips. “And my homework can wait, it’s not due for another couple days.”
“Seriously, I can handle this on my own, you don’t have to come with.”
Manny narrows his eyes suspiciously at Nick, but after enough of Nick’s innocent blinking, Manny lets it slide, his face softening with understanding. They’ve lived in this condo together for centuries, and they both know that all the love in the universe isn’t enough to prevent restlessness. Sometimes they just have to get away from each other for a few hours, get some physical and mental space.
“Yeah, okay. Get me some of those frozen burritos? The cheap ones, you know.”
“I really don’t understand your commitment to the worst possible frozen burritos.”
“Listen, a mediocre frozen burrito is its own thing, okay? It is uniquely satisfying in a way that an actually good, fresh burrito isn’t. Sometimes you don’t want abuela’s perfect burrito with the amazingly tender carnitas, you want mass-produced shit with processed cheese and beans.”
God, and here Nick is laboring to provide this man, this terrible frozen-burrito-loving man—the love of his life who brightens all of his days—with an exquisite, gourmet meal. That’s the thing about Manny though: he can take just as much genuine joy in the mediocre as in the sublime.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll get you your terrible burritos,” says Nick, indulgent. Manny beams at him, and alright, Nick has to kiss him now, so he does, just a quick kiss, and okay, one more, with tongue this time, and then he’s really gonna leave. “Bye babe, love you.”
“Love you too.”
Once he’s out of their condo building and outside, Nick doesn’t start running right away. He calls the grocery store first, and asks for the butcher.
“Butcher counter, what kinda meat do you want? If you want a whole hog, let me tell you right up front, it ain’t happening. We just had an order put in for a barbecue competition and we are fresh outta hogs.”
“Don’t need a whole hog, no—”
“And a whole cow is just not possible either, because—”
“Only need a couple pounds of filet mignon!” cuts in Nick, before he gets a full report of all of Atlanta’s meat orders.
“Well then why they hell are you calling? We always got filet mignon, christ—”
“I also need some duck fat! Uh. I was calling to ask if y’all have duck fat in stock.”
“Huh. Well I sure as hell don’t have ducks in stock, I can tell you that much.”
“Yeah, no, I figured. But what about duck fat?”
God, if Nick has to, he’ll head for the nearest park with a pond and take out a duck himself. Although, how the hell do you get the fat from the duck? This is why he’s not a butcher.
“Huh. Lemme check, hold on.”
There’s silence for a few minutes, and Nick passes the time by jogging in place. Eventually, the butcher returns to the line.
“Now how about that! We have some tubs of it in the freezer. How much you need?”
“Like, a couple of cups?”
“Alright, one tub’ll do ya. I’ll set it aside for you. And you said you wanted some filet mignon?” The butcher whistles. “Someone’s getting fancy, huh?”
“Just a surprise for my husband. And yeah, two pounds of filet mignon, please.”
“Awww, that’s sweet. I’ll have it ready for you, when are you coming by? What name should I put it under?”
“Soon! I’m on my way now. And the name’s Nick. Thanks so much!”
High on victory, Nick makes his best time ever on the grocery store run.
The sense of victory doesn’t last long. The fresh herbs are definitely out of bounds, for one thing, and so are the carrots and raspberries. But whatever, he can try Sandy Springs for those. He’s pretty sure the carrots at least will be in bounds at the Sandy Springs store. The truffle salt though…
As Nick stares at the store’s salt selection in dismay, a store clerk walks up to him.
“Why are you looking at the salt like it’s personally betrayed you?” she asks.
“You wouldn’t happen to have truffle salt in the back, would you?”
She snorts. “What is this, 18540? I thought everyone was over using truffle salt. The stuff’s totally overrated, if you ask me. Celery salt is where it’s at.”
“Yeah, no, definitely, but like. That’s a completely different flavor profile. I need some truffle salt.”
The clerk tilts her head and squints at him. “Do you really though? It just makes your food smell like fancy dirt.”
