A/N: My apologies for putting this off for so long ;v; to make up for it, I made this 6.7k words long. I'd finally taken the all-mighty fall of COVID and was bedridden for a week. I lost my sense of taste and smell in the middle of it all and got to experience first-hand how terrible it is to consume food without quite enjoying the pleasure of it.
Admittedly, half of what I wrote without experiencing all this made perfect sense: I was able to tell when something was actually good despite not being able to taste it in its entirety. Yet, it wasn't quite the knowledge that I found something I so loved incredibly bland and tasteless that destroyed me—it was the disappointment I felt towards the person who made it.
I could very much lie and rely on my past experience of said dish and say it tasted amazing when in truth, I tasted nothing at all. I ended up with: "If I could taste this, I'm sure I would have said it was amazing." Which I wasn't sure was any better, really.
The strangest thing about this period of having lost my sense of taste is that through it all, the cause of it was an odd, stinging smell lingering in my nose. I wake up to the smell of something burning. I sleep to the room in flames. I drink to the stench of smoke; eat to the sting of gas.
Truly an eye-opening experience.
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[Leroy]
Conditions for a hug: you're Vanilla White and your partner is Leroy Cox.
It just is. That said, I wasn't expecting anything to happen immediately after the shoot since the lead wrangler in charge decided to dismiss the cast a tad earlier than the rest of the production team and I'd seen the way his eyes remained downcast through it all, spent from a day's worth of fuckery. I had my suspicions. They were on Carter.
Guest judges thrown into the panel last-minute were thanked, briefed, and dismissed minutes after the cast while the rest of the spotlight remained on the movie star with a bottle of champagne. The favored party was clear. I'd hung back with Saito and Garland instead of heading back to the hotel with the rest of the cast. They were waiting around for a word with the Japanese chefs and assumed I had the same thing in mind. Not wrong; half-right.
I caught up with Yamazaki headed for one of the crew vehicles parked by the street.
"Hey." I didn't actually know what to say. "Thanks for showing."
"Leroy," he sighed, smiling tired. "Great work today. I very much enjoyed your cooking. Well, everyone did. We all had good things to say about your dishes, especially the calamari. One of my favorites this evening."
"You can drop all that," I held up a hand. "Fishing for compliments isn't my thing... sorry you had to deal with the short notice. They gave you a heads-up this morning, at least?"
"Haha, so you're here for the tea," Yamazaki laughed, shaking his head. "Ahn says that all the time. 'Tea-sipping,' she calls it. Anyway... I'm sure Vanilla will have a lot to say about this. No, none of the local guest judges were given more than an hour's notice before the start of the shoot. My agency had given me a call to say they'd shifted my entire evening's plans of book-signing to the week after just so I could show up for the shoot, framing it as a perfect opportunity and high-priority request. They knew I was acquainted with Vanilla said if I turned them down, it would've made him look bad. Of course, I knew Vanilla was no child; he would never blame me for refusing the invite, but still. I felt obliged.
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Wax
Romance[Sequel to Vanilla] Seven years later, childhood sweethearts Vanilla Julian White and Leroy Cox reunite in the City of London for an unlikely reason. The latter-once a burning flame unfazed by the wind-had, since a couple of years ago, left the heat...
