Chapter 3
Robin
Twelve seconds is my limit. Any longer and the bed wins, and the bed has never once paid my rent.
The house is dark and quiet. Ash's bedroom door is closed — Jason's boots are by the front door, which means he stayed over again, which means I need to be very quiet going past their room because the walls in this house are approximately one sheet of construction paper thick and I have heard things no brother should hear.
I shower fast, dress in my kitchen blacks, grab the coffee I prepped last night in the French press. Cold, but functional. Eating will wait until after the morning rush of prep — my stomach doesn't wake up until at least seven, and Gordon doesn't let us eat on the line anyway.
The drive to Gordon's catering kitchen takes twenty minutes in predawn traffic, which is to say no traffic.
Just me and the Audi and the quiet hum of the road.
Ash's car, technically — he bought it before deployment and I've been driving it for five years, but he still checks it for dents every time I come home.
Control freak. Loving, terrifying control freak.
I park behind the building at 4:50. The kitchen lights are already on, which means Sarah beat me here.
"Morning." She's at her station, hair pinned under a bandana, prepping fruit garnishes for today's luncheon. Sarah is five foot two, covered in burn scars she calls "kitchen tattoos," and the only person in this building I'd trust with my good knife.
"Morning." I tie my apron, wash my hands twice because Gordon checks, and start pulling mise en place for the dessert course.
Today's event is a corporate retirement party.
Two hundred guests. Gordon wants individual plated desserts — chocolate mousse with a tuile cookie and raspberry coulis — plus a display cake that no one will eat but everyone will Instagram.
This is what I'm good at. This right here, in the quiet before the chaos.
My station laid out with surgical precision — chocolate tempered and waiting, raspberries strained and reduced, sugar work cooling on parchment.
My hands know this the way a musician knows scales.
I've been in professional kitchens since I was a teenager, baking at home since I was old enough to reach the counter on a step stool.
By the time I was twelve, Ash was eating my brownies instead of whatever frozen thing our dad's girlfriend of the month left in the freezer.
Food is love. That's not a metaphor. For me, it's a literal fact.
I never learned to say "I care about you" with words that felt real, but I can say it with a perfectly laminated croissant.
A birthday cake with someone's favorite flavor combination.
Lion-shaped sugar cookies for a library story hour run by my best friend.
Salted caramel just because he mentioned liking it.
I shake that thought off and focus. Temper the chocolate. Test the consistency. Pipe the mousse into the molds with steady hands and a level of precision that would make Gordon cry if he ever bothered to watch me work instead of just critiquing the results.
Sarah and I fall into our rhythm. She handles savory prep, I handle pastry, and for an hour the kitchen is just the two of us and the sound of knives on cutting boards and the gentle percussion of pans.
"So," she says, slicing strawberries into fans without looking. "How was the dinner?"
I told her about the pride dinner last week. Edited version; motorcycle club guys who are friends, cooked for them as a thank you for helping me move. No mention of the fact that they're lion shifters. No mention of the fact that one of them has hands I think about while falling asleep.
"Good. They liked the food."
"They better have. You prepped for two days." She glances at me sideways. "Any of them cute?"
"All of them, obviously."
"Obviously. And?"
"And nothing. They're friends."
"Uh huh." Sarah has a gift for packing an entire interrogation into two syllables. "That's why you've been humming while you work for the first time in three years."
"I always hum."
"You hum when you're stress-baking at home. Here you're silent because Gordon screams if he hears it. Today you're humming." She points her paring knife at me. "Someone made you hum, Robin."
I open my mouth to deflect — it's what I do, it's what I'm built for, I have seventeen different ways to redirect a conversation away from my actual feelings — but Sarah's known me for years.
She was here my first week, when I burned an entire sheet of puff pastry and cried in the walk-in.
She covered for me when I showed up hungover after a breakup that wasn't really a breakup because you can't break up with someone you were never actually dating. She knows where all my armor has gaps.
"There's a guy," I admit. "But it's nothing."
"Name?"
"Vaughn."
"Ooh. What does he do?"
"He's a mechanic. Fixes motorcycles."
"Hot." Sarah grins. "Is he into you?"
