Rafael
I glared at Drake over the plate I was working on, watching him turn and check on the progress of Nikolai and Kit as they took the first dishes into the restaurant. Chaos was about to unfold, but it barely made a difference. I’d been living in chaos all day.
Especially since he and Grey had gone to the back of the kitchen together, down into the storage hall, and hadn’t emerged back out again for a suspiciously long time. In fact, Grey had never emerged at all.
They’d had sex. In the food storage. I knew it.
It had been quick, which was at least one thing to be bitterly pleased about. Neither of them was anything special. But Drake had come back belatedly with a tray of vegetables – a tray he hadn’t needed, because it was still sitting untouched on the side of the prep counter – and with his hair all mussed up. Like someone had run their hands through it.
And Grey hadn’t reappeared at all. If I knew him, he’d taken a moment to tuck himself back into his pants and then snuck out the back exit, sidling around his own building to hide in his office so no one would yell at him for sleeping with yet another employee.
Not that ‘sleeping with’ really did it justice, given it could only have lasted all of five minutes. They’d been flirting hard enough in the build-up to get each other riled up. It was quick and dirty, whatever it was. Maybe Drake had sucked Grey off.
I closed my eyes momentarily against the image entering my head and tried to focus on anything other than the way it made jealousy clutch red-hot at my stomach.
It wasn’t hard to find something. I still had dozens of plates to finish, and the service was only just beginning.
“Watch out,” I snapped, as one of Drake’s plates pushed over into my half of the plating station. It was only meant for one person at a time, maybe a sous chef to stand to the side, but with the two of us jostling for Head Chef, we were both using it at once. It only worked when we kept to our own sides.
It worked better when Drake kept to his own end of the kitchen and I took on plating duties for the full service, but apparently, that wasn’t allowed on a day when everything was so much more important.
“Oh, calm down, princess,” Drake said. He was still using that sly, flirtatious tone on me. It made me feel sick, now, knowing what he’d just done. It made me feel stupid. For a short while, I’d started to believe he was flirting with me because he wanted to, not just to put me off my game. “I’m sure you won’t die just because the edge of one plate is out of line.”
“It’s not out of line, it’s on my side,” I snapped at him. “Kit and Beau are serving from your end of the table first, so I need more room. If you’re going too fast to keep up with their pace, you need to stop and work on something else until they’ve cleared some room.” I pushed his plate back over the imagined line that divided the table exactly in half.
Drake stopped dead on what he was doing and looked right at me. I didn’t bother looking up. I had more garnish to put on my risottos.
He moved the plate back, extending a single finger to inch it over the line.
I stopped what I was doing, too, and glared at him.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I snapped.
“Filling my time while I wait for Kit and Nikolai to clear my side of the station,” he said evenly.
“Here they come now,” I said. “Try not to trip and fall on anyone’s lap.”
He tilted his head sharply to the side at me, but I was already looking away and didn’t have time to read his expression. Maybe he had fancy plating to do, and maybe he was quicker at being fancy than I was, but I still had all the other dishes that had been ordered outside of our showcase items. I didn’t have time to mess around.
The kitchen was not a place to be messing around.
Mentally, physically, or otherwise.
“Behind!” Ainslie called out, moving past me to take a ton of dirty dishes from the entrees we’d sent out over to the dishwashing station. Beau was rushing more precisely-cut square vegetable pieces over to Drake. Drake himself had already looked away from me and busied himself on arranging a couple more of his so-called mosaics. Kit and Nikolai seemed to sweep into the kitchen every minute, their feet accelerating as soon as they were through the swinging door and no longer needed to appear calm and measured in front of the customers. Plates passed under my nose and were gone again, some of them even before I had really fully verified to myself that they looked as good as I could make them.
Which, admittedly, was never close to as good as Drake could make them. But it didn’t matter. No matter how many Instagram posts his food inspired, mine had one thing going for it that would guarantee the repeat orders: the taste.
The buttery, white-wine-infused risotto base. The tender poached lobster meat. The luxurious and earthy flavor of the truffle oil drizzled over it all. My dish was the winner. It had to be. There was no amount of visual flash that could replace a dish like this.
“We have a returned plate,” Nikolai announced loudly, bursting back into the kitchen with a dish held high in one hand. Both Drake and I froze, our gazes snapping sharply to him. It was a steak meal – one of the plates Drake had been in charge of. I resisted a smirk. This wasn’t a smirking matter. We prided ourselves here on the low rate of returned plates; getting one back from a customer was a serious event.
“Why would it be sent back?” Drake asked, his eyes narrowed as he examined the approaching steak. “That meat is perfect.”