“I really do need this food to smell like fancy dirt.”
“If you say so,” she says dubiously. “Anyway, we haven’t got any. You might try the spice store downtown. Or just order some online.”
There’s no spice store on their patch of the field, Nick’s sure of that. Still, he smiles at the clerk. “Thanks.”
He runs over to Sandy Springs, weighed down with groceries. He gets some weird looks for it, but people do weirder shit, so not that many weird looks. The Sandy Springs store does have accessible carrots and raspberries, but the fresh herbs aren’t on the field in this store either. Why do all these stores tuck their fresh herbs away in some weird, damn near hidden corner of the produce department? It’s downright inconvenient.
With the herbs out of his reach, he heads for the aisle that has spices next, stepping carefully with his unwieldy cargo of grocery bags and a grocery basket, and looks grimly for the truffle salt he knows won’t be there. He scours the shelves: there are like six different kinds of pepper, ground and whole, and seemingly every other dried herb and spice imaginable. And there are plenty of kinds of salt: plain salt, sea salt, kosher salt, garlic salt, celery salt, pink salt for fuck’s sake...and no truffle salt.
Well Nick is not giving up. He sets his bags and basket down on the floor and starts poking through the shelves, just in case there’s some lone container of truffle salt lurking at the back somewhere.
He hears footsteps approaching, and hopes one his fellow shoppers doesn’t need him to move. The footsteps stop right next to him. Dammit.
“Uh, sir, if you’re looking for something specific, please let me find it for you. I can assure you it is not hidden in some secret spot in the back of the shelves.”
Ah, a store employee. Could be helpful. Still, Nick does not cease his search.
“Okay, but what if it is,” says Nick, carefully nudging aside cartons of ice cream making salt.
“It’s not. What are you looking for?”
Nick sighs, and nudges the cartons of salt back into place. He looks up at the bemused store clerk. “Truffle salt,” he tells her.
“Oh yeah, we don’t have that. Not trendy any more, you know?”
“Fuck!”
The clerk blinks at him. “But we’ve got this umami powder stuff—”
“That’s not gonna cut it—”
“—and dried truffles.”
“Wait, what?”
The clerk walks down the aisle, a yard away, where there are assorted dried things in bags: dried chiles, bay leaves, whole cinnamon sticks, and yup, dried mushrooms.
“Yeah, they’re not big sellers. Who knows how long they’ve been here. Anyway, you can crush ‘em up, mix them with salt, and ta da, you got your truffle salt right there.”
“Thank you,” says Nick, with enough sincerity that the clerk takes a step back, as if she’s worried he’s gonna hug her.
“Uh, sure.” She eyes the array of bags and the basket spread out on the ground. “You need help with any of this?”
“Oh, yeah, actually—“
“Never mind, that was a rhetorical question,” she says. She tosses him the packet of dried truffles. “Here are you go, have fun making truffle salt.”
And so Nick returns to the apartment, sweaty, sore, and burdened with many bags of groceries, but mostly triumphant.
“What the hell took you so long?” asks Manny, baffled, as he starts taking bags from Nick.
“They didn’t have your shitty burritos, I had to go to Sandy Springs,” Nick answers, figuring this little white lie is allowed, given his greater purpose.
“Aww, babe, you didn’t have to,” says Manny, and gives him a kiss on the cheek.
They put the groceries away together, and while Manny raises an eyebrow when he gets to the filet mignon and the duck fat, he doesn’t demand answers either, at least not out loud. Nick takes the food from his hands and puts it in the fridge.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “I’ve got some menu plans for later this week.”
“Alright,” says Manny slowly. “I won’t say no to you cooking. But what about tonight?”
“Tonight we eat your shitty frozen burritos.”
And tomorrow, Nick is going to figure out how to acquire his fresh herbs.
