Rafael
I stood there for only a moment, the cold air of the walk-in freezing the feeling of his lips into mine, before I shut my mouth and turned to leave.
I couldn’t let him walk away like it was nothing and then let him think it meant more to me.
It clearly meant nothing.
He was worked up and angry, and he was probably hopped up on painkillers – if that really was what they were – and therefore not in his right mind. As soon as we’d kissed, he had realized his mistake and walked away from me with a growl.
The kiss was nothing.
But it was everything.
I resisted the urge to touch my lips with my fingers like a schoolgirl, like I had just been kissed for the first time. I kept my head down and walked to my station, noticing from the corner of my eye that Drake was already at his with his hands busy. He was back to work. Straight back to work. He didn’t need any time to process what had just happened.
Because it meant nothing.
But it meant everything .
I tried to ignore the pounding of my heart as I grabbed my list of tasks for the day, neatly written out the night before on a sheet of paper I had clipped to the front of the board I liked to carry around. Underneath it were the order forms I needed to fill out and the list of bookings we already had for tonight – which wasn’t much help in predicting what we would need to make, but since this stupid contest had I started, I liked to keep an eye out for returning customers and see if they had previously ordered my lobster risotto.
I couldn’t understand a word of the list. It was like it was written in Latin. I recognized the letters, sure, but the language itself was nothing to me.
I looked at my hand where it held the clipboard. Was that my hand?
Everything felt different.
It was like the world had tilted on its axis and tipped me into an alternate dimension. One that was familiar enough to our own that I could pretend I belonged here, but different enough that I was completely out of my depth.
I needed to cut some pastry.
I took the cutter and the tray of dough I’d already made and patted it down, cutting out a serrated circle. I lifted it up. The pastry I’d cut stayed within the cutter, not dropping out like it was supposed to. I stared at it. I took a knife and pushed it out and it dropped down onto the counter with a soft plop .
Or was I supposed to cut the strawberries first?
I picked one up and sliced it down the middle. My hands didn’t feel like my own. There was a moment when I didn’t realize, and then –
“Ouch!” I hissed, recognizing belatedly that the red liquid around the strawberry wasn’t juice. I’d cut the end of my finger.
“Chef?” Ainslie said, materializing at my side so quickly I almost jumped. Had he been in the kitchen this whole time? He looked at my finger, swore, and grabbed a box of blue band-aids out from a lower shelf. Before I could even figure out what was happening, he’d ripped one out of the paper packaging and slicked it down over the cut, making me wince.
I looked up. Drake was watching me with wide eyes and an open mouth, his hands not moving. Our eyes met for the briefest moment and then he was looking down, swallowing hard and cutting whatever he was cutting on the board in front of him again.
I looked down again. The sight of my blood on the counter had me coming back into myself, although everything still felt off-kilter and I had a feeling it would for a while. I glanced at the to-do list. It made sense now. I wasn’t even supposed to be working with the strawberries for another hour.
“Grey hasn’t come back in?” I murmured out of the side of my mouth to Ainslie. I didn’t want anyone else to overhear us. Correction: I didn’t want Drake to hear me.
“Not yet,” he said, shaking his head. He sighed. “I really hope he changes his mind. Luca’s a good guy.”
I nodded. “I think we all feel that way.”
But Grey didn’t return to the kitchen before service began, and once it did, things got hectic fast. I was off my game, and maybe it was my imagination, but I thought Drake was slower than usual, too. Maybe that had nothing to do with me. Maybe he really was in pain, and now that I’d brought it up, he didn’t want to be seen taking any more painkillers. Maybe Beau was being loyal and not helping him as much as usual since Drake had shown he wasn’t a member of the team.
Right. He’d let us down over Luca. That was still true. I couldn’t allow a kiss to knock that truth out of my head.
Even if it had been a mind-blowing kind of kiss.
“I have an order, and you’re not going to like it,” Nikolai said, coming into the kitchen with a slip of paper between his hands – a page from his order notebook.
I narrowed my eyes. “Why?” I couldn’t think of many reasons that I would be unhappy with a customer placing an order. Maybe if they wanted me to go across to another restaurant and get the food there because ours wasn’t good enough, but I doubted Nik would have taken the order in that case.
“It’s the guy who complained about the dishes,” Nikolai said. His mouth was a flat line of displeasure. “He wants the risotto this time.”
“My risotto?”
Nikolai nodded.
I bit my lip.
“Have you seated him somewhere where the cameras can see him?” I asked.
“Of course,” Nikolai said. “He’s near the entrance. Unless he complains about a draft and demands to move, we have him right under the eye in the sky.”
His phrasing made my lips twitch in a smile, but only for a moment. There was serious work to do now. We had to prove Luca’s innocence, and the best way to do that was surely to catch him in the act of trying to get a free meal again.
