SUGAR KISS [YEONBIN] ✓

ten

I am sweating throughout the entire individual challenge. It’s early enough in the morning that everyone is about half asleep, or we were when we got here. My hair is a wreck, and several kids still smell like the creek, and it’s all just a mess in here.

A mess that is short one person.

We had an hour today, another time-lenient challenge, to create something small and beautiful and extravagant, which makes anything anyone will make just impossibly annoying on principle. Basically the Tiny Houses of food.

There is a half-hour left, and my merlot is reducing on the stove, sweetness and pungency bubbling up in the air. I pull out a knife to start slicing my duck, stomach twisting. Yeonjun isn’t here yet. Thirty minutes late and I wonder if the judges have noticed or if there are so many of us, they won’t realize until judging comes up and his name isn’t there.

I feel annoyingly guilty. Man, I hate having a conscience; life would be so much simpler if we could just be done with them altogether when we needed to be. But that is not real, and so I am assailed with it.

I am halfway through slicing this duck breast when the door to the kitchen slams opens and in runs Yeonjun. He’s red-faced, hair completely wild. He’s wearing Deadpool pajamas and these beat-up tennis shoes and he looks absolutely panicked.

“What’s the challenge, what are we doing?” I hear him whisper frantically to Beomgyu, who looks like he hasn’t got a lot to do; whatever he’s making won’t take him the full hour.

Beomgyu leans over to tell him in this low voice and Yeonjun just hisses, “Shit. Shit shit.” He jerks an apron over himself and runs his hand violently over the tuft on top of his head. He knots the rope aggressively, like it has done him a personal offense. I whirl away from him and focus on my own stuff. I can’t afford to be derailed by him, not again. And he’s not giving a second thought to me. I slice.

Prepare my pan with butter and saffron, a pinch of garlic. There’s only twenty minutes left and Yeonjun is swearing up a storm somewhere, clanging around. I glance up when I reach for a few herbs and start chopping, and see the judges glancing at each other, looking down their noses. They keep looking over at Yeonjun, and oh man, he is in such deep shit.

He doesn’t seem to notice, he’s so focused on making up forty minutes of lost time.

I get my duck in the pan, stir my merlot, prepare the little veggie and crostini base of the appetizer, and when it’s perfectly pink inside, I take it off the burner. It smells totally divine. It tastes totally divine. The wine sauce is utterly absurd, it’s so incredible. I never get to cook duck at home, so I’m dying to just eat the whole thing myself and straight up drink the spiced butter out of the sauté pan.

I’m wrapping ingredients, arranging them on the plates, drizzling reductions in perfect patterns, and I have enough extra time to make up more than four. I wind up with six completed plates when time is called, and the prettiest four are set up front. I cut a glance over at Yeonjun’s. He looks relaxed, like he can breathe. Hands in the pockets of his apron and slouching a little. He’s still kind of a wreck, covered in purple sauce and flour and who knows what else, but that easy expression is back on his face, in the rest of his muscles. I have no idea what on earth his dish is, but there’s some kind of green vegetable, zucchini probably, that’s all thin like a noodle and curling up around some kind of red meat in a sauce, and suddenly I am mad.

He had twenty minutes, and he made that.

I glance down at my dishes, which seem inadequate now. Not because they suck, but because I’m hearing Choi Yeonjun made this in twenty minutes! With a box of scraps! And his is so beautiful it’s like my covert ops last night did nothing at all.