The Ex-Fiancé in the DMs
The cooking class was Maya’s idea.
She had spent the morning after the rooftop bar running a post-mortem analysis on their first date, and the data was clear: they had succeeded in spite of themselves. The Instagram story had performed well—twelve thousand likes, four hundred shares, and a comment section that was eighty-three percent positive. But the engagement metrics showed a sharp drop-off after the first thirty seconds. People had clicked away once the arguing stopped.
The algorithm wanted tension. The algorithm wanted conflict. And if Maya was going to treat this like a project, she needed to optimize for the algorithm.
So she booked "Sauce & Soul," a high-end cooking class in SoMa that promised "culinary intimacy through shared creation." The Yelp reviews were glowing. The class size was capped at twelve couples. The lighting was warm and flattering. Maya had even pre-selected their outfits via a shared Pinterest board—Leo had responded with a single eggplant emoji, which she chose to interpret as agreement.
Now, standing at a stainless steel station with a mise en place that looked like a surgical prep table, Maya was reconsidering every life choice that had led her here.
“You told me to wear something I could move in,” Leo said, holding up a wooden spoon like it was a foreign object. “You didn’t tell me I’d be performing surgery on a vegetable.”
“It’s a shallot, Leo. You dice it. You don’t interrogate it.”
He squinted at the small purple bulb. “This thing has layers. I’m not emotionally prepared for that.”
The instructor, a woman named Celeste with a French accent and the patience of a kindergarten teacher, clapped her hands. “Welcome, couples! Tonight, we will be making a classic coq au vin. It is a dish of patience, of trust, of letting the flavors meld together. Much like love, yes?”
Maya smiled. Leo made a face that suggested he was about to vomit.
“The first step,” Celeste continued, “is to prepare your aromatics. Onion, carrot, celery, garlic. Finely diced. Uniform pieces. This is the foundation of everything that follows.”
Maya’s knife hit the cutting board with military precision. Chop, chop, chop. Each piece of onion identical to the last. She had done this a hundred times. Cooking was just another user flow—inputs, processes, outputs. Predictable. Controllable.
Leo picked up his knife like he was holding a weapon he didn’t trust. He positioned the shallot on the board. He took a breath. He swung.
The shallot shot across the station and landed in a bowl of flour.
“That was intentional,” he said.
“It absolutely was not.”
“I’m testing the physics of root vegetables. It’s for a project.”
Maya grabbed the shallot, rinsed it, and placed it back on his board. “Hold it like this.” She positioned his fingers into a claw grip, the tips curled under, knuckles guiding the blade. “And rock the knife. Don’t stab. Rock.”
Leo’s hand was warm under hers. She noticed it for exactly half a second before she pulled away.
“Rock,” he repeated. He tried. The shallot split unevenly, one half flying into the air and landing in a saucepan. “I’m a genius.”
“You’re a hazard.”
“Same thing, different font.”
Maya turned back to her own board. She diced the carrots into perfect quarter-inch cubes. She sliced the celery into identical crescents. She minced the garlic so fine it practically dissolved. Around them, other couples were laughing, touching each other’s arms, feeding each other tastes of wine. A man in a plaid apron whispered something to his partner, and she blushed.
Maya felt a familiar tightness in her chest. She was performing. They were performing. But everyone else seemed to be performing a different play.
“Hey.” Leo’s voice was quieter now. “You’re doing that thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you disappear into the data. Your eyes go flat. You stop breathing.”
Maya’s knife paused. “I’m breathing.”
“You’re holding your breath. I can see your shoulders.” He pointed with his knife—still holding it wrong. “They’re up by your ears. You look like a stressed-out turtle.”
She forced her shoulders down. “I’m optimizing.”
“You’re spiraling. There’s a difference.” He dumped his uneven shallot pieces into the pan. “Look, I know this is stupid. I know we’re just doing this for the grant. But if you’re going to be miserable the whole time, it’s going to show. And then the algorithm won’t work.”
Maya stared at him. He was right. She hated that he was right.
