Drake
Someone was hammering at the door of my apartment.
I groaned and rolled to look at the clock by the side of the bed. It was early in the morning. Way too early. Like, bakers getting up early. Not chefs. Chefs could sleep in.
Unemployed bums who were recovering from major surgery could sleep in even longer.
The hammering came again. Someone was out there, and they weren’t going away.
I tried to ignore it, but my eyes cracked open wider at the thought that it could be some kind of criminal. This wasn’t the best neighborhood in town, and it was possible that someone was out there with a gun looking for a drug dealer or seeing if I was home before they robbed the place. Maybe I needed to call the police.
I got up and went to the door, looking through the peephole into the corridor.
And recoiled, my heart suddenly pounding in my chest.
This was much worse than a thug with a gun intending to burglarize my apartment.
It was him .
He lifted his fist to hammer again and I swallowed hard, knowing that I’d be getting an earful from my neighbors if I didn’t stop him from making so much noise. I grabbed the door handle and opened it before I could think again, not giving myself the opportunity to wimp out.
“What?” I asked, glaring as best as I could when the sight in front of my eyes made me want to fall to my knees in gratitude.
I had gone two weeks and three days without seeing him. Now he was standing there in my hallway, it was like the sun coming out. It was an emotional sucker punch to the gut that I didn’t know how to take.
“You’re a hard man to track down,” Rafael said, stepping forward. I had to move to the side to let him in, or it looked like he was just going to bulldoze straight through me. He stalked into my apartment and glanced around; I wasn’t sure what he saw, but it couldn’t have been much, because most of the place was just full of boxes I hadn’t unpacked yet.
“What do you mean?” I asked, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. I had no hope of stopping him, apparently, so I just sat down in the one free rickety chair I had that matched my rickety kitchen table. It was at that moment that I realized I was still in only a pair of boxers, my version of pajamas. If Rafael minded, he hadn’t said anything, but I still found myself swinging my legs under the table to feel a little less vulnerable.
“You haven’t been answering my calls,” Rafael said. Apparently, he was satisfied with his look around, because now he turned back to address me directly. “And the address you put down on your employee intake forms turned out to be a dud.”
I took a breath, remembering. “Right. I was only staying there for three months. I figured at the end of it, I would either have to get something permanent or go back where I came from.”
“Based on whether or not you got the job?” Rafael asked.
I nodded and yawned. “Obviously.”
He gestured around before leaning on the back of the other chair, the one that was still covered in boxes, his hands gripping the top of the wood tightly. “Then what do you call this?”
I was still sleep-deprived; it took me a minute to figure out what he was saying.
The logic hit me slowly. Right. Because I hadn’t gotten the job, so I should have gone home instead of finding somewhere more ‘permanent’. Not that this really counted. The shitty apartment had been the only thing I could find on short notice, and now I was stuck with it.
“I knew I was ahead,” I said at last. There was no point in hiding it now. “Kit told me. So, I put down a deposit on this place and moved in before Grey did… well, what Grey did.”
Rafael sighed, letting out a tense breath. “You cocky motherfucker,” he said.
I couldn’t help myself but grin. Why was it that curse words always sounded so much better when it was Rafael who said them? “Well, you can be satisfied that it didn’t pay off,” I said. “I’m going to be out on my ass and losing my deposit within a couple of months since I’m out of work now.”
“You don’t have to be,” Rafael said.
I looked at his face and I knew. I just knew. He was here to get me to work at The Crow again. I sank my face into my hands, pillowing it on the table, and groaned out loud.
“What?” Rafael asked. When I didn’t immediately answer, he was concerned enough to move around the table and put his hand on my back.
I almost flinched. The warmth of his skin emanated on my bare back… yeah, he was just like the sun coming out. And I’d been living in winter.
But it didn’t matter this time, did it?
“I do have to be,” I said, raising my head. “I know what’s about to happen. You’re going to get all excited about some new plan you have, and I’m going to have to tell you that it won’t work, and you’re going to put on some sad puppy dog face and make me feel like an asshole when it’s not exactly my fault, and we’ll be right back to the square we’re standing on now.”
“You don’t even know what I’m going to say,” Rafael insisted stubbornly.
I wasn’t awake enough to deal with this. “Fine,” I said, lifting one hand in a loose gesture of permission. “Go ahead.”
Rafael smiled.
I groaned again, but he was sitting down opposite me, shifting boxes onto the floor so we could be on the same level. “Everyone’s back at The Crow,” he said. “Well, nearly everyone. Beau’s never going back. And then there’s you.”
“How?” I asked, half-heartedly, because I knew how this was going to end no matter what Rafael said.
“Grey called me up that morning – you know, the morning we…” He trailed off, flushing, and I felt a clench deep in my stomach at the shame he obviously felt over what we’d done. “That’s why I had to rush off. He said he had a promise to make that would make me change my mind about quitting, so I thought I could at least hear him out.”
