Chapter Two #2
At first, Kian was sure he’d misunderstood.
Xander finally had to grip his shoulder and literally pull him away from the doorway.
He knew he should say something, but he didn’t know what that was.
Hadn’t Chef Aquino convinced him to come work for him by offering to teach him?
Promised him work that wasn’t the dish room?
Yet that was exactly where he was telling Xander to send him.
He couldn’t be as callously crass as Xander when it came to their boss, but he could still, politely, make sure that Chef remembered who he was, right? But Xander didn’t even let him formulate the question, he just dragged him off.
“Wait, wait,” he muttered as Xander kept his grip firm around his upper arm. “I need to remind Chef Aquino that I’m not here to be a dish washer. I’m supposed to be his new intern.”
Xander gave a sharp bark of laughter. “Yeah, he knows.” He dropped Kian’s arm, finally, when they were back in the locker room. “Get changed.”
But Kian was not going to change into anything until he understood exactly what had just happened. “I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t. You’re like . . . a baby. Or a puppy.”
Kian bristled. “I’m twenty-one. I’ve just graduated from culinary school. I was the top of our class. Chef Aquino handpicked me to be his intern.”
Xander just looked bitterly amused. “Like I said. A puppy. For the record, the intern job basically means you’re the Bastard’s bitch, at his beck and call. And what he wants you to do today is work in the dish room. So dish room it is. Do you speak Spanish?”
Kian had grown up in southern Oregon, which meant that he did, a little. As he slowly stripped down and changed into the whites in the locker, he informed Xander of that fact.
All Xander said was, “God, where did you learn to change? Your grandmother’s house? Hurry it up. You need to get to the dish room and I have to get back to the fucking soup.”
Trying to hurry, Kian was surprised to discover that the whites fit perfectly.
He’d never sent his sizes to Chef Aquino, but somehow he must have known.
He thought about asking Xander if that was normal, but even though he seemed to be a weird guy, probably used to odd questions, his impatience was beginning to show.
Kian had begun his first day by seemingly pissing off Chef Aquino just by existing; he couldn’t risk pissing off the one person who’d been relatively helpful.
When he was done, Xander showed him the dish room, an already bustling space filled with steam and a single man, who seemed to be in a hundred places at once.
“This is Jorge,” Xander said. “He’s from Honduras, and he doesn’t speak a lot of English. Good luck.”
Kian looked at Jorge, who didn’t smile back at him.
He had a sudden feeling that this was Chef Aquino’s first line of defense at weeding out the self-important and the useless that passed through his kitchen.
If that was true, then Kian wasn’t going to fail.
Not on his first day, but more importantly, not ever.
He straightened his shoulders and held out his hand.
“I’m Kian. I think we’re going to be working together today.”
Jorge looked at his outstretched hand like it was an insect. He didn’t make a single move to shake it. Instead, he gestured at the front of the line, where a bunch of dirty pots sat.
Unfortunately Kian understood all too well. What Jorge wanted was for him to scrape those pots, and then the towering set of plates next to it. How was there already so much to be cleaned? The restaurant wasn’t supposed to open for hours.
But it didn’t really matter why. All that mattered was that, until told otherwise, Jorge was his boss, and he’d better do what he said, or else he wouldn’t ever see Bastian Aquino again.
Jorge held out a long, rubberized apron, and a scraping tool. Kian tried not to let his frustration show in his face, but he’d blown way past any neutrality he’d ever acquired, and Jorge just laughed, and it sounded way too much like Xander’s.
Maybe Kian understood after all why they called him the Bastard behind his back.
Bastian was not used to feeling guilty, but the sickly feeling at the base of his stomach followed him around during the rest of the day.
Manipulating employees into becoming the best version of themselves was routine; it was okay that they hated him for it.
He got their most exemplary work, and eventually they got sick of him and left.
But somehow the thought of Kian hating him filled Bastian with self-loathing.
It didn’t matter that Bastian knew he was doing the right thing.
It didn’t matter that Kian was so green, the last place he needed to be was on the line, fucking everything up during a service.
He needed to learn, and he needed to prove he was strong enough to dedicate himself to this emotionally and physically grueling work.