“Fine,” she said. “What do you suggest?”
Leo grinned. “Let me set something on fire.”
“Absolutely not.”
“It’ll be great for engagement. ‘Chaos Pod chef burns down kitchen.’ It’s a headline.”
“We are not burning down a kitchen.”
“Fine, fine.” He turned to the stove, where a pan of butter was melting. “But I’m not responsible for what happens next.”
What happened next was that Leo added the onions to the pan and then immediately turned the heat to high. The butter sizzled. The onions hissed. Smoke began to curl upward.
“Leo, that’s too hot.”
“It’s fine. I’m caramelizing.”
“You’re incinerating.”
The smoke detector went off. A high-pitched shriek cut through the warm ambiance of the cooking class. Couples turned to stare. Celeste rushed over, her French accent sharpening with panic. “Monsieur! The heat! Turn it down!”
Leo grabbed the pan handle without a mitt. He yelped. The pan tipped. Butter and onions splattered across the burner, and a small flame licked up from the gas.
Maya moved without thinking. She grabbed the lid from the counter, slammed it over the pan, and cut off the oxygen. The flame died. The smoke detector kept screaming.
She turned to Leo, who was shaking his burned hand and looking at her with something between awe and amusement.
“You just saved my life,” he said.
“I saved your dinner. There’s a difference.”
“Same thing, different font.”
Maya felt the heat rise in her cheeks. She opened her mouth to say something cutting, something that would re-establish the distance between them, but what came out was Spanish.
“¡Eres un idiota! ¡Casi quemas el edificio!”
Leo’s eyes widened. “Whoa. What was that?”
“That was me telling you that you’re an idiot.”
“No, it was more than that. You were really going at it. Your hands were moving.” He mimed aggressive gesturing. “I didn’t know you spoke Spanish.”
“My grandmother. I learned as a kid.” Maya grabbed a towel and wiped up the butter spill. “It comes out when I’m angry.”
“Can you teach me? I want to yell at people in multiple languages.”
“No.”
“Please? Just one phrase. Something dramatic.”
“No.”
Celeste appeared with a fire extinguisher, looked at the situation, and sighed. “Perhaps you two would like to take a break? There is a terrace outside. Fresh air. Calm.”
Maya wanted to say no. She wanted to stay and fix the dish, to prove that she could salvage this disaster into something functional. But Leo was already walking toward the terrace doors, and the other couples were staring, and the smoke detector was still beeping in her ears.
She followed him.
The terrace was small, with a few metal tables and a view of the Bay Bridge lights. The air was cold and clean. Leo leaned against the railing, his burned hand tucked under his armpit.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Maya blinked. “What?”
“I’m sorry. I was trying to be funny, and I almost burned down a cooking class. That’s on me.” He looked at her, and for once, there was no joke in his eyes. “You put a lot of work into this. The Pinterest board. The outfit coordination. The Yelp deep dive. I know you did. And I just… I don’t know how to do things the normal way.”
Maya sat down on a metal chair. The cold seeped through her jeans. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why can’t you do things the normal way?”
Leo was quiet for a long moment. The wind picked up, carrying the smell of burnt butter and salt water.
“Because normal feels like a cage,” he said finally. “I grew up with a dad who had a spreadsheet for everything. Grocery lists. Vacation itineraries. My future. He had my entire life mapped out by the time I was twelve. College, internship, marriage, kids, retirement. All of it. And I looked at that spreadsheet and thought, ‘If I follow this, I’ll never be surprised. I’ll never be wrong. But I’ll also never be alive.’”
Maya felt the words land in her chest like stones.
“So I broke it,” Leo continued. “I broke everything he planned. I dropped out of the engineering program he picked. I started coding at three in the morning. I took jobs that didn’t make sense. I dated people who were bad for me. I made a mess of everything, because at least a mess is mine.”
He turned to face her. “And then I met you. And you had a spreadsheet for our relationship. And I thought, ‘Oh no. Here we go again.’ But then I saw you in that kitchen, yelling at me in Spanish, and I realized—you’re not the spreadsheet. You’re the person who made the spreadsheet because you’re scared of what happens without it.”
