Chapter 4 #3
It might be cute, but they’re almost sickening to my people (the perpetually single), the way Amelia’s on his lap at the end of the table, his hands all over her.
I’m also a little worried about what might be going on under her, because she keeps squirming in his lap, and I can practically hear the boing of his boner from here.
“Here” is the far end of the table, where I can be exposed to their nauseating joy as little as possible.
So I focus on the conversation with my sister, who is daring to bring up the elephant in the room, as her husband and our stepfather continue setting up the meal, in and out of the Grady cottage to the table in the backyard where the rest of us are sitting.
“I hear there’s fresh meat in town,” she says, catlike smile still on her face.
The memory of my first encounter with Wilder swarms to the surface, where I’ve struggled so hard to keep it from going since that afternoon, and emotion overtakes me once again. Irritation and frustration wrapped up in one horny little package, that’s me.
“You hear that, do you?” I seethe at her, shooting daggers at her with my eyes that don’t have as much heat as they would’ve a couple years back, but I’ll still throw down with her over this if she pushes me.
My issues are always brimming right under the surface when it comes to her anyway.
Sometimes I think one wrong word and she’ll set me off in a way that can’t be undone.
“Could that be because you got him here? And stuck him on me? And now I have to work with the most infuriating man-child on the planet because you gave me no other choice?”
Rory sips her wine, taking her time to respond, and when she does, only one line jumps out at me of what she says. “I got you a talented chef, straight from New York.”
When I skimmed his résumé, the job he’s held for the past seven years wasn’t exactly what I’d been led to believe.
“You got me a sandwich maker from a bodega!” I shout.
The man should be working in a sub shop, making corny jokes about footlongs, not the head chef of the café I’m opening to carry on the family legacy.
“That’s one of his qualifications, yes.”
“Wait,” Weston’s voice butts in. Laidback, easygoing, he’s the nice brother of the two. Golden blonde hair, golden tanned skin, he looks like a surfer fell into the mountain town, not sprouted from the ground here, just like his grumpier older brother did.
“The sandwich maker? From the bodega?” he asks.
I was so caught up in my battle against him, I didn’t even connect the dots. I scream a laugh, the pieces clicking together in my mind as I point an accusing finger at my sister.
“Wilder is that man! How did I not put this together sooner?”
My mind races, scouring the tidbits she gave me about him in the past. It came out one girls’ night, early on after rekindling our relationship as sisters.
New York wasn’t all bad, she’d said. Might not have the sun rising behind the mountains, but there was this mountain of a man who made my sandwiches at the bodega who looked like he could break a back or two.
Jealousy, hot and vicious, like I haven’t felt with her since she first came back, comes rearing up my throat like acid when I remember the next thing I said. You ever let him break your back?
It was funny to me then, hearing her sexcapades—few and far between her long, long hours in the office. The variety in the city was a novel concept to me, in a small town with no options left for me.
Now, I’m desperate to remember what she said. To find out if she ever fucked him, and ignoring the part of me that says I shouldn’t care one way or the other.
I hear Rory’s voice, tipsy and happy, like she was that night.
God, no. Not my type. But I can window shop even if I’m not buying the bag, right?
For some reason, the present version of me takes a deeper breath, chest rising and falling with some sort of relief that makes no sense.
But Rory’s eyes are desperate, begging for this not to become fodder for conversation when her husband comes back outside, so I do what sisters do best. I push her every button.
“No wonder you wanted me to hire him so bad,” I say, mischief dripping from my voice. “Your eyes haven’t gotten their fill of his…meat in such a long time.”
Weston and Amelia are off in their own world again, but that’s okay. I love busting my sister’s tits just because I can. I don’t need an audience.
“Stop it, Lexi, you know he’s not my type. I don’t look at all anymore, you know I’m happily married.”
“I do,” I drawl, nodding my head. “But I also know you said this man was one of the hottest specimens you’d ever seen. Does Wyatt know how you feel about Italian sausage?”
Wyatt and our stepfather head out of the house, and my eyes flash to them in challenge, where they cross the yard to get to us, platters of food in hand, baby strapped to Wyatt. Rory’s eyes widen, pleading with me just as much as her mouth does.
“Don’t bring it up, Lex, don’t! Wyatt got all jealous in New York, I don’t want him to think there’s some history there that really isn’t.”
Strangely, her words have an unexpected effect on me too, calming me just a little, and I decide to have mercy and let it drop.
Mostly.
“So you guys visited the bodega man and just had to bring him home, huh?” I ask once Wyatt has sat down, baby now on his knee, where she watches the meal around her, grabbing with her little fists at anything that passes by.
Wyatt’s jaw tightens, and his eyes dart to his wife at his side.
“Wasn’t my choice,” he mumbles.
“His meat’s not bad, though,” says my stepfather, lips pressed to a bottle of beer, and Wyatt and I both glare at him while Rory cackles.
“Not you too,” I moan, and the graying man who was the love of our mother’s life just smiles at me.
At least I have Wyatt on my side. Only things we might’ve ever agreed on were that Rory belongs here, and Wilder doesn’t.
I’m staying confident that by the end of summer, the oversized New Yorker will be gone for good. Maybe Amelia’s optimism is rubbing off on me.
