Chapter Four
The echo of the conversation with Chef— no, Kian told himself firmly, you want him, you can call him by his name, at least in your own head—Bastian lasted for weeks.
It took Kian a long time to sift through the layers of it, even though Bastian had been very clear and extremely forthright.
But first there’d been The Moment, which was how Kian thought of it in his head.
The Moment had torn away all pretense, forcing Kian to admit that he wanted it all—he wanted everything Bastian had to teach him, and he wanted his hands and mouth all over him, too.
The Moment had made it obvious that Bastian felt the same.
And just when the incredulous delight had filtered through him, shockingly sweet, Bastian had proceeded to explain that moments like The Moment would keep happening, but instead of focusing on them, they needed to focus on Kian’s career.
Kian wasn’t stupid. He didn’t believe that Bastian could be a boss and a mentor and a boyfriend. Or even a friend with benefits.
Even the thought of Bastian as a friend with benefits made him hot and then cold all over. And it wasn’t just the benefits part.
Bastian committed himself in everything he did. He loved and hated passionately, with commitment. They couldn’t just casually fuck and then work together in the restaurant the next day, pretending nothing had ever happened.
As the weeks passed, and then a month, and then two, it wasn’t like Kian disagreed with Bastian’s assessment. It was fundamentally sound.
It still sucked.
It didn’t mean that anything changed either. Most days, in fact, during the majority of them, the relationship between him and Bastian was strictly a professional one. Kian kept close, absorbing everything Bastian taught.
Not just Bastian either—one morning when he reported in, Bastian sent him over to Xander, to learn how to make sauces, and to shadow him on the sauté station during dinner service.
“Must think pretty damn highly of you,” Xander muttered as he meticulously set up his mise en place.
Kian had already whipped out his little notebook and was making notations on how Xander liked things arranged. Every chef liked it slightly different, and while Xander wasn’t quite as particular as Bastian, he still had very definite ideas of how his ingredients should be prepped and set up.
“I’m assuming you know all the mother sauces,” Xander said and Kian nodded.
That had been a whole semester’s worth of classes at the culinary institute.
He’d aced that particular course, but he’d learned in the few months since he’d graduated and started working at Terroir that anything he’d learned in school was almost completely useless.
In fact, Bastian had told him more than once to forget everything he’d been taught. The first time he’d said that to Kian, it had been a particularly frustrating and difficult day.
He’d gone back to his little studio apartment, beyond discouraged, which hardly set him apart from anyone else who worked at Terroir.
Everyone had a bad day once in awhile, and almost always the reason for that was their illustrious head chef.
But Kian believed that what set him apart was that he could shed the frustration and show up the next morning even more determined to learn everything he could from Bastian.
Everyone else slowly grew jaded and bitter, until they started using the Bastard nickname on a regular basis.
Xander was the leader of that particular faction at Terroir. Even though it should have made Kian like him less, he surprisingly didn’t.
In spite of the nod, Xander led him through the preparation of each sauce and reduction meticulously, Kian making notes on each one.
When they finished, it was time for family dinner. “Hey,” Xander said, pulling him aside before he could join the others at the long table, “Wyatt and Miles and I are getting a house together. There’s a fourth bedroom. You interested?”
He actually was. He’d been looking around for a new place because his studio was decrepit and depressing, even though he barely spent any time in it. “Sure. Miles is a pastry assistant, right? The only one René likes?”
“Yeah. He’s cool.”
Kian agreed with that assessment. He often brought “experiments” in to family dinner, augmenting dinner with some truly delicious pastries and desserts. For that alone, he seemed like a good choice for a roommate.
“I’ll send you the ad with the rent and info and stuff,” Xander said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “But it’s a good deal and a decent enough house, for the price.”
“I’m in,” Kian said firmly.
For a moment, Xander looked surprised, like he hadn’t really expected Kian to agree.
And that, Kian realized as they were getting ready for service, made sense because Xander was sort of prickly at the best of times and could be mean at the worst. He didn’t make friends easily, but it seemed that he and Kian were actually becoming friends.
At least that was what it felt like until service started and Kian discovered just how unprepared he was to work the line at a high-end establishment like Terroir.
