Chapter Three #2
“If you think that what I need to learn is how to scrape plates better, it’s not very flattering but you’re the expert. I trust you.”
Bastian leaned forward, his dark eyes mesmerizing as they searched Kian’s face. “I think you really mean that.”
It wasn’t easy, but Kian held his ground. There was undeniably a part of him that wanted to crawl across the floor and beg to be let out of the wet, humid, torturous dish room and back into the kitchen, where he belonged.
That wasn’t all he wanted to beg for. Before he could stop the thought in its tracks, he imagined crawling across the floor, to where Bastian sat, waiting for the head nod of permission, so he could feel those powerful thighs under his fingertips, and then raise up on his knees, mouth so close to the significant erection bulging in Bastian’s white and black checked pants.
“Reynolds?” Chef questioned again, and Kian couldn’t help it. He flamed bright red, making it unavoidably clear just what he’d been thinking about.
“I do mean it,” he said, hating how his voice trembled a little, at the very end. And not because he’d been caught; but because the fantasy was so real, so visceral. The blinds were closed, and Chef was staring at him like he might not actually fire him if he tried it.
“Shadow Wyatt at the grill tonight,” Chef ordered in clipped tones, and the heat of the earlier moment was doused by his sudden coldness.
Kian told himself that he shouldn’t be disappointed, because whatever he’d just been fantasizing about was an impossibility, but it was tough not to be.
He wanted the learning and the knowledge Chef Aquino wanted to teach him, and he wanted the fantasies too. It was incredibly good for his sanity that he was going to have to settle for the former, but there was a part of him, deep inside, that yearned, anyway.
It had been a week since Bastian had pulled Kian from the dish room, but the conversation in his office haunted him still.
He’d done his utmost to make sure that they were never alone after that, because the desire in those innocent blue eyes to be much less innocent was difficult to resist. And Bastian knew, as much of an asshole as he could be, there was no way he could ever fulfill any of the fantasies Kian was collecting.
Whatever passed between them was going to have to be strictly, completely, professional.
It stung, but Bastian had done much harder things, and it wasn’t like a lack of sex was going to kill him.
He’d already been mostly going without, because being a professional chef in charge of one of the most prestigious restaurants in the country meant excessively long hours and mind- and body-numbing exhaustion. Even one-night stands deserved better.
It was entirely Kian’s fault that he’d thought about sex more in the last month than he’d thought about it in the previous six.
“What are we doing today?” Kian asked, all unvarnished eagerness.
“Do you know what the most vital part of Terroir is?” Bastian asked as they walked from his office towards the bank of large walk-in fridges.
“The line?” Kian asked, more hesitatingly than Bastian thought he normally allowed himself.
He would have to be a lot stupider to not realize that Kian was trying to play the sort of chef—the sort of person—that Bastian normally admired.
Confident but not overly cocky. Sure but always willing to be taught something new.
Sometimes he wanted to tell Kian that you couldn’t manipulate a manipulator.
And, sometimes he wanted to shake him and demand to see the real Kian.
Not the Kian that he thought Bastian wanted.
What scared him the most was that it was very possible that they were one in the same.
Bastian pushed all that away, deliberately distancing himself from those embarrassing, semi-hysterical, desperate thoughts. Just because he already knew he was screwed didn’t mean he had to acknowledge it.
“Not the line,” Bastian replied patiently. “The line can’t prepare the fish special if the fish we receive is poor quality, or if the fish isn’t available at all. The most vital part of this restaurant, and any restaurant, is inventory.”
Kian looked a little disappointed, like he believed the most vital component of Terroir would be sexier. What Kian didn’t know yet was that a properly stocked kitchen was the sexiest thing in the whole god damn universe.
“I take inventory every single morning,” Bastian continued, yanking open the door to the dairy fridge.
“I know you’ve been watching me in my office.
” He nearly wanted to grab those words back.
They were dangerous, just as it was dangerous that Kian couldn’t tear his eyes away from his boss, even when he was supposed to be doing something else.
“What do you think I’m doing every morning? ”
“Making phone calls?” There was an element of frustration in Kian’s voice, like he didn’t appreciate being asked questions that Bastian knew he didn’t have the answers to.
