Rafael
“Where the hell is Drake?” I muttered under my breath, glancing around the busy, steam-filled kitchen and seeing not a single sign of my so-called rival. If he was hiding out in the storage unit or the walk-in taking pills again, then he was gifting me the job. Not that I was going to stop him.
“Uh, Chef?” Beau said. His cheeks were flushed, but perhaps that was because he was standing over a pot of boiling water. “Didn’t Grey tell you?”
I tilted my head and narrowed my eyes. I didn’t like the sound of that. “Tell me what?”
“Drake took off,” Beau said. “He has a doctor’s appointment.”
I blinked and stared at him. “What?”
Beau shrugged. “That’s just what I heard.”
“Today? Right now? Why didn’t anyone tell me this was coming up? He’s on the schedule for this service.”
“I think it was an emergency,” Beau said. His forehead creased. “Do you think he’s alright?”
I scoffed. “Yeah, I’m sure he’s alright,” I said. “He needs to duck out for an emergency doctor’s appointment on the very day that we all stop talking to him? I bet he’s just fine.”
A flicker of guilt passed over Beau’s face. “Maybe we shouldn’t do that when he comes back.”
I shook my head. “Just because you’ve been working closely with him as his line chef doesn’t mean you’re not still one of us,” I said. “Aren’t you?”
“Of course!” Beau exclaimed. “It’s just… well…”
“Well?” I prompted.
Beau flushed deeper, a bright red that made him look like he would be at home with the lobsters in my risotto. “He might be our boss soon.”
I blinked at him. It took me a moment to respond. “Right,” I said and looked back down at the mix I was stirring with a wooden spoon.
Beau had that little confidence in me that he really thought Drake would be taking the Head Chef job from under me?
It gave me serious pause. After all, Beau had worked closer with Drake than all of us. And Drake had taken Grey’s side over the whole Luca thing. But I’d proven I was right, hadn’t I?
Deep down, I knew one thing. That Grey was not as fair and even-minded as I would have liked him to be. The fact that I had stood up to him – perhaps even humiliated him – in front of the rest of the staff wouldn’t sit well with him. I would expect him normally to be snappish with me for a few weeks, but this was a different situation.
Right now, my job was on the line. Somehow, I’d become so confident in my role as the leader of this team, the person who they all followed and believed in, that I’d allowed myself to forget it wasn’t the team who would decide the ultimate Head Chef.
It was Grey.
And Drake had never forgotten that for a single second.
I lost myself in thoughts of how the hell I was going to make this up to Grey and make sure I could keep the job as I went through the motions of food prep, my hands taking over while my brain was otherwise occupied. I’d made these dishes so many times that it was all muscle memory by now, no need to concentrate properly.
The atmosphere in the kitchen was strange. It was only as I came out of my own head and started to think about the service ahead, while Beau called us all to family dinner, that I noticed it. We’d all been so cheerful when Luca came back to work, but having Drake leave meant we were all going to have to put in extra work. Then there had been my own introspective concentration, which couldn’t have helped the mood; Ainslie and Beau must have picked up on it.
When we sat down for dinner, I noticed that Grey was feeling it too: he was shifty, looking uncomfortable in his seat as though he wanted to be anywhere but eating with us.
Until Beau sat down at his right hand, flashed him a generous smile, and Grey smiled back.
I narrowed my eyes.
I didn’t like that at all .
“Dig in,” Beau said excitedly, directing us all to try the new recipe he’d tried for dinner, and the moment – whatever it was – was gone. I grabbed a fork and started to eat, but while the conversation moved in stilted and staccato bursts, I kept my mouth shut and my eyes on Beau.
Something was going on.
It became clear later, when we all headed back into the kitchen, that I wasn’t the only one to have noticed it.
“Okay,” Ainslie said. “What’s going on?”
Beau looked at him with wide eyes. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“He’s right,” I said. We both faced him with our arms crossed over our chests. “You and Grey. What is it? Are you on his side over everything now or something?” I remembered how he’d almost spoken to Drake this morning, despite the agreement we’d made in the group chat.
Was he ganging up on me? Was this how it started? Drake slowly siphoning off the whole team to join his and Grey’s side?
“I’m not on anyone’s side,” Beau said, with a flustered little move of his hand that would have convinced absolutely no one. “I’m just trying to get through the service, okay? Haven’t we all got a lot to do tonight?”
Ainslie and I mumbled and muttered under our breaths, but Beau was right. I was supposed to be leading this kitchen, so it chagrinned me a little that he’d been the one to point it out.
But when, even in the thick of service as we were rushed off our feet, he started humming a nice little tune, I couldn’t take it anymore.
