Vice

17: Smoothie

Jaquie's hand rests on Natara's shoulder as he guides her back into her office. 

His other hand rubs the ruffles from his dress shirt, then twitches nervously atop his slacks. Natara stares past him at her desk, vacancy in her eyes, while his wide eyes peer down at her as if he thinks she might run back down the hall and out of the building forever.

And she might, if she wasn't so dazed by everything going on lately. She shakes her head, trying to clear her scrambled thoughts, and Jaquie gives her a discouraging half-smile as she sits back down at her desk.

"I believe in you, okay, Natara? And I want you here. And Mr. Vice wants you here, too, he just doesn't know it yet. He'll change his mind as long as you keep to it, okay?" Jaquie rambles, giving her one last deer-in-the-headlights look before he slinks out of the room.

As the door closes, Natara exhales and looks down at her desk. Jaquie's words play on repeat in her head. He believes in her. He wants her here. Mr. Vice will change his mind. She said she wasn't going to give up.

She's not going to give up. She pats the sides of her face, trying to wake herself from her daze. I'm not going to give up. I promised myself I wouldn't give up. 

On her desk sits another print out of work that needs done, something Jaquie must have prepared and dropped off ahead of time. Natara isn't sure how many hours of work Jaquie puts in, but she knows for a fact that he stayed later last night and came in earlier this morning than she did. No wonder he looked so tired yesterday.

Somehow, he looks normal again today. His shirt is tucked in, his hair is prim, and he looks far from disheveled. Compared to last night, he looks almost like a different person. Perhaps that's the magic of drinking multiple cups of coffee, like she saw Jace doing yesterday morning.

Whatever tiredness Jace is suffering from, Mr. Vice must not be suffering from because this morning on Natara's to-do list it says to make him a smoothie instead of a coffee. As Natara reads through the instruction list, she learns she's supposed to make the smoothie using a blender downstairs near the coffeemaker. 

She bites her lip as she folds up the instructions and exits her office. At least she knows where the coffeemaker is, so finding the blender shouldn't be too hard. While she waits for the elevator to descend, Natara unfolds the paper again and stares at the recipe she needs to prepare.

Honestly, she's never made a smoothie in her life. She's hardly even followed any cooking recipes. Her mother always handled the cooking and she did an excellent job. Natara is sure if she tried cooking something instead of her mother she'd be quickly booed out of the kitchen by Macey and their father and that's if she managed to not accidentally set fire to anything. 

The elevator door opens and Natara makes her way to the coffee machine and looks around. Sure enough, there is a blender there that she totally didn't notice the other day. Even if she had noticed it, she probably wouldn't have recognized it at first glance anyway. It looks just as science fiction-y as the coffeemaker. 

The instruction sheet doesn't mention where she's supposed to get the ingredients for everything but eventually her eyes land on the office fridge and she finds them inside. She places them on the counter one by one and triple checks that she has everything. Then she looks around in the cabinets for measuring tools and lays them out, too.

She pulls the lid off of the top of the blender and cautiously drops the ice cubes inside. Will the blender be able to chop things as hard as ice cubes? What if I break the work blender? Natara hopes it will be okay. She doesn't want to have to pay to replace something that looks like it was made twenty years in the future.

She drizzles the heavy cream over the ice cubes and peels the banana. She breaks it into little pieces once the peel is off and drops them on top of the ice. Then she opens the canned pumpkin and pours that in. Natara's family rarely makes dishes with pumpkin, so the smell of the canned pumpkin takes her back to eating a rare slice of her mom's homemade pie. 

She relaxes into the smell as she adds pinches of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, all spice, sugar, and vanilla to the blender and pours in some whole milk. She tries to follow all the amounts and measurements the instructions tell her to and she feels like she does a pretty good job of it. Once she has everything in, she presses the "smoothie" button on the blender and it whirs to life.

It whirs loudly. Too loudly, Natara thinks, as the little knives on the bottom that spin around seem to get hung up on the ice cubes. She inwardly prays that they'll move and the blender will stop making that terrible screeching sound.

"Morni-" A voice says behind her. "Oh, hey. It's you again."

Natara turns around and her eyes meet with Jace's. Her face instantly flushes and she flashes him a nervous smile. Great, he gets to see me destroying the blender.

"I've never done this before," Natara sheepishly admits. Thankfully, the blender starts moving again and the sound quiets to a more normal churn.

"And I've never seen someone look so mortified while using a blender," Jace grins. Natara presses another button that brings the blender to a stop and pours the smoothie into a glass. "Let me help with the last part, at least. It's the hard part." 

He reaches around her and pulls open the fridge door, grabbing a can of whipped topping out of the fridge. He presses his finger against the nozzle and then expertly twirls it around the top of the smoothie. When he pulls away, there is a perfect whipped cream swirl on top of the pumpkin spice smoothie.

"Wow, thanks," she says. She knows if she had tried doing that it would have probably looked like a leaning tower of whipped cream. This, instead, looks picture perfect. "You'll have to teach me your tricks so I can do it myself next time."

"Or I could do it for you every day," Jace winks and pulls a mug out of the cabinet, prepping the machine for his morning coffee.

Did he mean that to be flirty? Was it flirty? 

Natara's heart flutters. She doesn't know what to say so she continues to smile, her face growing redder as she slips out of the room, escaping in the direction of Mr. Vice's office.