“Two duck, three chicken, four scallop,” Bastian called out in a loud voice.
Xander’s hands were moving like quicksilver, everywhere at once, checking all his sauté pans, and somehow, impossibly adding more to the stove, even though it felt like it had been full only a moment ago.
Up until now, Kian had been stuck on the simpler appetizers, assembling the salads, and dishing up the soup. He’d been small time and, tonight, he was getting a taste of the big leagues.
“Yes, Chef,” Xander barked out, then turned to Kian. “Get those scallop pans going and don’t fucking overcook them, not if your life is valuable to you in any way.”
“Yes, Chef,” Kian said, and tried to calm the trembling in his fingers as he set the pans on the stove and dug the ingredients for the scallop dish out of the refrigerated pull-out drawers underneath the gigantic stovetop.
He knew how to cook scallops, but it was incredibly intimidating to cook them for two of the harshest critics on the planet—Xander and then Bastian.
Still, as the routine tasks took over his hands, they helped. His movements became more certain, and he was fairly confident they were perfectly cooked when he carefully started plating them.
“Wait,” Xander said, even though he wasn’t even looking in Kian’s direction. Did he have eyes in the back of his head somehow? “Those aren’t caramelized enough. Chef likes a deep golden brown.”
It was not easy to be told he’d screwed up even though he’d given it his very best attempt. “They’re cooked through,” he insisted stubbornly.
Xander held up his hands. “Your fate.”
He’d been confident before, but now he uncertainly slid the plates to the pass-through, ready for the final garnishes and the inspection, which was Bastian’s domain.
Bastian started to set a spray of pea greens gently on the top of one scallop when his tweezers paused in the middle of his delicate task. His brows slammed together and when he glanced up, his gaze eviscerated Kian.
“Are these done?” he demanded.
“They’re done,” Kian promised. Inside he was quaking.
“Caramelize the next batch a little more.”
Kian wasn’t going to point out that cooking scallops was difficult, but cooking scallops with a gloriously brown sear on them while making sure they were perfectly cooked while cooking about ten other things perfectly simultaneously was not easy to do. But he thought it.
After shift he brought this up to Xander while they were in the locker room.
“How do you do that?” he asked, because he’d long since learned that there were myriad tricks of the trade that he hadn’t learned at the institute, and Xander, if he was in a giving mood, sometimes felt like sharing one or two.
“You think it’s impossible right?” Xander asked with a wry smile.
“I think it’s really fucking hard,” Kian admitted.
Xander’s smile widened and deepened, and for the first time, Kian really believed they were becoming friends. Not just co-workers and potential roommates but friends.
“That’s why they pay us the big bucks,” Xander said, stretching his neck.
Kian frowned. “They don’t pay us big bucks.”
“Yes, well, I guess that’s why the Bastard gets paid the big bucks, then. You’ll figure it out. It’s all about placement of the pan on the stove at different stages of cooking. I’ll show you how I do it tomorrow. Right now if I think about scallops, I might vomit.”
“Yeah, sure,” Kian said. He didn’t love how young and na?ve he sounded. But that was the job, he figured. He was still learning. Still evolving. Still growing.
And if luck was on his side, that would keep happening, every night, until finally he woke up one day and he was a fantastic chef, ready to be promoted and ready to run his own kitchen.
A month later, he was actually able to sub for Xander, when he had the flu and could not actually stand, and the sauces Kian prepared, though not as subtly brilliant as Xander’s, didn’t make Chef throw the pans across the kitchen.
He cooked pan after pan of scallops flawlessly, leaving Bastian to only raise a single eyebrow as the plates slid over to the pass-through.
He took over daily inventory and was meticulous enough that even Bastian couldn’t find a thing to complain about.
Slowly, he began shadowing every part of the restaurant, and after the Xander flu incident, Bastian actually encouraged it.
It was good to have someone who could step in on a moment’s notice and not fuck everything up.
Kian was proud of that, and proud of the way he was helping Chef not be so overwhelmed with the incredible amount of daily work that just he was responsible for—never mind everyone else who worked at Terroir.