Rafael
I slumped down on a low bench against the wall where we often sat to rest during quieter service days, letting my head rock back onto the cool surface of the white-painted brick and closing my eyes for a moment. I rubbed my hands over my face. What a night.
“Chef?” Beau asked quietly.
“What’s up, Beau?” I asked. I didn’t try to hide how exhausted I was from my voice. This had been a night as intense as any I’d ever experienced in my career as a chef.
“Luca came back in when you were gone.”
I nodded; I’d seen him rush past me while I was heading for the office. It had been fast, but I could have sworn I’d seen tears on his face. With the mission I’d had in mind, I hadn’t had the time to go after him first. “Is he fired?”
Beau nodded and sank down on the bench next to me. “So, I guess someone needs to finish the dishes.”
“Right,” I said and sighed.
“Ainslie went home,” Beau added. “He said he wasn’t going to get stuck doing it since you’d already told us to leave.”
I looked sideways at him and smiled briefly. “You’re a good one, Beau. Thanks for staying. But, forget about it. We all deserve a break. We’ll take care of it before service tomorrow.”
“I don’t think the plate was dirty,” Beau said.
I looked at him.
“I was helping Chef Drake plate up all night,” he said. “I mean, I wasn’t actually doing the plating, but I was bringing stuff back and forth for him and laying out the plates. I never saw any dirty marks on anything. And he was paying a lot of attention. I don’t think he would have missed it.”
Possibilities flew through my mind. Maybe he was wrong; maybe Drake was strung out or high and he’d missed a lot of things. But then again, Beau was right about one thing for sure. Drake had been paying a lot of attention to his plating. I hadn’t seen a single vegetable mosaic that was anything less than perfect every time I’d had a chance to glance over.
“Well, I don’t know how this is all going to shake out,” I said with another sigh. “We might be down both a dishwasher and a chef by the time we come in tomorrow.”
Beau gaped at me. “Who? Not me?”
I looked at him and could almost have laughed, except that the fear in his eyes was genuine. “No, not you, buddy. Sorry. It’s Drake. He’s in with Grey now.”
“What for?” Beau asked, his indignant and surprised voice coming out like a squeak.
I hesitated. How much was okay for me to say? If Drake didn’t get fired for this, he would be at work tomorrow and Beau would know more about him than he needed to. Was this a confidentiality issue, or should I tell Beau everything so that he could help me watch out for more signs of Drake being high?
Or was it all a moot point if he was going to be fired anyway?
I rubbed my hands over my face again. It had been a long day.
“It’s, just…” I shook my head wordlessly. “I don’t know how much I can say until it’s all done.”
Beau seemed to accept that, sitting back and staring out across the kitchen with me. I couldn’t speak for him, but if he was feeling anything like I was, then he wasn’t getting up and going home because he was simply too tired to move.
“How do you feel about that?” he asked.
I blinked and looked at him. “Huh? I mean… it’s not great that we’re going to be short-staffed.”
He tilted his head sideways at me. “That’s it?”
I looked down. “It’s not how I wanted to get the job.”
“So, you didn’t maybe want him to get fired just so you could be Head Chef?”
“No!” I exclaimed. I looked indignantly at Beau and hit him lightly on the side of his arm. “Beau Weaver, how long have you known me? You think that’s how I do things?”
He gave me a light smile. “No, I don’t,” he admitted. “Just had to check.”
“I don’t want him fired,” I said. I looked down at my hands, at the fingers covered in blue band-aids and the various burn and cut scars I bore from my years in the kitchen. “Not like this, and not any other way, either.”
“You don’t want to be Head Chef?” he asked with a note of surprise.
“No, I…” I paused, trying to figure it all out myself. “I just… you can’t ever tell him this, but I kind of like having him in the kitchen.”
Beau chuckled. “You have the hots for him.”
“No!” I exclaimed. Beau was giving me a lot of reasons to exclaim, today. I was starting to feel like a teenage girl gossiping in the school hall. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“What? You don’t think he’s attractive? You flirt with him all the time.”
“He flirts with everyone,” I said dismissively.
“But you don’t.”
I stared at Beau for a moment. The revelation floored me. I hadn’t even really noticed it, but he was right. I’d given myself away easily to anyone who knew me.
I’d flirted back.
“Right,” I muttered. I cleared my throat. “I, uh. I guess I find him. You know. Slightly. Just… a tiny bit attractive.”
Beau laughed, but it wasn’t unkind. “You should tell him,” he said. “Especially if he gets fired. If you don’t tell him before he leaves, you might not get the chance.”
“No, I’m not going to tell him,” I said, resting my hand on my knee and my chin in my hand. “I don’t want to have some kind of one-night stand with him. I get the feeling that’s all he’s interested in.”
“You don’t know until you try,” Beau argued.
“Exactly.” I picked at a sewn-in patch on my trousers, my favorite loose pants that I loved to wear in the kitchen but that had been caught on snags or damaged by fire or spills a good number of times. “I don’t know. And I don’t want to get hurt.”
Beau snorted. “You’re crazy,” he said. “If I had someone I liked like that, I’d go after them no matter what. You might think he’s only into one-night-stands, but maybe once you actually had sex, you’d find out you were ridiculously compatible and he wouldn’t be able to resist.”
I scoffed. “Yeah, sure, if this was a book or a TV show. It’s not. It’s real life. That kind of thing doesn’t happen.”
Beau shrugged his shoulders. “It might. You just have to actually give it a chance first.” He got up. “If you really don’t need me, I’ll head out.”
I nodded in agreement. “Yeah, you go on ahead,” I said. “It’s fine. Things have wound down enough out there that I don’t think we’re going to have anything else coming in, anyway.”
Beau nodded. “I’ll head out front and tell Nikolai the kitchen’s closed, then I’m off.”
I nodded my thanks. He must have realized I was so tired, I wasn’t going to be getting up off this bench anytime soon – unless there was an emergency.
I sat there until close. Drake never came back in. Grey never came back in. Eventually, Nikolai came to tell me the last customer was gone and I got up, feeling all the aches and pains in my body and glad – not for the last time – that I’d driven to work. Even though it was a short enough distance away that I could easily walk it, after nights like tonight, I had no desire to walk anywhere. Even pressing my foot on the accelerator pedal felt almost like too much.
I locked the door of my apartment behind me, fell on the bed, and slipped into a deep sleep before I’d even taken my shoes off.
But I still had time, between shutting my eyes and drifting away, to wonder what I was going to find when I came to work tomorrow – and whether my chance to find out if Drake might be open to something more than just rivalry was gone forever.