The next day, Nick is surveying the field outside their condo, trying to catch sight of any potential ball carriers, when he has an epiphany about how he can acquire the fresh herbs he needs. Gardens. Nick has exhaustively mapped every single damn yard and backyard that’s on the Georgia State field in Atlanta: he knows every pool and fence, every path through the suburban sprawl. And while he hasn’t ever taken detailed note of all the plants in those yards and backyards, he knows a lot of them have gardens. Probably a lot of them have herbs in their gardens.
Is this, technically, theft? Sure. But it’s pretty harmless theft, he figures. He’ll only be taking a few sprigs of whatever herbs he finds. Birds and squirrels and bugs do way more damage to gardens. The garden owners probably won’t even notice a few missing basil leaves or sprigs of rosemary! This is fine, Nick tells himself.
He still has to figure out how and when to engage in this bit of light theft. Obviously he can’t do it during the day, he’d get caught, and while he has the perfectly reasonable excuse of college football for lurking around ostensibly private property, he’s not about to break cover now, not after managing to lay low in Georgia for centuries. That means he has to do it at night. And that means he has to sneak out without Manny knowing.
This, at least, isn’t too hard. Manny’s a deep sleeper, and if he has a couple drinks before bed, he’s basically dead to the world. So that night, Nick busts out a bottle of wine with dinner. Which, shit, that reminds him, he needs to get some nice wine to go with the fancy dinner, he’ll have to swing by the liquor store once he’s done raiding herb gardens.
“Oooh, wine, someone’s feeling fancy tonight,” says Manny.
“Figured it’s been a while. And nothing’s going on on the field, so we might as well indulge, right?”
“I won’t say no,” Manny says, and holds his glass out so Nick can pour him a generous serving of pinot.
Just as expected, Manny’s snoring into his pillow by 10:30 p.m. Nick eases out of bed carefully, puts on some dark clothes, and heads out into the night. He leaves a note before he goes though, just in case Manny wakes up: couldn’t sleep, went out for a run, xoxo Nick.
He keeps an easy jogging pace as he heads out for the sleepy suburban neighborhoods of Atlanta, hopefully projecting an air of nothing to see here, just a dude with insomnia out for a jog. There are other people out for late night jogs and walks too, and Nick keeps an eye on them, just in case they’re football players. It’d be a hell of a thing if he could manage to get a football thanks to this late night herb-theft excursion. But no, none of his fellow late-night joggers have the tell-tale bulge of a football showing through their clothes, nor do they have any bags big enough to hold one. So Nick keeps running, steady and easy, towards the homes that will hopefully have gardens available for the burgling.
His first stop is the backyard that he recalls having a particularly lush and full garden. He definitely recalls having seen tomatoes in there, and he figures anyone who’s planting tomatoes is a good bet for also having an herb garden. After a quick climb over the fence and some stealthy poking around, he’s proven right. There are a few big pots of herbs along the patio.
The problem, Nick swiftly realizes, is that in the dark, he has no damn idea what kind of herbs these are. No way is he risking a light—he’s lucky enough as it is that the patio doesn’t have a motion-activated light—so he’s either going to have to take some of each, and hope for the best, or he’s going to have to ID them by touch and smell. The rosemary at least is easy to make out, and he snaps off a couple sprigs, their savory scent rising as he does. He rubs the leaves of the next plant, and then brings his fingers to his nose: mint. He doesn’t need any mint. There’s sage though, and a basil plant that’s enormous enough that Nick has no compunctions taking a couple dozen leaves from it. The thyme, on the other hand, isn’t doing so hot, judging by how it feels more like sticks than herbs, so he leaves it alone, and that’s about all the herb bounty this yard offers. Nick tucks away his stolen goods, and moves on.
The next garden-having yard has a dog in it too, so Nick beats a swift retreat before it barks everyone awake, and after another hour of lurking, searching, and stealing, Nick figures he should quit while he’s ahead. Parsley’s basically just garnish anyway, right? Right.
