Chapter Text
Darcy realizes what he’s been doing wrong when he watches the latest video.
Over the last week, he’s asked Lizzie if she’d like to go to lunch with him. He’s made sure to do it casually—asking her with Bing in tow, or Gigi, or even (once), with Ceres Wilkins, Pemberley’s CFO. She’s always turned him down. Nicely, yes, but without hesitation.
He doesn’t realize what he’s been doing until he sees Gigi turning to Lizzie on screen, so clearly trying to include her in the conversation, and saying, “Lizzie, where does your family ski?”
He grimaces. Even grimacing, he’s still watching Lizzie’s face—that laugh, that pinch of her lips. He knows how awkward she’s feeling, how she doesn’t want to come right out and say that at this point, her sister can’t afford Jane’s student loan payments. Ski trips are right out.
That’s when he realizes.
Ski trips are out. So, probably, are three course lunches to the little gourmet restaurant down the street.
Darcy’s been drawing his lunch possibilities from the forty-two restaurants in the Bay Area that have earned Michelin stars.
He is definitely going to have to step up his game. And this time, he’s going to bring out the big guns.
#
Darcy stands just behind his friend in the hallway, and he has to admit that he’s kind of jealous of Fitz. Lizzie jumps up from her seat and gives him a big hug.
“Fitz!” she says happily. “How are you?”
“Oh, you know. I was just here with my man Darcy.” A few minutes past, Gigi primed Fitz on proper wingman behavior. Good to see that the lesson is sticking.
Lizzie glances behind Fitz. “Oh,” she says. “Hi, Darcy.”
He tries not to read anything into those three words. “Hi, Lizzie.”
“We were just headed to lunch,” Fitz says. “Want to come along?”
This is one of those moments that he’s played over and over again in his mind—the many times she’s turned down an invitation to lunch. And once that video, and Gigi’s question, gave him a nudge, he came to a realization.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
She always asked that before turning him down.
“Dim sum,” Fitz says proudly. “Darcy knows this great little hole in the wall over in Chinatown. They have the best egg custard tarts in all of San Francisco.”
Darcy holds his breath, waiting…
And this time, Lizzie smiles and reaches for her purse. “Sure,” she says.
He tries not to smile; he dislikes smiling, since he thinks it makes him look stupid. He fails. He’d guessed right. She wasn’t turning him down. She was turning down his restaurants.
#
They pass a storefront with a row of roasted ducks on hooks in the window before opening a door that leads up a rickety staircase.
“Really?” Lizzie says.
“Trust Darcy,” Fitz replies. “I’m telling you, he would not eat here if it were not amazing.”
Lizzie glances at Darcy and shakes her head. “I can see that.”
Darcy has to duck his head to get through the narrow doorway that leads up to the top floor. It is, as he remembers, a madhouse—the carts navigating the narrow space between the tables, people chattering in a multitude of languages, pots crashing around from the kitchen. Clouds of savory-scented steam waft out of bamboo steamers.
Really, Darcy tells himself, he has to be the densest man on the planet.
When he asked Lizzie to lunch, he had just assumed that he would pay for her. He’d assumed that she had assumed that he would pay for her. He hadn’t even thought there would be anything awkward in that, even if they weren’t dating.
Maybe growing up with George made him feel like that—like he should expect to pay for everything with everyone. It’s something he just does, and why not? He has the money. It doesn’t make any difference to him if he buys someone else’s lunch. He’d do it even if he weren’t in love with her. In fact, it almost feels weird to have someone not expect him to pick up the tab.
They sit down. Shortly thereafter, a woman comes by and unceremoniously deposits a pot of tea on the table, along with cups, plates, and a card for tracking their orders.
After that, it’s a parade of carts. They get siu mai and jiaozi. Lizzie is impressed when he asks for cheung fun by name.
“There was a point a few years ago when I was in Hong Kong for three weeks,” he explains, almost embarrassed.
Dim sum, he soon remembers, can be really difficult to eat, especially if you’re not completely adept with chopsticks. He isn’t. Plus, he’s wearing a white shirt today. But the food’s too good to care about his shirt, and besides, there is always dry cleaning. Soon, he’s watching Lizzie do her best to eat shrimp dumplings. Her lips are pale pink, and there’s something deeply, painfully erotic about watching her bite into the translucent skin of the dumpling.
He has to look away, and concentrates on mixing soy sauce and chili paste on his plate instead.
“You like things hot,” Lizzie says.
Combined with his last thoughts, this has him blushing.
By way of answer, though, he lifts his own shrimp dumpling in the air, dips it into the mixture in front of him, and bites down. It’s good—really good—the tang of the sauce and the almost-sweetness of the shrimp warring with the perfectly-steamed rice dough.
There are barbeque pork buns after that—easier to eat, since these don’t need to be wrangled with chopsticks. The dough is sweet and just a little hot, and the pork inside is tender, dyed red.
“This,” Lizzie says, gesturing with her own pork bun, “is amazing. That hint of sugar in the meat—that’s something you just don’t get in western cooking. We don’t mix sweet and savory.”
“Or tragedy with comedy,” Darcy says. “At least, not much. The character who’s there to provide comic relief never dies tragically young.”
“Thank God,” Fitz says. “I’m safe.” He winks at Darcy as he says it, because they both remember last year when Fitz had to get that biopsy. He’d cracked jokes about cancer that shouldn’t have been funny—and wouldn’t have been funny—except that they were.
Fitz waits until Lizzie and Darcy have both taken a bite of dessert—until Darcy’s mouth is full of sesame and the rich honey-flavor of red bean paste—before he drops his bomb.
“So,” he says, “speaking of mixing things up. Let’s talk about the big white elephant in the room. You guys are talking to each other, even after Darcy’s disastrous internet love confession. That’s pretty cool!”
The bite of sesame ball turns to a glutinous, sticky mass in Darcy’s mouth. He glares at his friend, but it feels like his jaw has been cemented together with rice paste.
“Uh…” Lizzie says, looking around the room, her skin flushing pink.
“What?” Fitz asks. “We were all totally thinking it. Am I supposed to pretend it didn’t happen? Gigi and I talk about it all the time.”
Darcy takes a swig of chrysanthemum tea and contemplates the ways that he might kill his friend with a chopstick. He can think of three. Too bad he’s not Bruce Lee.
Lizzie casts Darcy a brief, wary look, before turning back to Fitz. “I can’t speak for Darcy,” she says, “but I think we’ve both said some things we shouldn’t have. We’ll both be happier if we just forget everything that we said to each other before I came here.”
“That what you think, Darcy?” Fitz asks, with a raised eyebrow. “Just wipe the slate clean?”
Darcy is finally able to swallow the bite that has been choking him. He sets his teacup down. “No,” he says. “I disagree.”
Lizzie is looking into his eyes. God, he could drown in her eyes. Sometimes, he thinks that he has drowned in them, that everything now is a dream from which he cannot wake.
“You disagree?” she repeats, her voice small.
He meets her eyes, his gaze unblinking. On this, he has promised himself, he will not waver.
“I forget nothing.” He tries to match the airy tone Lizzie uses in her videos, to play it off as a joke, but he doesn’t do airy well. It comes out sounding fierce and unrelenting instead.
And maybe that’s okay, because when it comes to her, fierce and unrelenting are precisely the emotions that come to mind.