I took a plate out from under the counter and looked at it from all angles. It was clean. Cleaner than clean. I gestured to Nikolai. “Do you have your cell phone with you?”
Without answering, he understood what I wanted: he stepped forward and took a picture of the plate, showing how clean it was. He stood patiently by and waited as I plated up the risotto, taking a picture at the end of it as well. It looked perfect. It was probably the best risotto I had ever plated.
“Right,” I said, handing it to him with a satisfied determination. “Let’s see him try to say that the plate was dirty this time.”
The satisfaction, however, did not last long.
Because not ten minutes after Nikolai had taken the plate out to the customer, he returned with a simmering anger on his face that made me very glad I wasn’t on the receiving end of it.
“He says there is shell in risotto,” he said. I had noticed previously that Nik’s accent got stronger and his grammar got worse when he was emotional in any way. I didn’t have either the heart or the courage to correct him.
“There was no shell in the risotto,” I scoffed. “What is he saying? Egg or lobster?”
“Lobster. He says he bit right into it and hurt his tooth.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I huffed. “Have you checked the footage?”
“Come with me,” he said, jerking his head back to the restaurant.
I understood why. The camera footage could only be viewed from one place. Grey’s office.
I made a quick gesture to Ainslie to take over plating and stepped out through the kitchen’s swinging door, fully into the restaurant. It always felt weird to do this in the middle of service. I felt like everyone was staring at me, so I kept my head down and my eyes on the floor. I didn’t know what was more horrifying: that someone might catch sight of me and complain about the food, or that they might catch my eye and praise me about the food.
Thankfully, it was only a short walk to Grey’s office, and we managed it without getting interrupted.
Grey looked up when we entered, and immediately made a face. “Oh, come on,” he said. “It’s the middle of service. Stop hassling me about the kid and go back to work.”
“You need to see something,” I said, instead of trying to argue with him: I wanted to get right to the point. “It’s on the camera footage.”
Grey grunted and turned to the bank of screens to his left; it was set up like a security booth, only Grey had never actually hired security. It seemed pointless. The only time we usually ever needed this footage would be if someone broke in after hours, or if someone carried out an illegal act on the premises and the police asked to see it. Neither of those things had happened yet.
“What am I looking at?” Grey asked. He sounded irritable still like he was resenting us for interrupting… whatever it was he did in here at his desk all night.
“Over here,” Nikolai said, moving over to one of the screens and tapping on the table where our rogue customer was sitting. I squinted my eyes at him. I didn’t recognize him – he just looked like he could be anybody. “We need to go back about ten minutes.”
Grey pushed a few buttons and rewound the footage from the live feed, then hit play again. “Well?”
“Hang on,” Nikolai said, holding up a finger. “Hang on… and… there!”
He gestured triumphantly at the screen as the diner looked around to check no one was watching him, reached into his pocket, drew out something wrapped in a handkerchief, and then stuffed whatever it was into his risotto before returning the handkerchief to where it came from.
“He’s asking for a refund because he found something in his risotto?” Grey guessed.
“It’s him,” Nikolai said, looking at him like he couldn’t believe he needed to explain this. “The guy. The one who said Luca didn’t clean the plates.”
Grey turned to him and I could almost see the moment he realized he had been wrong. It was the moment steam started coming out of his ears. He’d made a mistake, and now he was going to have to own up to it and ask Luca to come back.
Grey cleared his throat.
“I’ll deal with him,” he said. “Nikolai, I’d appreciate it if you would go and stand by the front door, just in case we need to call the police in order to prevent this man from leaving without paying his bill.”
Nikolai nodded grimly, and I couldn’t help but picture our broad-shouldered Russian waiter standing in the doorway, blocking anyone who tried to get past. I wasn’t sure I would be brave enough to attempt it once he had one of his cold glowering looks on.
I watched on the cameras for a moment as Grey approached the diner who had complained so many times, hands behind his back in a pretense of humility until he leaned over and said something quietly into the man’s ear. As soon as he heard whatever Grey said, the man’s eyes popped open wide and he immediately glanced at the door – before hurriedly reaching for his wallet.
I’d seen enough, and it would be easy to slip out back to the kitchen unnoticed – especially if any of the diners around him caught on to what was happening and started watching him. I made my way there with my eyes down, only glancing up once to see the customer laying his card against a reader, visibly sweating.
But despite all the excitement, and despite the fact that I hated being out in the restaurant in my chef’s whites…
I hesitated for a beat too long in front of the swinging door to the kitchen, knowing that as soon as I stepped through, I would be in the same room as Drake again.
I kept my eyes on the floor and tried as hard as I could to pretend that no one else in the world existed so I could get through the service.