"Parlez-vous francais?" Pierre asked her as she kneaded the puff pastry dough.

Abebi just smiled, shook her head, then said, "English?"

He shook his head as he pressed his hands into a section of his own dough and started working next to his new neighbor at Shanghai's most popular French restaurant. The language of the kitchen was French and English—but only the executive chef spoke both.

Under normal circumstances, Pierre would have been annoyed at being assigned to his least-favorite job and stationed next to a person who didn't even speak his language. They had to work together, after all. And how were they supposed to do that if they didn't even understand each other? But there was something he liked about Abebi. She was serious and hardworking, and just so happened to make the lightest puff pastry he'd ever tasted. The fact that she also had gorgeous eyes the color of liquid chocolate didn't hurt matters.

Abebi glanced back at him, not looking very hopeful, but wrinkled her brow. "Isoko? From Nigeria." Her voice was lilting and soft.

"Pas du tout," Pierre said, but a grin spread across his face to match hers.

"That means 'not at all.'" Jack snorted as he slipped past them with bags of sugar, then threw another comment over his shoulder: "Abebi, don't waste your time with le Frenchie unless you're thinking about learning French."

"Maybe he'll learn English or Isoko," Abebi said.

Pierre didn't understand a word of what they were saying even though the conversation was clearly the level of kindergarten English. But Pierre's strengths were not in puff pastry so focusing on the job and a foreign language wasn't happening.

And now he whistled out a sigh of dissatisfaction. His dough wasn't right. It was too heavy, meaning the resulting croissants would be like bricks. And then Abebi's hand touched his, gently pushing it to the side. She patted the sad blob, dug her fingers into it, tasted, then frowned.

"Je sais, je sais." I know, I know. He said the words more to himself than to anyone else as he wiped the back of his wrist over his damp forehead.

But the situation didn't intimidate Abebi. She was already in trouble-shooting mode, and through a few hand gestures, managed to show Pierre the problem. He responded, and together, they developed their own sort of sign language, punctuated with smiles and laughter. Abebi helped him start from scratch, and somehow, when the chef lit into him for falling behind, it didn't even matter. The only thing that mattered was that Abebi was grinning at him.

At the end of their shift, he would ask her out. He wasn't worried about the language barrier anymore because, with or without words, he and Abebi understood each other. What was blooming in his heart was universal.