Rory looks back at me pointedly. “Did you even look at his résumé yet? Or are you just determined to hate him because he isn’t homegrown?”
“I’m not—” I scoff, the right words not coming to me.
“That’s what I thought.” Rory smirks at me. For the second time in under a week, she looks so much like our mom with that playful, knowing look that my breath hitches, my stomach tightening into a knot that surely requires a medical diagnosis.
Sound tunnels and fades, and I lose my balance before I remember I’m sitting.
But then her face warms, laughing at something Wyatt said to her when the earth was crumbling beneath my feet, and the moment is gone. She looks like my sister again. My stomach loosens, the noises return.
“Seriously, Lex, check out his résumé. Even you might be impressed,” Rory says easily.
I roll my eyes, hoping I look normal again. “For the millionth time, nice things don’t mean shit to me.”
“I know, I know,” she appeases me. “It’s the moments that make life worth living, not the things in it. I know your philosophy. I just think he’ll add a lot of good moments to Heights Bites.”
“And nice things,” I tack on grumpily.
“Sure,” she says with a shoulder lifting. “That too. But you can’t complain about having your chef make delicious food, Lex. That’s where I’m gonna draw the line and call you out.”
She’s infuriating. Impossible to argue with. An annoying response to anything I throw out there.
Petty insults that don’t bother her anymore and years-old resentment is all I have against her.
For all our physical similarities, Rory’s oval-shaped face is thinner than my heart-shaped one, and happiness looks like it lives beneath her skin, even when she’s bickering with me.
My RBF would need to be surgically removed if I wanted it gone.
I wonder if I fell in love, if I’d look as peaceful as she does.
“Let me know what you think when you check him out,” she says, taking a big bite of food.
I grumble for a minute, the voice in my head mocking her, until curiosity gets the better of me and I pull my phone out of my jeans pocket to look a little closer at his résumé.
Thumbing up the original email from Rory, I click open the attachment and scan it as I eat, eyes flicking across the PDF as best they can on the small screen.
A lot of words I don’t understand, and names that mean nothing to me. Scrolling back to the beginning of his work history, I try to look a little closer.
First job listed on here is as a line cook in upstate New York. No name, number or reference listed.
As I flick through the couple of pages, it jumps out at me that no references are given on any of these places.
How am I even supposed to vet him? He’s not even giving me the possible out of “bad references.”
I try to remember the name of the most recent restaurant he was at and type it into Google. My nostrils flare when the results populate.
Worse than I thought.
The place looks like somewhere you’d see celebrities dining in the tabloids. Exactly the way I imagine Rory’s life was those years she ditched us for her precious big city. The kind of glam the Heights will never have to offer.
If that’s the background he’s coming from, what draws him to Heights Bites? If he wants to be a hotshot chef, we’re not just a step down, we’re a whole damn ladder down from a place like that.
The itch of too much but still never enough for anyone burns beneath my skin as I flick through the images for the restaurant. The nausea has me closing out of the tab and going back to the résumé for the name of the bodega.
Now the pictures of that place look a lot less intimidating. You definitely couldn’t eat off the floor of it, which is a step in the less snooty direction by my standards.
It’s got over two thousand reviews and it’s rated 4.7 stars, which is a little hard to sneer at. Tabbing through those reviews is a lot funnier than the ones for the other place, that’s for sure.
The general consensus seems to be it’s the best food for blocks, but the guy behind the sandwich counter talks way too much. Sounds about right.
If I didn’t already know I was on the right listing, a few decidedly feminine profiles praised the view while you wait for your food.
I feel eyes that look just like mine on my face, watching for my reaction, and I make sure to leave an unimpressed look glued in place as I keep tapping on my phone, refusing to look up and give my sister the pleasure of being right, yet again.
I already knew the man could cook. I tried his food. There’s no denying he’s talented on the line.
It’s his personality I can’t stand.
But if his talent he’s clearly so passionate about could bring us a loyal following like he had at these places…
I sigh, trying to stow my personal feelings about the man aside and swallow down what the proximity to him will mean for my blood pressure, if it helps the restaurant.
If he makes our recipes, it won’t feel like the place is being taken from me and turned into something else. I just need to keep him on a tight leash is all. Keep him from branching out and changing the place too much. Making it too New York, instead of the best the Heights has to offer.
Resigned, I decide to google the man himself and see if that gives me a reason to hate him a little less.
Result after result populates on my phone’s screen, but nothing that seems to be about him.
Apparently there’s a hot dog vendor off Wall Street named Amante.
Another article pops up about some other Amante with ties to a notorious crime family, which almost makes me laugh, but I don’t want Rory to see and I bite down instead.
Amante must be a popular last name.
Let me narrow down the search results.
I type in his name, a plus sign and the name of the bodega.
Way fewer results this time, the only thing that looks to be relevant recently is a TikTok of a girl filming herself in the bodega looking sad. I’m guessing because she doesn’t have eye candy anymore, or maybe she misses his…sauce.
Oh no, now I’m doing it too.
This guy is contagious.
Well, nothing too scary came up on his search that could get me out of this.
Looks like I have a new chef.
For now, at least.