Chapter Five #2
“Ah, the illustrious Chef Aquino,” Luc said, his voice grating on Bastian in ways that it never had before. Either he’d been protected by a healthy helping of hormones, or Luc had gotten more annoying in the intervening years since he’d left Terroir.
“Where is my mise?” Bastian demanded. Kian appeared next to him, no longer the subservient half a step back.
“Right here, Chef,” Luc said, gesturing towards the setup in front of them.
Kian got to work immediately, and Bastian suddenly wished that he hadn’t brought someone who was so meticulous, that it left nothing for him to do except be engaged in conversation by Luc.
“He is very thorough,” Luc said.
Bastian shot him an incredulous look. “Did you forget the way I like things?”
“Oh no,” Luc said, shooting Kian another head to toe, scorching look, “I couldn’t forget what you like. Especially not when you keep reminding us all.”
Bastian wasn’t blind; he saw the way Kian’s back tensed. He knew what all this talk was about.
“This is not the place, or the time.”
He lowered his voice and with the hope Kian wouldn’t hear, forced himself to step closer to Luc.
His old protégé, his old lover. Someone he’d never really expected to see again.
Someone he hadn’t cared to see again. Because when he’d told Kian that his future was more important than a few fleeting moments of pleasure, he hadn’t been speaking from a place of inexperience.
He’d already done this once, and he’d fucked it all up. He wasn’t going to let Kian become another Luc—jaded, bitter, downright nasty with disappointment. It didn’t matter that Luc didn’t have a shred of the loyalty that Kian held dear.
It didn’t matter because Bastian could never stand here and have Kian sneer at him the way Luc was. He could stand a lot of things—uncomfortably hot kitchens, cramped spaces, cooking with not enough prep and not enough help, sixteen-hour days, six days a week—but he couldn’t stand that.
“If you brought me here,” Bastian continued, in a low, brutal voice, “only to insult me, then I’d be happy to leave and have you perform the demonstration.”
Luc gave a sharp nod and turned to check up on some other important task, leaving Bastian to stew.
“An old friend?” Bastian looked up to see that Kian had finished the double check of his mise and his eyes were burning with injustice. “You were friends with him?”
There was the undeniable question in his words. Friends? Kian was silently asking. Or more?
But Bastian was still not prepared to get into it, not right now, not when he was about to give a demonstration for approximately five hundred members of the culinary media.
“Friends,” he replied shortly. He couldn’t miss the way Kian’s expression shuttered, but what else could he say? I fucked up with him, a way I’m never going to fuck up with you?
The demonstration was thankfully a rather easy dish, actually one of Kian’s inventions, the langoustine with dill butter sauce.
With ease, despite being in front of five hundred members of a press that would joyfully rip him to pieces, he removed the shell, and carefully sautéed the langoustine.
Blanched the beans. Prepared the sauce. Did all of the above with as much grace and skill as he could.
Answered questions. Tried to even make a joke or two, which mostly didn’t go over, as he wasn’t renowned for his humor.
But that was okay, because he caught Kian’s expression, where he stood at the side of the dais, and he was smiling. Luc was not, but Luc seemed to have developed a permanent scowl on his handsome face.
He finished the demonstration to generous applause, and even took a handful of questions, something he normally would not have done.
When it was finally over, he was incredibly relieved and had a headache probably induced from being too nice for too long. Definitely from tolerating Luc’s sly looks and endless supply of semi-rude remarks.
Luc had always been too clever for his own good.
Bastian and Kian rode the elevator back upstairs in silence. Luc had extended an invitation to dinner, same as he had with all the other chefs that were in town, but he wouldn’t have expected that Bastian would accept.
Instead, he really wanted to take another hot shower, and order in some mediocre room service he could complain to Kian about.
But Kian was young and vibrant and worked too hard, for too many long hours.
He turned to him. “You should go to dinner here. I’m tired. I’m going to order in and probably fall asleep early.”
Kian frowned. “You want me to go to dinner with Luc?”
That was the very last thing Bastian wanted. “No, I meant, we’re in a beautiful, vibrant city. You should see some of it. Expand your palate.”
Maybe if Bastian wasn’t feeling quite so stung over all of Luc’s insinuations, he might have taken Kian himself, damn the headache.
But there were too many people—let’s face it, Bastian thought to himself, all the people—who would assume they were a couple.
A much-older gentleman taking his young, delectable boyfriend out for a fancy dinner, all to spoil him.
Maybe another time their opinions might not matter, but they mattered tonight.
“You’re not going?” Kian asked flatly.
He shook his head. “Headache.”
They reached their floor, and in short order, their rooms. Kian pulled out his key but hesitated, looking at Bastian.
He’d just performed in front of a whole score of media, all willing to rip his head off, but it was the questions in Kian’s eyes that terrified the fuck out of him. Bastian whipped out his keycard and escaped into the room before he could ask any of them.
The second shower didn’t help nearly as much, as an uncharacteristic ball of guilt settled into the base of his stomach.
What made it feel even worse was that he knew, if Kian texted one of his friends, Xander maybe, and accused him of being an unfeeling, abrupt asshole, they would all tell him that he shouldn’t expect anything less. He was the Bastard, after all.
The guilt gnawed at him through his room service dinner, which ended up even more mediocre than he’d imagined, and that he just pushed halfheartedly around the plate.
He did drink the wine that accompanied the meal though, and settled back in the bed, television on low, and tried not to think at all.
A firm knock on the door knocked him right out of his unthinking reverie.
