One
ONE
WILDER
Pressing on her soft warmth, I watch as juices run out of her thick center.
Damn, I love a juicy girl.
Testing to be sure, because I don’t wanna rush and do this before she’s good and ready, I push again with two thick fingers, mouth watering as more of that delicious moisture spills out, over and down the thighs.
Perfect. She’s ready.
The corner of my lips pops up in a smirk of self-satisfaction.
And to think, I get to do this dozens of times a day, all in a day’s work.
“Order up!” I call, tapping the bell on the counter to remind the customer to come back to my corner of the bodega and grab their food that’s still sitting there.
I dress a fresh hoagie roll with my special love sauce. Homemade herbed peppercorn aioli, rather than some shit that arrived in a twenty-five gallon drum, “fresh” off a barge where it took two months to ship here.
Nah, my shit’s homemade. Full of love. That’s why I call it my love sauce. I even grow the herbs myself, on the roof of my shitty building in Queens.
The bottle squirts out, making a lewd noise that I laugh at, because even though I’m twenty-seven, I’m clearly a child at heart. We’re getting low. Gotta fill ’er up with more love when I get the chance.
“Thank you!” The person picks up their sandwich and taps the counter in greeting. Downright kind for a New Yorker. Probably a transplant, my guess is from the South, where everyone is sickeningly sweet.
Placing the warm, juicy chicken thighs atop the sauced buns, I spread the rest of the toppings on, then sprinkle on the finishing touches.
Wrapping her up—I’m a stickler for such things—she’s ready to go. I turn around, foot long in hand (sandwich, not my sausage), I find the person who ordered it still standing there, waiting impatiently, annoyance all over their face.
I hand over the sandwich. “Your Chicken Love Supreme.”
“That just sounds gross,” they say, swiping the package from my hand and taking off.
They clearly have somewhere to be that’s more important than a thank you.
Yeah, that’s what I’m more used to.
I sigh contentedly. This is what it feels like to be home.
Naming the sandwiches I created was my stipulation for taking this job. Ken, the bodega owner, doesn’t give two shits what I do back here, as long as it doesn’t get him any health code violations or fines. He’s raking in a lot of dough with me behind the counter, too. The Chicken Love Supreme is a newer addition to the menu, and it might be my current fave.
It’s not the job I dreamed of as a head chef, or even a leg up in the food industry so I can get there one day, but I get to make people food I’m passionate about, fill their mouths with my love day in and day out, and for now, it’s gotta be enough.
I do get occasional odd jobs, filling in for a line cook here or there when emergencies happen, but the bougier places I’m interested in working at don’t wanna hire a convict who’s done hard time. And I don’t wanna do dishes at a taco joint just to say I got the experience. So the bodega sandwich counter it is. For now.
Until the day I can open Salt + Spice, Executive Chef Wilder Amante at the top of the menu.
Prison took away a lot of options for me, but it also changed my perspective, and it gave me a dream.
I didn’t always have this sickeningly cheery outlook, compared to my fellow brethren of the Big Apple.
When you grow up in a family like mine, with a life like mine, your outlook is dark. Shit, your whole past is dark.
But I found a new life seven years ago, when I walked out of the state penitentiary. Fresh air in my lungs, fresh passion for being in the kitchen thanks to my work assignments at the pen, I was ready for a fresh fucking start.
In my family’s line of work, that’s unheard of.
I did my time and got out. I’m on a new path now. Even got a deal made, so it’s official, and that shit never happens.
But I’m Wilder Amante. I carve my own fucking path.
It’s been almost eleven years since the day I got thrown in juvie before I was tried as an adult and locked away for four years and seven months over my crimes.
That was the day that changed it all for me.
I haven’t been in the life since the day I got put in cuffs.
But sometimes I still have nightmares that I never got out.
Even making sandwiches for gruff assholes who don’t give me the time of day is better than where I’ve been, and worse, where I was headed.
Getting started on the next order, I use my favorite knife, a 8.25” Moritaka AS Gyuto, to dice the roast chicken for the sandwich. The same knife peeks back at me in black and white on the mirrored backsplash along my workstation, from among the sea of tattoos covering my arms. They cover my whole body, really, but my entire forearm has a to-scale homage of the knife I can’t live without along the outside, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t turn me on in a weird way to see it as I’m chopping the meat for my next customer.
