Chapter 11
“What can I get for you?” the barista asked, rather than the Your usual? Sam was used to hearing.
“Can I get a medium coquito latte and a”—she glanced at the glass case of pastries and breakfast sandwiches—“spiced apple croissant?”
The barista tapped away at the tablet in front of him. “For here or to go?”
“To go,” she said, and he reached for a paper cup.
“Name?”
“Samantha.”
He sharpied a giant S on the side of the cup followed by a trailing scribble. “That’ll be $14.70.”
Sam tapped her card against the screen to pay for the order, then slipped a few dollars into the tip jar before sidling over to the bar to wait for her drink.
So Hannah’s dream girl didn’t frequent the Nook these changes were Hannah’s private, personal, unvoiced preferences, appetites made manifest. She had wished to be the woman of Hannah’s dreams, her perfect partner in all ways; of course she looked different.
She was the incarnation of idealized attributes plucked from Hannah’s fantasies. Everyone was allowed to have those.
Knowing that didn’t change the fact that waking up in a body different from the one she was used to, even in mostly subtle ways, was … disconcerting. Throwing her off-kilter and kind of fucking with her head. Definitely doing a wicked number on her self-esteem.
But maybe she was looking at this the wrong way. Maybe that Sam, the Sam she was, had been good, looked good; she just hadn’t been good enough . And now she was. Upgraded. Sam 2.0.
She had always loved these jeans.
“I’ve got a medium coquito latte at the bar for a … gosh, this is hard to read. I think it says … shenanigans ?”
Her whole body tensed, left eye twitching spasmodically.
She had to be fucking kidding.
Sam whipped her head around and glared at the all-too-familiar barista sliding her drink across the bar.
“What the hell?” Sam asked, leaning over the counter, voice dropping to a harsh whisper as a cold knot of dread formed in her stomach. “What do you want now, Daphne?”
Daphne’s brows drew together in a look of put-upon confusion. “I’m sorry, I think you have the wrong person.” She tapped the name tag pinned to her polo shirt. Her nails were short, painted a soft shade of bubblegum pink. “My name is Cassandra.”
“Cassandra?” Her lips pressed flat. “Seriously?”
Daphne had sure pulled that out of her ass.
“Seriously.” Daphne turned and made eye contact with the barista who’d taken Sam’s order, exchanging a look that screamed get a load of this chick . “It’s my name.”
Mm-hmm. Sure. “So your parents named you that?”
“That is usually how it works,” Daphne/Cassandra said, nudging Sam’s coffee closer to her. “But I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t ask people that. It’s invasive and, no offense? It’s kind of rude.”
Invasive? Rude? Don’t make her laugh.
“Whatever the hell your name is—”
“Cassandra,” she repeated. “I just told you that it’s Cassandra.”
“Literally,” the other barista added, so helpfully.
Sam narrowed her eyes. “All right, Cassandra , if that’s the way you want to play it. You leave me alone. Stay out of my way, you hear me?”
Daphne/Cassandra held up her hands. “You came into the coffee shop where I work.”
Sam snatched her coffee off the bar, and if she weren’t in desperate need of caffeine, she’d have dumped it in the trash just to make the point that she didn’t give one whit what Daphne said—Sam didn’t trust a word that came out of her mouth. “I won’t make that same mistake again.”
She spun on her heel and beelined for the door.
“Miss? You forgot your croissant! Miss!”
From the outside, Glut hadn’t changed.
The brick building, with its black awning over the door, Glut etched in gold on the glass, stood in the same place it always had on Prince Street.
The unlacquered brass door handle was still shaped like a spoon, and as soon as Sam stepped through the door, she was greeted by the light citrusy scent of the beeswax-based wood polish they used each week to shine the bar, same as always.
From the back of house came the clatter of dishes, voices drifting through the empty dining room. Sam wiped her feet on the welcome mat, which read M ANGEZ , BUVEZ , ET PRENEZ DU BON TEMPS , and followed the bright sound of laughter to the kitchen.
“ No, no, no, you guys gotta hear this part. ” Felix’s voice carried down the hall. “ Carmy stroked his fingers along the inside of Sydney’s thigh— ”
“ Don’t read it out loud! ” Javier shouted. “ I sent that shit to you in confidence! ”
“ You sent me porn. The Bear porn. What’d you think I was gonna do? Frame it? Of course I’m reading this shit out loud. ”
“ It’s fan fiction, you chucklefuck. And I worked really hard on it, so I’d appreciate if you didn’t call it shit, man. ”
“ Aw, Javi, baby, ” Felix cooed. “ I’m sorry. C’mere. Let me make it up to you. ”
“Ah, gross! Get off me, man!”
More laughter filled the kitchen.
“Javi, I’m sorry. You’ve got a gift, okay? No, don’t give me that look. I mean it. You’ve got a real way with words.”
“You think?”
“ Oh, yeah, ” Oslo, who hadn’t spoken until now, said. “ Felix sent it to me this morning. I read it on the way in. It was real ”—he snickered—“ tasteful .”
Sam slipped inside the kitchen just as Felix burst out laughing.
Oslo was the first to spot her. He froze, an eggplant in one hand and a peach in the other, in the middle of pantomiming something crass with the produce. The laughter died on his lips and the peach tumbled to the floor with a soft thud.
“Sounds rowdy in here,” she joked. “Guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s not even noon and y’all are already up to no good.”
A hush fell over the kitchen, so quiet she could hear the hum of the gas stove. She was pretty sure Javier wasn’t even breathing as he stared at her like she’d … well, like she’d sprouted horns or something.
“Chef Cooper,” Melissa greeted her, the first to recover. Her smile was a rictus, frozen on her face. “What are you doing here? I mean … we weren’t expecting you until tomorrow.”
“No?” Oh shit. Why not? “You weren’t?”
A silent look passed among the group that Sam couldn’t begin to decipher.
Was she … sick or something? Down with the flu? She felt fine, but from the way everyone was looking at her, she’d have thought they’d seen a ghost.
“No.” Melissa spoke slowly, dragging out the word, and Sam couldn’t get a handle on her tone, couldn’t tell whether she thought Sam was acting a few fries short, or what. “We weren’t. Should we have been expecting you, Chef Cooper?”
Chef Cooper. Melissa said it like Sam hadn’t held her hair back for her while she puked after a few too many eggnogs at the Glut kitchen Christmas party last year.
“I guess I just wanted to see how things were going?”
Executive chefs were often more focused on menu planning, recipe development, hiring, the management of the restaurant at the macro level, than they were on cooking; this she knew.
But as executive chef, she should still be here.
On the premises, overseeing the place, parleying with Melissa and Raquel, the front-of-house manager, making sure everything operated as a well-oiled machine from the time someone walked through the door to the time they walked out of it.
“Smoothly,” Melissa said, voice clipped, and Sam had the strangest feeling that she wasn’t welcome in the kitchen. “Would you like to inspect the stations?”
“Inspect the—” Sam laughed. “Are you kidding me, Mel? That’s—”
At the word inspect , like soldiers, everyone snapped to, hustling to their workstations, where they stood at attention. Shoulders back, chins held high, and arms clasped behind their backs, they stared straight ahead, unblinking.
… okay. Hello, Invasion of the Body Snatchers . This was getting weirder by the minute.
Coco was the one who ran the kitchen with an iron fist and a sharp tongue, barking orders and issuing random station inspections like a drill sergeant on an ego trip.
Sam wasn’t like that. She hated it when Coco did it and she knew the rest of the kitchen did, too, everyone bitching about it as soon as she left the room.
There was no way that as executive chef, Sam would turn around and do the same thing.