He still saw Kian’s shocked and disappointed face every time he closed his eyes, and it was annoying. Bastian didn’t like feeling this way; didn’t like feeling responsible for another person. Kian was Kian’s own keeper, and it was up to him to prove himself.
It was only the force of his convictions that kept Bastian out of the dish room.
He got a brief glimpse of him, face already white and exhausted, at the employee meal before dinner service began.
Bastian considered sending help to the dish room, but Jorge typically managed on his own, and probably enjoyed having someone to boss around.
Bastian always kept a very close eye on how things ran during service, and tonight, like every night, clean plates and dishes and bowls and empty sauté pans didn’t seem to ever be in short supply.
He almost stopped by after the dinner service ended, but that would also be unusual, and he wasn’t willing to single Kian out so quickly.
The rest of the staff would figure things out soon enough, if Kian was able to stick it out, and burdening him with additional shit, on top of Bastian’s usual shit, seemed unfair.
He left in his Mercedes right when the service ended, depending on the other chefs to finish cleaning the kitchen to his exacting standards.
The drive was only a few miles, but tonight, that didn’t feel long enough, so he kept driving.
It was late, but he still found himself idling in the driveway of a house about ten minutes from Terroir.
He must have been sitting there long enough, because when he glanced up, a woman bundled in a lilac fuzzy robe, graying hair curling around her shoulders, was standing on the front walk, a small smile on her face.
“It’s late,” was all she said to him as he got out of the car, approaching her.
“Why aren’t you sleeping?” Bastian asked. He’d somewhat expected to come here and find her asleep.
Bastian leaned in, giving her a hug, and brushing a quick kiss over each cheek.
“Because you weren’t sleeping,” his mother replied tartly, leading him around the back of the house to the sunroom that Bastian had had built for her a few years ago. “Is everything alright?”
“No. Yes.” Bastian couldn’t even make up his own damn mind as he settled down in one of the wide, comfortable chairs. He propped his clog-shod feet up on the coffee table, and his mother gave him a single, castigating glance, before he moved them.
“It’s very unlike you to be unsure,” she said.
She was right.
“I had a new employee start today,” he said.
“You are always having new employees start,” she said, her accent still faintly musical after all the time spent in America. “Maybe because you’re an asshole.”
“Maman!” Bastian exclaimed.
She just shrugged. “I hear the stories. People love to talk. So what was so special about this new employee? Did you finally decide to hire a sous?”
“I have a sous,” Bastian argued tiredly.
“And yet he doesn’t do what a normal sous would do, because you cannot bear to let anything go. So it isn’t a sous. Who is it?”
“His name is Kian Reynolds. He just graduated from the CIA outpost here, in Napa.”
“So he is very young,” Celeste Aquino observed.
“Very young,” Bastian confirmed, and even though his thirty-five years wasn’t old, he felt like a dirty old man, thinking about a twenty-one-year-old this way.
“And you like him,” she added slyly.
He shrugged, an echo of her own from a moment ago. “I don’t dislike him.”
“Ahhhh. Quelle surprise,” Celeste said sagely. “You are human after all.”
“You birthed me,” Bastian said with annoyance. “I think you’d know whether I was human or not.”
“Eh,” she said. “I wonder sometimes. You are more machine than man. But this boy, this Kian, he makes you want to be more man than machine. That’s not a bad thing, darling. You can’t stay alone forever.”
Bastian shot to his feet. It was just like his mother to assume he and Kian would fall in love and spend a happily ever after together after he’d only said that he didn’t dislike him. Such an auspicious start to a romance.
“He’s my employee. My new intern. And he’s young.” Bastian paced back and forth. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. Nothing if I’m to stay his boss, and I want to because I think he could be very good. I want to teach him, more than anything, and it’s hard to be patient enough to do that.”
Celeste settled back in her chair and her knowing smile drove him wild. It was like she knew he was going to fail, before he even started, and nothing ever set him on a more determined path than people assuming he couldn’t achieve the goals he set for himself.
“You,” he said to his mother, “are even better at manipulating people than I am.”
She shrugged, but the twinkle in her dark eyes gave her away completely. “I worry for you, sometimes,” was all she said.
“Maybe you should worry for him, instead,” he said darkly.
“Will you be able to sleep now? Should I make you some hot milk?”