Maya’s throat tightened. “That’s not—”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m scared too. Just in a different font.”
She laughed. It came out wet and unexpected, a sound she didn’t recognize.
“We should go back inside,” she said.
“Probably.”
Neither of them moved.
“Your hand,” Maya said. “Let me see it.”
He held out his hand. The palm was red, but not blistered. She took it, turned it over, examined the damage. His skin was warm. His fingers were calloused from typing.
“You need ice,” she said.
“I need a lot of things.”
She looked up. He was watching her with an expression she couldn’t categorize. It didn’t fit any of her user flows.
“We should go back inside,” she repeated.
“Maya.”
“What?”
“Your phone is buzzing.”
She looked down. Her phone was on the table, screen lit up with a notification. Instagram. A direct message.
From Mark.
She picked it up. Opened it. Read the words.
*Hey. Saw the video. You look happy. I miss your fire.*
Leo was still holding her other hand. She pulled away.
“Who’s Mark?” he asked.
“No one.”
“That’s not a no-one face. That’s a someone face.”
Maya locked her phone and shoved it in her pocket. “It’s my ex-fiancé. He left me two years ago. He’s irrelevant.”
“He’s messaging you.”
“He’s irrelevant.”
Leo didn’t push. He just stood there, his burned hand hanging at his side, watching her with those eyes that saw too much.
“Okay,” he said. “But if you want to delete him, I’ll help you write the code.”
Maya almost smiled. Almost.
“Let’s go finish the coq au vin,” she said.
“I’m going to ruin it.”
“I know.”
“And you’re going to yell at me in Spanish again.”
“Probably.”
Leo grinned. “Good. That’s the best part.”
They walked back inside. The smoke had cleared. Celeste had restarted their station. The other couples pretended not to stare.
Maya picked up her knife. She diced another shallot. She didn’t think about Mark’s message.
She thought about Leo’s hand in hers, and how she hadn’t wanted to let go.
She had spent the morning after the rooftop bar running a post-mortem analysis on their first date, and the data was clear: they had succeeded in spite of themselves. The Instagram story had performed well—twelve thousand likes, four hundred shares, and a comment section that was eighty-three percent positive. But the engagement metrics showed a sharp drop-off after the first thirty seconds. People had clicked away once the arguing stopped.
The algorithm wanted tension. The algorithm wanted conflict. And if Maya was going to treat this like a project, she needed to optimize for the algorithm.
So she booked "Sauce & Soul," a high-end cooking class in SoMa that promised "culinary intimacy through shared creation." The Yelp reviews were glowing. The class size was capped at twelve couples. The lighting was warm and flattering. Maya had even pre-selected their outfits via a shared Pinterest board—Leo had responded with a single eggplant emoji, which she chose to interpret as agreement.
Now, standing at a stainless steel station with a mise en place that looked like a surgical prep table, Maya was reconsidering every life choice that had led her here.
“You told me to wear something I could move in,” Leo said, holding up a wooden spoon like it was a foreign object. “You didn’t tell me I’d be performing surgery on a vegetable.”
“It’s a shallot, Leo. You dice it. You don’t interrogate it.”
He squinted at the small purple bulb. “This thing has layers. I’m not emotionally prepared for that.”
The instructor, a woman named Celeste with a French accent and the patience of a kindergarten teacher, clapped her hands. “Welcome, couples! Tonight, we will be making a classic coq au vin. It is a dish of patience, of trust, of letting the flavors meld together. Much like love, yes?”
Maya smiled. Leo made a face that suggested he was about to vomit.
“The first step,” Celeste continued, “is to prepare your aromatics. Onion, carrot, celery, garlic. Finely diced. Uniform pieces. This is the foundation of everything that follows.”
Maya’s knife hit the cutting board with military precision. Chop, chop, chop. Each piece of onion identical to the last. She had done this a hundred times. Cooking was just another user flow—inputs, processes, outputs. Predictable. Controllable.