What can I say? I’m a passionate guy. And you know what they say, a chef’s best friend is a sharp knife.
With meticulous care, I spread my roasted red pepper jam on the bottom half of the roll, making sure to coat it evenly, and toss the spreader back in the prep container.
The meat gets piled on next, followed by a few dollops of smoked crème fraiche and a dazzle of arugula, and she’s good to go.
“Order up!” I call, tapping the bell, and so the day goes on. Just like every other.
The midday lunch rush comes and goes, and I’ve had the chance in the downtime to restock my station, making sure all of my homemade sauces, spreads, jams, and garnishes are full and good to go for the late afternoon crowd that’ll be hitting on their way home from work.
It’s a life I’m sure plenty of people would find ways to complain about, but the shit I’ve seen? Hell, the shit I’ve done ? I don’t forget where I came from that easily. Can’t let myself take for granted that shit could always be worse. A lot worse than making food I love that helps keep the people of this city running.
No risk of getting arrested for doing this job.
Probably not even a real risk of being killed while doing it.
Not like my pops.
The bell on the counter rings, but I didn’t press it, so some impatient fucking New Yorker must need their sandwich and need it now .
I turn around, ready to give them hell, because no one gives me shit once they see me. The 6’5” height on this Italian stallion probably has something to do with it. The giant man who can bench press a couple of correction officers, and has the full body tattoos to prove it, he doesn’t get much opposition.
I think it’s the neck and finger tattoos that really seal the deal for me. Even the knuckle tat that spells out LOVE across my right hand, it somehow doesn’t endear most people to me.
I think it’s sweet.
A play on words, my last name means lover, and I put love into everything I make. It was a no brainer. But others think it just adds to the fear factor that I tend to give people, maybe some relic of the shadows of my past that seep through, even when I try to tamp them down.
Could be that the hint of crazy that I had to rely on to keep me alive in prison has never really gone away.
Whatever the case, when people see my face, they don’t fucking push me.
But in front of my sandwich counter is a face I haven’t seen in an age . A woman much, much smaller than me, even at her taller stature in those fancy heels. She wouldn’t hesitate to put me in my place, no matter how intimidating I look, and a smile breaks out on my face at the sight of her.
“Aurora!”
My voice booms, no helping it, I’ve got a thing with volume control. When you’re this big, delicate isn’t really an option, unless I’m finishing a plate.
Her sophisticated face doesn’t give way to much often, but she gives me a big fucking smile today.
“Where ya been, loca?”
The man standing behind her, facing the other way, pulls up straight when he hears my voice. Dark hair, buffalo checked shirt, I can tell even from behind he’s not a pretty boy, but I don’t know what to make of him yet. I didn’t even realize she had anyone with her until I saw his spine straighten.
Turning around, what I’m not expecting is to see a baby strapped to his chest, over a Henley, beneath the open button down shirt over it. A little baby girl floats, cooing as she hangs from the carrier strapped to the scruffy man with the grumpy face.
“It’s Rory now,” he says to me, voice gruff and colder than I’d like. He wraps a possessive arm around Aurora’s shoulders, and that’s when I notice the boulder sparkling on her hand.
“This where you been?” I ask her, pointing to the man and baby.
She nods, eyes softer than I’m used to seeing them, not seeming to mind that she’s got a second asshole attached to her side.
“I moved back home. To Smoky Heights.”
“Well doesn’t that just sound lovely.”
Like something you’d hear in a fairy tale, or maybe see on a postcard.
“ This is the bodega guy?” Her husband, according to the band on his finger—and that aura of fuck right off when you look at my wife— says incredulously, looking between his wife and me.
He doesn’t think we hooked up, does he? Maybe it’s just the normal threat I tend to pose, no matter how good-natured I am these days. Old habits die hard.
“Aww, you talked about me? How sweet.” I flutter my eyelids at her a couple times, and hear a grumble from the guy she’s with.
Rory cuts me a look that says not to push this, and I ease up, because after all these years of making her sandwiches, I’m not convinced she wouldn’t shove a heel up my ass if I pissed her off.
And considering it’s against my ethos to hit a lady, unless it’s a nice smack to the ass while I’m hitting it from behind, well… You can see my predicament.
“Name’s Wilder. Wilder Amante, nice to meet you, my guy.”
“Wyatt Grady.”