"He's into tolerating me. I think I annoy him. I definitely annoy him. But sometimes he looks at me like—" I stop. Pipe another mousse. Steady hands. "It doesn't matter. I don't do relationships."
"You don't do relationships, or you don't know how to do relationships? Because those are very different problems."
I hate Sarah sometimes. I hate her because she's right and because she says the quiet part out loud and because her paring knife never slips even when she's psychoanalyzing me.
"Same difference," I say, and she lets it go because the back door slams and Gordon's here.
You can map Gordon's mood by how hard the door hits the wall. Today it rebounds off the stopper and nearly closes again, which means we're at about a seven out of ten. Manageable. Not great.
"Morning, Chef," Sarah and I say in unison, because we've learned.
Gordon barely acknowledges us. He's a big man — not tall, but wide, the kind of guy who takes up more space than his body accounts for.
Ruddy face, thinning hair he combs over with aggressive optimism, hands like catcher's mitts.
He was a good chef once, apparently. There are photos in his office from twenty years ago — thinner Gordon, sharper Gordon, Gordon with awards and handshakes and a smile that actually reached his eyes.
That Gordon is gone. This Gordon runs a mid-tier catering company that survives on corporate contracts and a staff too scared or too broke to leave.
He does a lap of the kitchen. Checks Sarah's prep, grunts. Moves to my station.
I've piped forty mousse molds. They're perfect — smooth tops, consistent portions, exactly the depth he specified. The coulis is strained and glossy. The tuile batter is resting in the fridge. The display cake layers are cooling on racks.
Gordon picks up a mousse mold, tilts it, sets it down. "Coulis is too thick."
It's not too thick. I tested it twice. "I can thin it out if you'd like, Chef."
"I'd like you to get it right the first time." He picks up the squeeze bottle, holds it up to the light like he's examining a specimen. "This is supposed to drizzle, not glop. Are you trying to make it look like a crime scene?"
"I'll adjust the consistency."
"You'll redo it. All of it." He sets the bottle down hard enough that coulis spatters across my station. "And the mousse needs more gelatin. It's too soft."
The mousse is perfect. The gelatin ratio is textbook. But I've been here long enough to know that this isn't about the mousse.
"Yes, Chef."
He moves on. Screams at the line cook about the vegetable prep. Throws a towel at the dishwasher for running the machine too loud. Normal Tuesday.
Sarah catches my eye across the kitchen. The look says: You okay?
I give her a tight smile. The smile says: Fine.
Neither of us believes it.
I redo the coulis. It comes out identical to the first batch because there was nothing wrong with the first batch, but Gordon tastes it, grunts, and moves on without comment. That's as close to approval as he gets.
The event prep accelerates. Two hundred plates, each one requiring a mousse, a tuile cookie, a coulis drizzle, a mint garnish, and a dusting of powdered sugar.
My hands move on autopilot — plate, unmold, cookie, drizzle, garnish, dust, next.
I can do this in my sleep. I have done this in my sleep.
Last month I dreamed I was plating desserts and woke up with my hands making the motions against the mattress.
At noon, two hours before service, Gordon changes the dessert.
"Scratch the mousse. Client called. His wife is allergic to raspberries."
I stare at him. "The mousse is chocolate. The raspberry is just the coulis. I can substitute—"
"Scratch it. Do panna cotta with a passion fruit glaze. Individual ramekins."
"Chef, panna cotta needs at least four hours to set."
"Then you better work fast."
Two hundred panna cottas. In two hours. When the mixture alone needs time to bloom, heat, pour, and chill. It's not physically possible to do it properly. Gordon knows this. I know this. Every person in this kitchen knows this.
"Yes, Chef."
I pull it off. Not the way I want to — the panna cottas aren't as silky as they should be, I had to use a flash-chill technique that sacrifices texture for speed, and the passion fruit glaze is more of a sauce than a proper glaze because there wasn't time to reduce it.
But they're plated and pretty and out the door on time.
Gordon walks the client through the dessert course. I watch from the kitchen pass. "Our signature panna cotta," he says, like it was always the plan. Like I didn't just perform a minor miracle in his kitchen with no notice and no support. "My recipe. Passion fruit from our preferred supplier."
His recipe. His supplier. My hands, my sweat, my two hours of controlled panic.
The client compliments the desserts. Gordon takes a little bow.