Drake
I adjusted the strap on my wrist, trying to get the tension right. The brace was always either too tight, cutting off my circulation and making my hand throb in a different way, or too loose so that I could easily move my wrist in the wrong way and hurt it again.
“How’s your wrist doing?” Beau asked, glancing up from the prep station beside me.
“Fine,” I said, giving him a brief smile. I always said it was fine, even when it was throbbing so hard I couldn’t think. If my voice was strained when I said it, no one seemed to notice.
The atmosphere was strained enough to cover it.
It had been like this since the afternoon I took off, a month ago. No one was interested in telling me, but I figured out for myself that the glimpse I’d caught of Beau and Grey in the office hadn’t been a coincidence or a misunderstanding. They were sleeping together, and apparently, everyone else hated it.
It wasn’t that they were treating Beau badly, turning their backs on him for fucking the boss. Actually, it seemed to be the opposite. They were all so keen to look after Beau and shield him from Grey that he was actually frustrated with them, and it was Grey who was getting the cold shoulder from absolutely all of his employees.
Except for two, of course. Beau, who made round moon eyes at him whenever he entered the kitchen, and me – because I knew which side my bread was buttered, and I wasn’t about to throw my job away over my boss’s relationship.
Why should I give a fuck where he chose to stick his dick, so long as it wasn’t interfering with the work?
And it wasn’t – if anything, it was nice to have time without Grey walking into the kitchen at all hours, wanting to talk to us or flirt with people in the storage area. He kept mostly to his office unless there was something important to announce, so we could get on with things much more easily without fear of oversight.
I flipped the meat I was flash-frying with a flick of the tongs and clenched my teeth to avoid a hiss leaving my mouth. The strapping on my wrist was supposed to make it stronger, but it seemed to be getting worse, not better. Whatever I’d done that day in the walk-in had really fucked it up, and nothing the doctor had suggested seemed to work. All I could do was keep topped up on my pain pills, and that wasn’t something I wanted to risk here in the kitchen anymore in case Rafael wanted to throw any more accusations my way.
The man himself rocked up opposite me, standing on the other side of the counter at another station, and I looked up without meaning to. I caught his eye and we both averted our gazes almost immediately. It had been this way all month. No one talking. No one looking at each other.
Absolutely, definitively no one kissing each other.
Which was a shame, because I couldn’t help but think that I needed to scratch this itch. It was like when you got a song stuck in your head so deep it was driving you insane. You needed to listen to it, just once, and then it would go away – like the worms in your brain were satisfied now that they’d heard it at last. Sometimes, you just needed to remember that one line or how that riff sounded.
It was the same thing with Rafael’s lips.
Whenever he stood opposite me like this, I couldn’t help myself. My eyes flicked up to those beautiful lips and remembered how they tasted. How they felt.
And they craved one more taste.
Just once, I thought. Just once would get him out of my system.
But I knew even as I thought it that I was just lying to myself.
It was an excuse – a way to justify the fact that I wanted him in my bed, spread open, begging me to fuck him. That I wanted my name on his lips as he came. That I wanted him far more than I wanted this fucking job.
I could finally admit it to myself, but it didn’t change a thing, because Rafael hadn’t made a single move in my direction since that one kiss a month ago.
“How are we going on the entrée prep?” he asked, calling my attention. He said it so diffidently like he didn’t want to make too much of a big deal out of the fact that we were talking. It was only ever about work, now. I couldn’t even flirt with him properly anymore, not now we both knew there could be more behind it.
I looked at his mouth.
“I’m on time,” I told him, wrenching my eyes away and up to his. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t watching me, anyway.
My gaze dropped to his mouth again. His lips parted. He took a breath but seemed to hesitate. I was fascinated, watching the movement, waiting for him to speak or close his lips or do anything to dispel the image that was currently forming in my head of him on his knees in front of me, his lips parted just like that.
“Um,” he said.
I looked up.
He was staring right at me with a puzzled look on his face.
I cleared my throat. “You have something caught in your teeth,” I said and walked away from the station even though I wasn’t done with prepping and didn’t need anything from the walk-in.
I pretended to oversee what Beau was doing for a few minutes, fussing with his chopped vegetables and examining the cuts until Rafael finished whatever he had been doing and moved on to another station. Only then could I breathe enough to go back to work.
It was a quiet night. We didn’t have a lot of covers in the restaurant, to begin with, and by halfway through service, most of us were standing around aimlessly, with only a couple of chefs required to work through orders at any one time. There was some big event happening at the other end of town, so I figured most of our regulars or the casual diners we might usually attract were all over there.
“We’re down to two tables,” Nikolai announced as he came through the swinging doors to pick up the latest set of prepared dishes. “And both of them are on their mains.”
I blew out a heavy breath. “It’s going to be a long night.”
“Not for all of us,” Rafael said. “We only need two chefs. Ainslie, you stay with me; Beau and , you can go home. We can cover it with just two of us.”
I saw Luca popping his head out around the corner hopefully, as if he was thinking that he might be sent home as well, but there was no such luck for him. The dishes still needed washing, and it was better to have them taken care of now than to put extra work on his load in the morning. Even when the customers were done and stopped ordering, there were a lot of tools in the kitchen that needed cleaning ready for tomorrow.
“I’ll stay,” I said. I didn’t have any particular reason to go home early. There was no one waiting for me back there, after all. I’d moved into an apartment with a couple of roommates while I was waiting to find out if I would be settling here permanently to take the job, and I didn’t know or particularly like them. The kitchen was where I belonged and where I wanted to be, wrist problems or no wrist problems.