Nick surveys his aromatic haul under the orange light of a street lamp and smiles. Basil, rosemary, sage, thyme, something that he sure hopes are chives but honestly could be some kind of grass because he doesn’t remember what chives smell like, hell, even tarragon. Fuck yeah, he’s done it. He’s found almost all of the necessary ingredients to recreate Manny’s mystery meal, and he did it while staying on the Georgia State field too. Well, almost all of the ingredients. He got most of the herbs, and that counts as a win in Nick’s book. If this is what doing a heist felt like back in the bad old days when people actually stole, like, important shit, Nick can’t blame those ancient criminals for crime-ing it up at all.
He runs back to the condo at a downright triumphant, ground-eating pace, only stopping at the 24-hour liquor store for their finest bottle of wine. He is gonna wine and dine the shit out of his husband.
The next day, there’s some brief excitement when there’s some movement on the scoreboard, but once they’ve pored over the maps and listened to the game commentary, it’s clear that whatever’s going down is nowhere near them. For once, Nick’s relieved about that, because it means he has the whole day to make dinner happen.
He starts with the fresh bread, since it’s gonna need time to rise, and Manny raises an eyebrow at him.
“What happened to baking bread from scratch isn’t worth it?”
“Most of the time, I said most of the time! This time it’ll be worth it. I’ve got dinner tonight covered, babe.”
Manny looks intrigued, and leans over the kitchen counter to poke a finger in the squishy bread dough, like he’s a damn toddler. Nick slaps his hand away.
“No interference in the kitchen!” he says, and Manny backs off with his hands raised.
“Alright, alright.”
Next up is making the chocolate torte, which has Manny poking his head back in the kitchen to say, “Oh damn, we’re getting real fancy tonight, huh? Shit, is it our anniversary? Did I forget our anniversary?”
“No, there’s no special occasion, now get out!”
Nick starts cooking in earnest around 5, and he settles into the groove of it easily. None of the recipes are especially difficult, just a little fiddly at most; getting all the ingredients himself without resorting to delivery had been the hard part. Now it’s simple enough to whip up the heirloom tomato soup, chop and toss the salad, roast the potatoes, glaze the carrots. He makes all the fiddly sauces, adds all the fancy finishing touches that presumably made this meal worth the hundreds of dollars Manny had spent on it millennia ago. The steak Nick devotes some serious attention to, because this whole dinner will be ruined if he overcooks it…
Manny sneaks into the kitchen, then proceeds to ruin his stealth by complaining.
“Babe, I’m starving here, everything smells so fucking good,” whines Manny.
“Out! Go set the table or something, I am making culinary magic happen here!”
And then, when the pan sauce achieves the exact shade of brown, the nutty and rich scent of browned butter and herbs wafting up, finally, the dinner is finished. For a moment, Nick’s wracked with anxiety: has he successfully recreated this memory of Manny’s? Is this really the same as the fancy dinner he remembers? Hell, should Nick have done this at all?
He plates everything frantically, like he’s on an episode of Chopped and the counter’s headed towards zero. Too late to turn back now, he thinks grimly, and assembles a perfect tiny mountain of roasted potatoes on the plate, topping them with a sprinkle of flaky sea salt.
The doubts all fade away once he sees Manny’s face, the honest and almost young wonder on it as he surveys the carefully plated and assembled meal before him.
“Holy shit, Nick. Look at this spread! What is this, four courses?”
“Yeah: soup, salad, main dish, and dessert.”
Manny takes a fork and makes a move for the salad.
“Ah ah ah! Soup first!”
“No, it’s salad first.”
“No way, babe, it’s soup first! The soup’ll get cold otherwise.”
“Right, but, like, you gotta start with the lightest thing first, so that’s salad—”
“Manny, just eat the soup first, before it gets cold.”
“Yeah, yeah, alright.” Manny sets the fork down, and grabs a spoon instead. It’s not a soup spoon, of course, but Nick’s not gonna say anything. Though he does think that maybe he should’ve set the table instead of Manny. Oh well. “What is this, tomato soup? And the green stuff?”