His first horrible thought was that it was Luc, here to gloat some more.
His second horrible thought was that it was Kian, here to ask all the questions he hadn’t let him earlier.
A glimpse into the peephole confirmed that it was option number two. Kian stood there, nervously shifting from one foot to the other, with a very determined look on his face.
Bastian sighed. They could either do this now, or he was sure he’d be interrogated on the way home and might actually end up crashing and killing them in the process. This way, tonight, seemed marginally safer.
The alcohol he’d drunk burned in his veins as he opened the door, tempting him unbearably. This was just as he’d imagined it happening, wasn’t it? The dim light of the hotel room. Kian coming over late at night. Sometimes it felt like there could only be one end to this story.
“Yes?” Bastian asked as Kian let the door close behind him.
“I asked you if Luc had been like me and you said sure.”
Bastian propped a hip against the credenza. He crossed his arms across his t-shirt-clad chest and wished he was wearing something more substantial than a pair of striped pajama pants that his mother had bought him. “That’s not a question.”
Kian frowned. “You said we were the same, but that isn’t true, is it?”
There was an unbearable temptation to tell the whole truth, but that felt incredibly dangerous. Too dangerous, especially in this room, with nobody the wiser to what actually happened in it.
“It’s true,” Bastian claimed. “He was my protégé. I didn’t have an intern then, but he assisted me, when Terroir first opened.”
Kian took a step closer, then another, and Bastian nearly stumbled backwards.
He hadn’t expected Kian to be this aggressive, but there’d been flashes of it lately.
Kian touching him. Kian approaching him.
And Bastian knew, with a flash of insight, that this status quo couldn’t continue forever, because Kian was changing.
He was growing up. He was finding his feet in this world.
Sooner or later, he would demand more, and Bastian was not ready for that confrontation. Not even close.
“He wasn’t only your protégé,” Kian said, putting a hand on Bastian’s chest. “You slept with him.”
For a moment, Bastian considered denying it, but it was useless. Kian already knew the truth. “I did.”
A very hard look crossed across Kian’s face. “So all that . . . crap was because you’d done this before and it hadn’t worked out very well for you.”
“No . . .” Bastian tried to insert but Kian had been saving up this speech and he intended to unleash it—not even Bastian was going to be able to stop him.
“You pretended like it was so hard for you, like it didn’t matter that I was dying for you,” Kian ranted, fingers curling tightly into the fabric of his t-shirt, right above where his heart beat in double time.
“You let me think, you let me believe, it was only me. But it wasn’t. This is what you do. You do this.”
“No,” Bastian uselessly argued. There’s nobody like you. Definitely not Luc, that fucking disloyal asshole.
“Why did you even do it? To prove you could? To make yourself feel better about Luc? Because I don’t see that working out very well for you,” Kian continued, voice growing higher and more hysterical. “I’m not his substitute, I’m not his stand-in, don’t you understand? I won’t be, I’m not.”
Later, Bastian would think back to this moment and envy the solitary certainness of his brain function. He’d only wanted to do one thing—prove Kian wrong—no matter what the cost, and that made him do something incredibly stupid and incredibly dangerous.
And probably, Bastian would later think, incredibly inevitable.
He grabbed Kian’s wrist and dragged him even closer, until they were hip to hip, chest to chest, and Kian was panting, wordless as they stared into each other’s eyes.
This was more than inevitable. It had probably been foretold at the beginning of time—Bastian Aquino was going to meet someone who made him question every ounce of his determination, his resolve, his ego, and who was eventually going to tear his self-control to shreds.
He kissed Kian.
Kian instantaneously melted under him, leaning against his chest and pouring everything into the kiss, even as Bastian selfishly took it all back out. Mine, he gloated inwardly, this is all for me.
Bastian’s hands slid up to his shoulders, to his head and he cradled it in his palms as he did the thing he’d told himself from the first moment that he would not do.
The kiss ended in a breathless whimper as Kian pulled back, his eyes as wide and shocked as Bastian had ever seen them.
Like he’d just blown every circuit in Kian’s body.
And he probably had; personally, Bastian felt just as decimated.
Like everything he knew about love and attraction and those fucking hormones he liked to blame everything on, was wrong.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Kian said, harsh pants against Bastian’s cheek.
“I know,” Bastian said, and his voice was a surprisingly honest caress.
“But I couldn’t help it. You . . . you’re not like him.
You’ve never been like him. In the most rudimentary ways, yes, you have some similarity.
But he is so different, and I was different than I am now, I was selfish and egotistical, and I took whatever I wanted, damn the cost.”
Bastian removed his hands carefully and Kian took an unsteady step back. Hesitant, like he wasn’t quite ready to let go yet.
Still, Kian was able to crack a little smile, and Bastian thanked God for that. “Selfish and egotistical . . . back then?”
Waving an impatient hand, Bastian had to hold back his own laughter. “You are . . . god damn . . . you’re my downfall. You know that.”
Kian didn’t say anything, those blue eyes boring right into Bastian’s soul. Like he could read him, and every single thing that was written there, good and bad, and somehow he accepted them all.
Nobody had ever done that for him before. Even his own mother sometimes despaired of all his less-than-stellar qualities.
“We’re not doing this,” Kian said very quietly, and very certainly. “Not like this.”
Bastian was afraid to ask what that meant. But secretly, he was afraid he knew.
Not like this, maybe, but some other way, some other day. And Bastian wasn’t sure he could turn him down, not after the taste he’d just had.