Rafael shot me a look. His eyes were unreadable behind his glasses. “Are you sure?”
“I’ll stay, too,” Beau said, answering the unasked question of whether to split up our usual teams or not. “I’m meeting Grey tonight after service, anyway.”
Ainslie barely held back a scoff and turned to grab his stuff without arguing. It was the mention of Grey that did it. He wasn’t shy about how much he disapproved of the relationship.
“Beau,” Rafael said softly. I followed his gaze and realized that Beau had shrunk in on himself, staring at the floor. “He’s just trying to look out for you.”
Ainslie was gone already, slinking out down the hall to the door. “It doesn’t feel like it,” Beau muttered, hugging his arms across his own chest.
Rafael sighed and wiped a hand across his forehead. He was tired, I could see that. An urge to go over there and put my arms around him and let him rest his head on my shoulder shook me to the core and I had to look away.
“He doesn’t want you to get hurt,” Rafael said. “We all love you, Beau. Ainslie can’t bear to watch because he knows it isn’t going to end well.”
“He doesn’t know that,” Beau shot back. “None of you do. None of you know what Grey’s like when it’s just the two of us.”
“Okay,” Rafael said, holding up his hands in defeat. He opened up his mouth – that sinful, tempting mouth – as if he was going to say something else, but then just nodded and repeated it. “Okay.”
He walked away, leaving Beau and I alone in the kitchen.
I hadn’t really noticed it before, but the kitchen was kind of cold. And despite the bright white overhead lights, certain corners were pretty dark, too. Like even the walls couldn’t hold out the fact that it was night out there.
I shoved my hands in my pockets and leaned against the wall, wondering how to pass the time if not by stealing glances at Rafael and imagining what I would do to him if he was into it.
“I’m going to go see if Grey’s in his office,” Beau said after maybe ten or fifteen minutes. No further orders had come in. “You can ask Nik to come and get me if you need me, right?”
I nodded. “Sure,” I said, shifting my weight to the other foot. Why prolong the misery by making two of us stand here alone and pointless instead of just one? Luca was still at his sink, but he had a habit of putting headphones in, and he was still working on the dishes. The only sound that filled the space was the clinking of plates under the water and the rattle as he put them onto drying racks.
I’d resorted to taking out my phone and playing stupid, mindless games on it when Kit poked his head through the swinging door, searching around and honing in when he found me. “Hey. Nik wanted me to tell you that the last customer just left.”
I sighed. “No one else came in?”
“Not yet. We’re open for another hour unless Grey decides to call it.”
“Great.” I sighed. “Luca?”
There was no response. I walked forward a few paces and waved my hand in Luca’s direction until the motion caught his eye and he popped out a headphone.
“Yeah?”
“Go home,” I told him. The stack of dishes in front of him was all clean, nothing left for him to keep up with. There was no point in keeping him here. If I did find the odd item that still needed washing, I could always do it myself.
“Just us for the next hour, then,” Kit said, smiling gamely. “Nik’s going home, too.”
“Just us,” I confirmed. “And the eternal boredom of an empty restaurant.”
Kit laughed. It had a way of lighting up his eyes. Even though he was younger, I probably would have considered it – if it wasn’t for the fact that my thoughts were already consumed by someone else. “Come out and sit,” he said. “You can duck and hide in the kitchen if someone comes in to eat.”
“Sure,” I agreed, following him out and sitting down. It was odd to be in the restaurant at night when all the lights were on and everything was set up for customers. Normally, when we ate family dinner, it was still bright enough outside to keep the neon off.
I sat and looked around, my eyes catching on the host stand. The swanky, professional computer system that kept track of booked tables and orders was still turned on, the screen lit up and ready for use.
“Say,” I said casually. “I don’t suppose you have access to data and statistics on that thing.”
Kit caught my eye with a twinkle in his. “The number of times customers have ordered a certain dish, for example?”
There wasn’t much point in pretending – he’d figured out exactly what I wanted to know.
“I don’t suppose you know the numbers for, let’s say for example, the seared scallops and the lobster risotto?”
Kit grinned at me. “Not only do I have the ability to look them up, but I’ve been looking them up this whole time. I know what the numbers are.”
“And?”
“For repeat customers only, you’re winning by enough that unless all of Rafael’s past customers come in at once, he’s got no chance of catching up with you.”
I looked away from him for a minute, digesting the news. “Wow,” I said at last. I had a feeling I’d had more orders – I knew how many dishes I’d had to prepare with my own hands, and I’d kept an eye on Rafael as well – but to hear that it was such a huge gulf…
“How does it feel to be a winner?” Kit asked me. Something was starting to make a little more sense. He and Nikolai hadn’t taken part in the silent treatment as much as the others, and they hadn’t been quite so obviously on Rafael’s side for all this time, either. It was because they’d known.
“Great,” I said automatically, but on the inside, I was wondering whether that was the true answer.
I was winning. That meant I was going to get the job.
And Rafael was going to leave.
How did I feel about that?
About Rafael losing his job so that I could have one?
About the team losing the person who was willing to stand up for them, even when it cost them his job? Who gave them almost fatherly advice, let everyone go home early while volunteering to stay, and dedicated everything he had to this kitchen and keeping it running smoothly?
I didn’t owe him anything. He wasn’t anything to me. We’d kissed one single time, and since then, there had been nothing. If anything, given the kiss was triggered by pure rage, we had the opposite of something.
He should have been nothing to me. Someone I had crushed on my way up the ladder – someone who failed to pass the test that I aced.
So why did I feel like the biggest piece of shit in the universe?