“What is going on with you?” I demanded over the clatter of pans and serving tools. “You’re dreamy-eyed and grinning in the middle of one of the worst services we’ve had in ages. What’s going on?”
Beau flushed bright red again. “Nothing, I told you,” he said.
“I know that look,” Ainslie said suspiciously. “That’s the look you had after that night at the club. That’s the look you have when you’re getting laid.”
There was a long, horrified moment of silence between the three of us.
“No,” I said.
“Oh, no,” Ainslie echoed, staring at Beau with a piece of wilted spinach forgotten between his thumb and forefinger.
Beau ducked his head and looked at the plates he was working on. “It’s new,” he said.
“No, come on,” I said, shaking my head. “You have to tell us we’re wrong. We have to be wrong. Grey?”
“It’s not like what you’re thinking,” Beau said defensively.
“Oh, so you’re not sleeping with your boss, who is notorious for sleeping with anything that moves and breaking hearts wherever he goes?” I asked.
“You’re not falling for the one person in this place who is absolutely guaranteed to let you down?” Ainslie called and raised.
“It’s not like that!” Beau insisted. “He’s changed. He’s changing . He’s different with me.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I’d thought Beau was smart, that he wouldn’t fall for this kind of thing. At the same time, though, part of me was surprised this hadn’t happened sooner.
Beau was exactly the type of man who would fall for someone like Grey. He had a complex about the way he looked – every now and then he’d comment about his own weight in such a hateful way that it made my heart hurt for him, but he wouldn’t hear any of us telling him that he was good-looking and that his weight was fine – and Grey was a charmer. The kind of person who could turn his attention on you and make you feel special. That was dangerous for someone like Beau.
Someone who dreamed of being treated like he was special, but inwardly believed he would never deserve it.
“He says he’s changing every single time,” I told him sadly. “That’s just what Grey does. We’ve all seen him do it time and time again. Beau, he’s not the one for you.”
Beau shook his head emphatically. “Why do you want me to be unhappy?” he asked. “Is it so crazy to think that Grey might actually like me?”
“It’s not that,” Ainslie began, but Beau wasn’t done.
“Well, he does like me!” he exclaimed. “He really likes me. He told me. We slept together. And we’re dating now.”
“You’re dating?” I repeated incredulously. Grey didn’t date . He slept with someone and then never called them again. We’d seen it happen so many times, and he had never cared before if that person happened to work in his own kitchen.
“Yes!” Beau said. He threw his arms up in the air, splattering food from the spatula he was wielding onto the wall at the side of the kitchen. “Is it so hard to believe that someone might actually want to date me?”
“No, of course not,” I tried, but Beau was already off in his own head, making his own conclusions about what we were trying to say. He shook his head, stomping off to the other side of the kitchen and noisily clattering about with pans and dishes to show how annoyed he was.
I exchanged a look with Ainslie. This wasn’t going to go well. Beau was going to end up getting his heart broken, and then what would we do? We couldn’t lose him. He was a good chef.
There wasn’t much time to sit and talk about it or plan a way to rescue Beau from his inevitable doom. We were in the middle of service. We all returned to our respective tasks, and silence settled over my kitchen once again.
It wasn’t a good silence. It wasn’t the silence of chefs hard at work, flowing around one another so well because they had worked together long enough to cut out the need for communication. It was awkward, and angry, and nervous, and I hated it.
If Drake was here, he would have defused it.
An odd feeling settled over me. I had grown used to standing shoulder-to-shoulder at the counter with him over the past month. I had come to expect to hear his stupid, flirty jokes or even just the sound of his voice as he moved behind other workers in the kitchen, warning them he was back there.
I missed having him here.
Which was stupid, on a number of different levels. First, because he was a pain in the ass who never shut up, always moving things to the wrong places and completely disregarding the rules of the kitchen. Second, because I hated it when he flirted with me because it made my heart beat faster and my face flush and took away my concentration from the food.
And third, because there was only another month or so before Grey would make his final decision, and then only one of us would be working here. The other…
Well, if he got the job, I supposed Grey would expect me to carry on working, supporting him like I had done for Jesse. But I wasn’t sure I could do that. I didn’t know how my ego would handle it. Could I take orders from him? Watch him mess up all my systems and stop enforcing them? Could I really let go of the role I’d been working all this time?
And if I got the job, I had no doubt that Drake would be going somewhere else, because it was clear that his ambition was about being a Head Chef – not about working for The Crow in particular.
Once Grey made his decision, I wasn’t going to see Drake ever again.
The thought left a hollow pit in my stomach that I tried hard not to think about for the rest of service, but when I returned home to my empty apartment for the night, it became that much harder to ignore.