Nikolai spun the plate around to present it under our noses with a flourish. “Plate is dirty,” he said, his native accent coming more to the fore under his tense mood.
All eyes in the kitchen snapped to the dishwashing nook, even those of us who were at such an angle that we couldn’t actually see Luca. After a long moment, he peered around the corner with wide eyes under his messy hair.
“I’m washing the plates,” he said, as if we were all accusing him of not doing so.
I leaned over the dish in question. There was a kind of brown smudge across the edge of the rim on one side. It didn’t appear to be anywhere even close to the actual food, but still – the customer had the right to demand a new plate if this one wasn’t clean.
Drake sighed. “I’ll replate an extra meal,” he said. “Take him one of these first so he doesn’t get even angrier.”
Nikolai switched out the plates and I watched as Drake began to carefully transfer one of the extra prepared steaks to a new, clean plate – checking it first. I looked up and saw Luca still watching us with a worried expression.
“It’s okay,” I told him, shouting over the steam and hustle of the kitchen in his direction. Someone needed to take on the leadership role here since Drake was more interested in his stupid pretty plate than making sure the team was actually working together and staying motivated. “Keep going. It’s a one-off. Just be really thorough with every plate, okay?”
Luca nodded unhappily and his head disappeared back around the bend, and I concentrated back on my own work.
The interruption had been unwelcome, but that was the reality of life in the kitchen. We had no choice but to move on and keep working. Anything less would mean failure, and on a night like tonight, we couldn’t risk failure.
Which seemed like a good way to move on, until Nikolai walked back into the kitchen with a dish held in the air again, thunderously declaring: “Customer sent second dirty plate back.”
Drake and I exchanged a glance. For once, it wasn’t a look of animosity or even gently flirtatious ribbing that passed between us. It was concern.
Luca hadn’t popped his head out this time.
I looked down at the plate. Another brown smear, this time closer to the food, on the inner part of the plate’s thick rim. I didn’t blame the customer for not wanting to eat it.
But…
“Same customer?” I asked.
Nikolai nodded tersely. He had a look on his face like we were all deliberately testing him, and I didn’t blame him, either. Dealing with customer complaints in the middle of a busy night like this was no waiter’s idea of fun.
I looked at Drake. “Didn’t you check them while you were plating up?”
He frowned deeply. “I always check,” he said. “That smear wasn’t there.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he snapped. He met my eyes. “I know what you think of me. But no matter what you want to say about me, there’s one thing you can’t take away from me. I make pretty fucking food. I don’t let it go out on dirty plates.”
He had a point.
And despite the way I felt about him, despite the rivalry between us and the fact that this was exactly the kind of thing that would give me an advantage… I believed him.
“Watch the customer,” I told Nikolai. “Give him the new plate and ostentatiously point out how clean it is. Apologize and bow and scrape like your life depends on it, so he thinks you’re trying to show how sorry you are. But you’re really showing him that you know for a fact the new plate is clean.”
“You think that will stop him from complaining again?” Drake asked.
I shrugged. “I think it will stop the same plate bouncing back in here all night long. Nikolai, look at all the plates on the table before you leave, now that I think of it. I don’t want this customer contaminating anyone else’s food to get a free dish, either. I notice the steak’s been cut into on each one, and half the tomato side is gone.”
Nikolai nodded smartly. I could see he understood the customer grift as well as I did.
At the back of the kitchen, though, I watched Beau and Ainslie muttering together and cutting glances in Luca’s direction.
Even with a second complaint, there was no time to stop and think about it for long. In fact, it only made the rush worse: now there was another extra steak meal to make, and everything had to be done before the dessert rush started. Drake and I barely spoke for the rest of service, our fingers rushing to spoon sauces, push cubes of vegetable into place, scatter garnish, and nudge every loose grain of rice back into place.
Until, finally, I looked up from the plate of cheesecake I had just finished garnishing and reached for the next – only to find that there was no next.
We were done.
I looked up and around the kitchen with a sigh. Ainslie, Beau, and even Drake all seemed just as exhausted as I felt. We had all worked very hard, and the reward was in the fact that there had only been those two single complaints. Every time the doors swung open to let Nikolai and Kit in, we’d been able to hear exactly how much the diners were enjoying their food.
But now it was done. The energy in the room seeped and sagged away as the adrenaline that had been carrying us all disappeared.
“Alright,” I said. “We might as well call it. Beau, Ainslie, you can go home. I can deal with any last orders or returned desserts that come in.”
I thought we were done – but, apparently, the evening had one more surprise in store for us.
Because that was when Grey burst through the doors, his face a twisted mask of fury.