“And he made you an offer you couldn’t refuse,” I said, dully, but playing along.
“He created a new contract for us,” Rafael said. Barely concealed mirth sparkled in his eyes, and I wondered what the joke was about to be that he was clearly so excited to deliver. “He legally can’t sleep with anyone for a year. A whole year! If he does, I get a payout so huge that I’ll basically end up owning the place. And he can’t have sex with anyone from or within Crowhill Cove for another year after that. And he can’t sleep with an employee ever .”
I stared at him for a long moment. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“But it solves everything that has been wrong with The Crow,” Rafael said. “Don’t you see? It’s brilliant. If he screws up even one more time, I get to own the restaurant. The team trust me enough that they agreed to come back under those terms as well. Beau even gave us his blessing, but he’s doing his own thing now.”
“That’s wonderful for all of you,” I said, leaning back in my chair and slumping against it. “Congratulations on finally becoming Head Chef.”
“But that’s just it,” Rafael said earnestly. “ You could be Head Chef.”
I stared at him. “Why would you want to give that up?”
“You were supposed to get the job all along, not me,” he said. He gestured around as if to say look, here’s the proof . “I’ll step aside. I can be the bigger man. I’m not afraid to do that.”
That… wasn’t exactly a reason why.
Had Grey sent him to negotiate? Was he maybe not Head Chef after all, but he was making me think this was some special deal to convince me to come back on Grey’s behalf?
Or was he so eager to work with me that he was willing to give up something he’d been working for for years?
My gaze dropped to the table. It didn’t matter, either way. None of it mattered.
I wasn’t going back.
I lifted my right hand in the air and then put it back down on the table more deliberately. Maybe his eye had skimmed over it because he was used to seeing me wearing a wrist brace. Maybe he hadn’t taken in the fact that it was different now.
His eyes followed the path of my hand and he frowned. He wasn’t getting it. I was going to have to spell it out for him.
“I can’t be Head Chef,” I said. “Not at The Crow. Not anywhere. I can’t even be a line chef anymore.”
“Why not?” he frowned. His lower lip was jutting out just a little bit. I briefly thought about sucking on it, before my own prediction came back to my mind.
He was about to be upset, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to take the pity.
“I had an operation,” I said. At Rafael’s sharp intake of breath, I carried on. “I had to. They said I was going to lose the hand, otherwise. But I can’t do anything with it. It’s useless for at least a few months, and after that, I’ll be on less than full mobility for a year. The doctor said basically that if I keep cooking, I’ll fuck it up so badly that it won’t ever work again.”
There was a long silence. Finally, I dared to lift my eyes from the table and look at Rafael.
His eyes shone with unsplit tears. I cleared my throat and looked away.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. He cleared his throat, a mirror of the noise I’d made, and spoke again at normal volume. “I’m sorry that happened to you. But that doesn’t have to mean the end of your career forever, does it?”
I looked at him, sullen and stupid from the anger I felt. Not at Rafael, but at the world in general. At God, if He was up there. At myself for letting it get this far. “How am I supposed to live in the meantime? On fairy dust and hope? I need to earn. Not only to pay rent and eat, but I’ve got medical bills to pay off and more to come, and I’ve got to keep getting pain pills. I’m broke. I’ve got to start again and find a new career – one that I can do without moving my right wrist very much, which believe me, is turning out to be quite the fucking challenge.”
There was another pause. I looked up, impatient at how many we were having. If he wasn’t going to speak, he could just go . But the heartbroken way in which Rafael bit his lip had me pausing, and I found myself ashamed of the way I’d spoken to him.
I looked, far from the first time, away.
Rafael shifted in his seat. “I, um,” he said. “I may have a solution.”
I snorted. This was going to be good. Everything had happened just like I predicted, landing us back at square one, and now he was asking if we could go around on the ride again. Fine. “What solution could there possibly be?” I asked.
“Do you trust me?”
I stared at Rafael.
There were so many possible answers to that question.
Did I trust him?
We’d had the best sex of my life, and in the morning, he’d disappeared. Maybe he’d spent the last couple of weeks trying to track me down, but he hadn’t tried hard enough to find me right away. That was probably unfair. I hadn’t made it easy for him.
Taking matters of the heart out of it, before we’d fucked, what had we been? Rivals for the same job. We hadn’t been friends or lovers. We’d had no reason to build trust between us. It was always going to be me or him, and we’d known that from the start. No reason to get attached.
But what had he ever actually done?
He’d never lied or cheated. Never done something underhanded to trick me out of the job. He’d stood up for his team and showed his loyalty to them even when it put his own job at risk. He’d never put himself above me or shown me any reason to think he was anything but sincere.
So, did I trust him?
Yeah. Maybe more than anyone else in the world, I did.
“I do,” I said, trying to ignore the way my voice cracked, and Rafael launched into a smile of such brilliance that the room seemed to light up from within.