“Heirloom tomato soup, yeah, with basil oil.” Very artistically drizzled basil oil, thank you very much. Nick pushes the basket of bread towards Manny. “Here, have some bread with it.”
“Holy shit, Nick, this is amazing.”
Manny eats the soup with an almost reverent relish, and Nick watches him carefully, but there’s no sign that Manny has recognized the recipe. Nick finally starts eating himself, and shit, yeah, this soup is fucking amazing, especially with the fresh, crusty bread. They move on to the salad, which Manny eats almost contemplatively, a shallow furrow taking up residence on his forehead.
“Do you not like it?” asks Nick, because shit, maybe he’d had too heavy a hand with the dressing…
“No, it’s great, it’s amazing, it’s just reminding me of something...what are these, hazelnuts?”
“Yeah. And the cheese is pecorino romano.”
Manny takes another hefty bite that audibly crunches as he eats it, and he hums happily before saying, “And, shit, these croutons...you made ‘em from the bread you baked?”
“Uh huh. Set aside a small loaf for ‘em.”
“Goddamn. And you made the dressing too, right?”
“Of course.”
Nick’s starting to have serious doubts about whether he’s successfully recreated the meal Manny had remembered, because for all that Manny had waxed rhapsodic about it earlier, he sure as hell doesn’t seem to be recognizing it now. It’s only when Manny stabs through the last bit of salad with his fork, and takes that last bite, that Nick watches realization dawn, bright and beautiful, on Manny’s face.
“Holy shit! Nick, babe, holy shit!” Manny slaps at the table, making all the silverware rattle. “It’s that dinner I told you about! The one I was craving!”
“Yup.”
“How the—what—you made the whole thing?”
“Yeah.”
“How did you even know?”
Nick leans back in his chair now, feeling effervescently smug. “I did some research. Now c’mon, keep eating, before the steak and sides get cold.”
Manny eats the rest of the meal with gratifying care and frequent exclamations of appreciation, and Nick swears he spots the sparkle of genuine tears of joy when Manny takes a bite of the roasted potatoes, which really are fucking amazing with the duck fat. The steak is at the exact level of medium rare that Manny likes best, and Manny hums in pure joy after he takes his first bite.
“Babe, I can’t believe it. It tastes just the same. Exactly the same! How’d you do it?”
Nick only now realizes that he’s been goddamn waiting for the chance to tell him, so he does: he lays out his self-imposed limitations, his deep dive into the research, his grocery store adventures, his admittedly larcenous quest for fresh herbs...he takes Manny’s hand in his and tells Manny all of it, and Manny listens, enraptured.
“You’re amazing, you know that?”
“Yeah, I know,” says Nick, and Manny laughs and kicks him under the table. “Alright, you ready for dessert?”
“Bring it on.”
After the first bite of the dense and rich chocolate torte, Manny’s eyes go wide. “Oh my god. I remember! I remember why I first had this fancy expensive meal!”
“Yeah?” Nick leans forward, eager to finally find out. His Facebook research hadn’t revealed that little tidbit, lost as it was to Facebook’s slow and unmourned slide into entropy.
“Shit,” says Manny, laughing. “It was my college graduation dinner! When I got my first degree!”
Now Nick’s laughing too, incredulous and delighted. “Well damn, and here you still are, 18,000 years later and still in college! The more things change...”
Manny’s laughter subsides, leaving behind only his sweet and deep dimples, and the light in his eyes. “Still in college, sure, but in college with you. No one else I’d rather do this with, babe. I’ve got the best damn husband in the entire world.”
“Nah, that’s me,” says Nick, and then they lean across the table to kiss, the taste of chocolate and wine mingling on their tongues.
One small, impossible thing down, one much bigger and more impossible thing to go. Nick is gonna get Manny some goddamn footballs for SDSU, no matter how long it takes.