“Calling our suppliers. Ordering. Verifying orders. Then when orders come in, I check every single one. I open every crate, every box. I examine every single piece of produce that comes into this restaurant. And if something isn’t right, I make a phone call.”
He held out a clipboard and a pen to Kian. “It’s time you learned how to do this.”
For a split second, Kian made a face, like he couldn’t imagine anything less enjoyable than counting and making notations on a sheet of paper.
Then his expression changed, like he’d needed to remind himself that everything Bastian asked him to do was important.
It was the same look he’d worn when Bastian had banished him to the dish room.
It remained to be seen whether every experiment Bastian tried would turn out like the dish room, but he hoped, like he hadn’t hoped in years.
He expected all his employees to eventually let him down, some of them spectacularly, most of them by their commitment to mediocrity.
Kian was the first who truly gave him hope.
Bastian didn’t know if the hope was what attracted him in the first place, or if it was what might deepen this attraction into something uncontainable.
If it hadn’t been for the hope, he really would have fired Kian the first day, and then fucked him out of his system.
“I just count the boxes, and then write it down?”
“You do more than just count. You inspect. You know the menu. You know the specials. You should know the breakdown of plates that we serve every night. More meat on Fridays and Saturdays. Fish on Fridays. The reports that I put up every Monday? Study those. Memorize them. Without that knowledge, this task is impossible.”
“Because otherwise I won’t know how much fish is enough, and when we need to order more,” Kian said, and Bastian felt the familiar flash of recognition resonate through him.
He recognized so much of himself in the younger man in front of him.
The eagerness, the barely leashed ego, the willingness to work as hard as it took to achieve goals.
Those were familiar enough traits, but when reflected back, were apparently irresistible.
“Precisely,” Bastian said, and followed Kian deeper into the dairy fridge. Cartons upon cartons of butter, stacked. Lesser stacks of gourmet European butters, purchased to finish certain dishes. Huge jugs of milk and cream. Rows upon rows of eggs.
“The sheet is laid out just like the fridge,” Kian observed, his pen making miniscule tick marks alongside each ingredient.
“Did you believe that I’d make my life harder and not easier?” Bastian asked wryly.
Kian glanced up, blue eyes wide even in the dim light. “No, never,” he said, and his voice was worshipful.
He didn’t want to know what falling off that pedestal would feel like, because it was inevitable that it would hurt. A lot.
Other chefs who came to work at Terroir believed Bastian was the best, but nobody held any old-fashioned ideas about him.
They called him the Bastard for a reason.
The first time he threw plates, a little of the shine in Kian’s eyes would dim.
It wasn’t going to stop him from throwing them, but it bolstered his resolve to keep his hands off his intern.
Things were going to end up complicated enough without deepening that hero worship into something more intimate.
“I remember, always, that nothing is ever perfect,” Bastian said gruffly. “That’s what we aim for. But the best of us know it’s unattainable.”
But Kian’s attention was already pulled into the inventory, counting wrapped hunks of butter, his fingers quickly flicking away the paper to test their firmness.
With anyone else, Bastian might believe his thoroughness was because he was standing in the fridge, observing, but he knew that it wouldn’t matter later.
Kian knew the bar, and like Bastian himself, was constantly motivated to exceed it.
It wasn’t a large space, and Bastian, to his own regret because kitchens tended to be cramped and small, was a large man.
It was one of the reasons he’d built his kitchens at Terroir to be expansive and his line more spread out than others—too many years of trying to make himself impossibly smaller.
But still, the fridges, while large, weren’t designed for two. Even if one was as slender as Kian.
Kian turned to him, pointing to an item on the clipboard, and Bastian realized, a second too late, as he crowded closer, that there was no room behind him to back up.
Kian, absorbed in the printout on the clipboard, didn’t look up until it was too late, until they were nearly nestled together, right against the shelf holding about a hundred dozen cartons of eggs.
Kian’s eyes widened in surprise and he fumbled the clipboard, nearly dropping it. He should have just let it fall, but Bastian reached out and his hand grasped Kian’s shoulder.