Chapter 17 #2
He asked about Sazón’s reconstruction and pressed me to tell him what I was planning for the reopening menu, after I hadn’t answered him the last time we were in the restaurant.
Maybe it was the food, or the city laid out forty floors below us like something that couldn't reach us up here, or just that he'd asked like the answer mattered.
Whatever it was, I started talking, and the trouble with asking me to describe a menu I'm building from nothing is that there's no off switch once I begin.
“The dining room’s framed. We gutted the old layout completely.
” I set down my fork. I always set down my fork for the good part.
“Before, we had thirty covers crammed into a room built for twenty. This time, it’s fewer tables and an open pass, so people can watch the line work.
I want them to see the food before they ever taste it. ”
“That’s a risk.” He said it mildly, eyes on his plate. “Fewer tables is less revenue a night.”
I blinked. “How do you know that?”
“I played a restaurant owner once. I did the research.” He cut another piece of chicken like the fact was unremarkable. “Most independents fail in the first year on margins, not on cooking. You’re betting the experience is worth the higher check.”
“...That’s exactly what I’m betting.”
“Then the menu has to carry it.”
“The menu,” I said, “is going to carry it.”
And I was off.
I told him about the dishes I'd been scribbling on the backs of receipts for weeks.
The braised oxtail I'd been chasing since I was nineteen, falling off the bone over coconut rice.
A whole snapper, scored and crisped, with a sofrito so bright it tasted like somewhere I'd never been.
The empanadas I'd kept off the old menu because I was afraid they were too humble, too much mine, and had finally decided that humble and mine was the whole point.
“You’re describing your childhood,” he said.
“What?”
“It's not impressive food. It's comfort food made by someone with too much skill to leave it simple.” He turned the thought over, looking like he was examining the edges. “People won't come for the technique. They'll come because eating it feels like being taken care of.”
For a second I didn't say anything, because he'd just put words to the thing I'd been failing to explain for a year, and he'd done it between bites without appearing to try.
“You're annoyingly good at that,” I said.
“At what?”
“Seeing the thing underneath.”
“Occupational hazard.” But the corner of his mouth moved, and I caught it.
Somewhere along the way the lunch had stopped feeling like the assignment Trisha had put on his calendar.
It had stopped feeling like anything but two people who liked talking to each other—him listening like there was nowhere he'd rather be, me talking faster than I had in months, and not wanting it to end, which I was self-aware enough to recognize as a problem.
So I kept going, into the dishes I'd never have had the nerve to put on a menu before. I was mid-sentence about a mango glaze when he said, “You didn’t have to do that.”
I stopped. “Do what?”
“Esmeralda. In the elevator.”
I stared at him. “How do you know about that?”
“The private elevator has cameras and live audio recording. It's for safety purposes.”
My face heated. Who watched the camera feed in the elevator in the first place?
“You defended me. No one has ever done that before,” he said. He was looking at me, his eyes intent. As though the concept was foreign and he was turning it over, examining it from different angles.
We were on the same side of the desk now, he’d moved his chair closer without me realizing it, and the space between us had compressed into something denser and warmer. His blue eyes were steady on mine and there was a warmth in them I hadn’t seen before.
Appreciation. Gratitude.
“You know,” I said, trying to lighten whatever was building between us because it was getting hard to breathe, “if you keep looking at me like that, I’m going to think this lunch was a date.”
“Would that be a problem?”
I looked away. “It would be confusing.”
“Why?” His brows lifted.
“Because we have rules.”
“I made those rules.”
“And?” I looked back at him.
“And I’m starting to think I made them too fast.”
I swallowed, confused about what to say next.
A knock sounded. It startled me.
Trisha’s voice calling out that Christopher had a meeting in five minutes. He stood. I stood. We were closer than the office required, close enough to see the different shades of blue in his eyes, deep enough to drown in.
“Don't worry. No one will enter without my permission,” he murmured, leaning close.
He tilted his head down. I didn’t move.
Then he kissed me.
His hand found my jaw and tilted my face up. The kiss was slow. Tender. A sound left his lips, low and quiet, and his other hand found my waist, pulling me closer and I let him because I wanted this. Just as badly.
My hand found his chest. My fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt. I kissed him back and the kiss deepened and for a stretch of time I couldn’t measure. The glass-walled office, the forty floors beneath us, the security cameras, and the contract all disappeared.
It was just his mouth on mine, and the warmth between us.
He pulled back. His thumb traced my jaw once, gentle and slow, a gesture so careful it didn’t match anything I knew about Christopher Vale. Then he stepped away and grabbed his jacket from the chair.
“I have a meeting,” he said. His voice was steady but his eyes weren’t.
He left.
I stood in his empty office for a full thirty seconds, touching my lips, heart hammering, trying to reassemble the wall I’d been building between contract wife and someone special.
The wall had a problem now. A big one. Because there were no cameras in this office.
No photographers. No press. No audience.
He’d kissed me with no one watching.
Why?
I took the elevator down on legs that felt like they belonged to somebody else. Trisha was in the lobby, scrolling her phone, leaning against the reception desk.
She looked up, studied my face for two seconds, and grinned.
“So,” she said. “How was lunch?”
“Fine.”
“Uh-huh.” The sound was packed with everything she wasn’t saying and everything she’d already figured out. “Fine. Got it.”
I walked out of the building into the afternoon sun. The Miami heat hit my face but I could hardly think straight, feeling anything. I stood on the sidewalk and told myself, firmly and without an ounce of conviction, that the kiss meant nothing.
But there was no one except us.
No paparazzi to take a picture as proof of his happy married life.
No contract clause that required Christopher Vale to kiss me in his office in an afternoon.
So why did he?