Leo picked up his knife like he was holding a weapon he didn’t trust. He positioned the shallot on the board. He took a breath. He swung.
The shallot shot across the station and landed in a bowl of flour.
“That was intentional,” he said.
“It absolutely was not.”
“I’m testing the physics of root vegetables. It’s for a project.”
Maya grabbed the shallot, rinsed it, and placed it back on his board. “Hold it like this.” She positioned his fingers into a claw grip, the tips curled under, knuckles guiding the blade. “And rock the knife. Don’t stab. Rock.”
Leo’s hand was warm under hers. She noticed it for exactly half a second before she pulled away.
“Rock,” he repeated. He tried. The shallot split unevenly, one half flying into the air and landing in a saucepan. “I’m a genius.”
“You’re a hazard.”
“Same thing, different font.”
Maya turned back to her own board. She diced the carrots into perfect quarter-inch cubes. She sliced the celery into identical crescents. She minced the garlic so fine it practically dissolved. Around them, other couples were laughing, touching each other’s arms, feeding each other tastes of wine. A man in a plaid apron whispered something to his partner, and she blushed.
Maya felt a familiar tightness in her chest. She was performing. They were performing. But everyone else seemed to be performing a different play.
“Hey.” Leo’s voice was quieter now. “You’re doing that thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you disappear into the data. Your eyes go flat. You stop breathing.”
Maya’s knife paused. “I’m breathing.”
“You’re holding your breath. I can see your shoulders.” He pointed with his knife—still holding it wrong. “They’re up by your ears. You look like a stressed-out turtle.”
She forced her shoulders down. “I’m optimizing.”
“You’re spiraling. There’s a difference.” He dumped his uneven shallot pieces into the pan. “Look, I know this is stupid. I know we’re just doing this for the grant. But if you’re going to be miserable the whole time, it’s going to show. And then the algorithm won’t work.”
Maya stared at him. He was right. She hated that he was right.
“Fine,” she said. “What do you suggest?”
Leo grinned. “Let me set something on fire.”
“Absolutely not.”
“It’ll be great for engagement. ‘Chaos Pod chef burns down kitchen.’ It’s a headline.”
“We are not burning down a kitchen.”
“Fine, fine.” He turned to the stove, where a pan of butter was melting. “But I’m not responsible for what happens next.”
What happened next was that Leo added the onions to the pan and then immediately turned the heat to high. The butter sizzled. The onions hissed. Smoke began to curl upward.
“Leo, that’s too hot.”
“It’s fine. I’m caramelizing.”
“You’re incinerating.”
The smoke detector went off. A high-pitched shriek cut through the warm ambiance of the cooking class. Couples turned to stare. Celeste rushed over, her French accent sharpening with panic. “Monsieur! The heat! Turn it down!”
Leo grabbed the pan handle without a mitt. He yelped. The pan tipped. Butter and onions splattered across the burner, and a small flame licked up from the gas.
Maya moved without thinking. She grabbed the lid from the counter, slammed it over the pan, and cut off the oxygen. The flame died. The smoke detector kept screaming.
She turned to Leo, who was shaking his burned hand and looking at her with something between awe and amusement.
“You just saved my life,” he said.
“I saved your dinner. There’s a difference.”
“Same thing, different font.”
Maya felt the heat rise in her cheeks. She opened her mouth to say something cutting, something that would re-establish the distance between them, but what came out was Spanish.
“¡Eres un idiota! ¡Casi quemas el edificio!”
Leo’s eyes widened. “Whoa. What was that?”
“That was me telling you that you’re an idiot.”
“No, it was more than that. You were really going at it. Your hands were moving.” He mimed aggressive gesturing. “I didn’t know you spoke Spanish.”
“My grandmother. I learned as a kid.” Maya grabbed a towel and wiped up the butter spill. “It comes out when I’m angry.”
“Can you teach me? I want to yell at people in multiple languages.”
“No.”
“Please? Just one phrase. Something dramatic.”
