The chapter opens with a conversation between the two young men. The narrator asks the young men if they've broken up. The young men admit that they did, but they're not sure if it was because they were too close or because they didn't like each other. They decide to take a break from each other's company for a bit, and the narrator feels relieved that they'll be able to get back together. He asks if the break-up means that he's going to be back together with the young man. The two men agree that they don't want to be together, but the narrator doesn't know if that means they can be together again. He wants to know if the two of them are really meant to be apart, and if so, what's the point of spending some time apart? The narrator tells him that if they are, then it's not really meant that they be together at all. He then asks if she's been up to something new, and she says that she hasn't been working on anything new. He tells her that he has been experimenting with different things, and that's why his dish isn't doing well. He's trying to enter a food contest, and he thinks that his dish will do well in the competition, but he'll have to wait until the next week to enter it. He wonders why he couldn't figure out a way to spice up the dish with a sauce. He says that he tried a lot of different spices, too, but that he just wasn't able to figure out how to make the dish taste good. He thinks that he should have tried something else, too. The