The Proposal(64)

Nik pulled up to Carlos’s house late Saturday afternoon, with a six-pack of beer in her hand and her old Stanford T-shirt on. She had a feeling that enchilada making was a messy endeavor.

“Hey! Come on in.” Carlos wrapped his arms around her and held on tight.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

He nodded and kissed her hair.

“It’s been a kind of emotional week, that’s all. Glad you’re here.”

She pulled his head down to her and kissed him.

“I’m glad to be here.”

They stood like that for a while, until he kissed the top of her head and pulled away.

“Okay. Let’s get cooking.”

They walked together into the kitchen, which looked prepared for battle. There were packs of tortillas stacked in one corner, bags of dried chilies in another, aluminum baking pans all over the kitchen table, and many other ingredients that she didn’t recognize lined up on the counter. Her eyes widened.

“You ready for this?” Carlos surveyed the kitchen and rubbed his hands together.

She wasn’t totally sure, but she nodded anyway.

“The first thing we have to do is to make the sauces,” he said.

Sauces, plural. This dude didn’t play around. She handed him the six-pack, and he took two beers out of it and put the rest in the fridge.

“Excellent. Let me get you started and I can pull out some snacks for us.”

Soon, she was standing over the sink, pulling the papery skins off what seemed like hundreds of tomatillos. He was standing next to her, quartering onions, and lining them up on a big cookie sheet with garlic and a variety of green peppers.

It felt peaceful, standing there and cooking with him. Some game was on the TV, but on low, so it was perfect background noise. They weren’t talking, but the silence between them felt easy. She could feel him smiling next to her.

When she was done, she washed and dried the weirdly shaped little fruits and lined them up in even rows on the cookie sheet.

“Perfect.” He’d moved on to shredding the pot full of beef. It smelled amazing. She opened her mouth and he slid a piece between her lips.

“Oh my God, that’s good,” she said.

“Now I know that you are sincere when you say that in bed, because you say it just like that.”

She smirked at him.

“Or I could be lying both times.”

He shook his head.

“Impossible. I know how good that meat is. If I’m cocky about anything, it’s my enchiladas.”

She shook her head as she washed her hands.

“‘If he’s cocky about anything,’ he says.”

He laughed and picked up the two cookie sheets full of vegetables.

“Open the oven so I can get these inside?”

Once the vegetables were broiling, she turned to him.

“What’s next?”

He nodded at the other side of the stove.

“We need to get the chilies stemmed and seeded, and then soak them long enough so they soften. Put those on, and pull the chilies apart over the garbage can so the seeds come out, pull the stems off, then drop the pieces in that big pot.”

She opened the bags of chilies as he carefully transferred all of the shredded beef from the cutting board to a big bowl. Once the bags were all open, she ripped each dried chili open with her fingers, and let the dry seeds rain out into the garbage can. Some of the seeds kind of stuck to the inside of the chilies, so she scraped them out with a fingernail before tossing the chili pieces into the pot on the stove.

“Beef enchiladas and chicken enchiladas . . . there are no vegetarians in your family, I take it?”

Carlos opened the oven again and took the sheet pans of vegetables out.

“God, no. They would probably all flip out if I brought over vegetarian enchiladas. Which is a shame, because I make some really good ones with cheese and onions in the same kind of red chile sauce we’re making now. I just save those for parties with my friends instead of my family; even my carnivore friends happily eat them.”

She rubbed her fingernail against a stubborn seed to loosen it from the pepper.

“That sounds delicious. I’d eat those in a second.”

Carlos tipped all of the vegetables into a big pitcher.

“Excellent, you might just get the opportunity some time.”

He stuck a bunch of cilantro leaves and a handheld blender inside the pitcher, and in about thirty seconds the roasted vegetables had become a fragrant olive-green sauce.

“See?” He turned to her for the first time in a while. “Now the tomatillo sauce is all . . . oh my God, what are you doing?”

She stopped, just as she’d pulled the stem off another dried chili.

“What? Isn’t this what you told me to do?”

She had no idea why he was looking at her with that appalled look on his face.

He crossed the kitchen and picked up a box that had been sitting next to the bags of chilies.

“Gloves! Nik! Holy shit, you’ve been touching all of those chilies with your bare hands. Did I forget to tell you to put gloves on? Oh no.”

She had no idea what he was talking about.

“What do gloves have to do with anything?”

He took her by the waist and pulled her over to the sink.

“You were touching dried hot chilies—and their seeds—with your bare hands. Your fingers are going to be on fire soon.” He turned on the water and handed her the bottle of dish soap.