“No.”
Celeste appeared with a fire extinguisher, looked at the situation, and sighed. “Perhaps you two would like to take a break? There is a terrace outside. Fresh air. Calm.”
Maya wanted to say no. She wanted to stay and fix the dish, to prove that she could salvage this disaster into something functional. But Leo was already walking toward the terrace doors, and the other couples were staring, and the smoke detector was still beeping in her ears.
She followed him.
The terrace was small, with a few metal tables and a view of the Bay Bridge lights. The air was cold and clean. Leo leaned against the railing, his burned hand tucked under his armpit.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Maya blinked. “What?”
“I’m sorry. I was trying to be funny, and I almost burned down a cooking class. That’s on me.” He looked at her, and for once, there was no joke in his eyes. “You put a lot of work into this. The Pinterest board. The outfit coordination. The Yelp deep dive. I know you did. And I just… I don’t know how to do things the normal way.”
Maya sat down on a metal chair. The cold seeped through her jeans. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why can’t you do things the normal way?”
Leo was quiet for a long moment. The wind picked up, carrying the smell of burnt butter and salt water.
“Because normal feels like a cage,” he said finally. “I grew up with a dad who had a spreadsheet for everything. Grocery lists. Vacation itineraries. My future. He had my entire life mapped out by the time I was twelve. College, internship, marriage, kids, retirement. All of it. And I looked at that spreadsheet and thought, ‘If I follow this, I’ll never be surprised. I’ll never be wrong. But I’ll also never be alive.’”
Maya felt the words land in her chest like stones.
“So I broke it,” Leo continued. “I broke everything he planned. I dropped out of the engineering program he picked. I started coding at three in the morning. I took jobs that didn’t make sense. I dated people who were bad for me. I made a mess of everything, because at least a mess is mine.”
He turned to face her. “And then I met you. And you had a spreadsheet for our relationship. And I thought, ‘Oh no. Here we go again.’ But then I saw you in that kitchen, yelling at me in Spanish, and I realized—you’re not the spreadsheet. You’re the person who made the spreadsheet because you’re scared of what happens without it.”
Maya’s throat tightened. “That’s not—”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m scared too. Just in a different font.”
She laughed. It came out wet and unexpected, a sound she didn’t recognize.
“We should go back inside,” she said.
“Probably.”
Neither of them moved.
“Your hand,” Maya said. “Let me see it.”
He held out his hand. The palm was red, but not blistered. She took it, turned it over, examined the damage. His skin was warm. His fingers were calloused from typing.
“You need ice,” she said.
“I need a lot of things.”
She looked up. He was watching her with an expression she couldn’t categorize. It didn’t fit any of her user flows.
“We should go back inside,” she repeated.
“Maya.”
“What?”
“Your phone is buzzing.”
She looked down. Her phone was on the table, screen lit up with a notification. Instagram. A direct message.
From Mark.
She picked it up. Opened it. Read the words.
*Hey. Saw the video. You look happy. I miss your fire.*
Leo was still holding her other hand. She pulled away.
“Who’s Mark?” he asked.
“No one.”
“That’s not a no-one face. That’s a someone face.”
Maya locked her phone and shoved it in her pocket. “It’s my ex-fiancé. He left me two years ago. He’s irrelevant.”
“He’s messaging you.”
“He’s irrelevant.”
Leo didn’t push. He just stood there, his burned hand hanging at his side, watching her with those eyes that saw too much.
“Okay,” he said. “But if you want to delete him, I’ll help you write the code.”
Maya almost smiled. Almost.
“Let’s go finish the coq au vin,” she said.
“I’m going to ruin it.”
“I know.”
“And you’re going to yell at me in Spanish again.”
“Probably.”
Leo grinned. “Good. That’s the best part.”
They walked back inside. The smoke had cleared. Celeste had restarted their station. The other couples pretended not to stare.
Maya picked up her knife. She diced another shallot. She didn’t think about Mark’s message.
She thought about Leo’s hand in hers, and how she hadn’t wanted to let go.