8. Eric
— ? —
Eric
Friday evening. I’m driving to the restaurant again. Fourth time this week.
I’ve been at Le D?ner Charmant more in the past seven days than I have in the past six months combined.
The leather steering wheel is warm under my palms, the city lights blurring past as I take the familiar route through downtown.
I tell myself it’s business. Inventory reports.
Staff performance reviews. The kind of hands-on management that built my empire from nothing, that turned one struggling bistro into sixty-five restaurants across three states.
I’m lying.
It’s her.
Valentina.
Her name alone does something to me, something I don’t have a word for, something that settles low in my chest and refuses to leave.
I grip the steering wheel harder, trying to focus on the road, but my mind keeps drifting.
The curve of her neck when she leans over a table to set down a plate.
The way her uniform pulls tight across her hips when she walks between tables, that subtle sway she probably doesn’t even know she has.
Those full lips forming words I barely hear because I’m too busy watching them move, wondering what they’d feel like, what they’d taste like.
Three days. Three days since I ended her shift and sat her down at table 20 and she’s been avoiding me like I carry some contagious disease.
Looking through me like I’m furniture. Like I’m wallpaper.
The second I walk into a room, her eyes find the floor, the ceiling, the emergency exit, the specials board, anywhere but my face.
She’ll take the long way around the dining room just to avoid passing my table.
She’ll suddenly need something from the kitchen the moment I approach the bar.
And I can’t stop thinking about her.
The way her cheeks flushed when I asked her to sit across from me.
The red creeping down her neck, disappearing under her collar like a secret I wasn’t meant to see.
I wondered how far it went. I’m still wondering.
Does it spread across her chest? Does it touch her shoulders?
Does it fade slowly or all at once when she calms down?
Her hands. Small, quick, always busy with something. Folding napkins, wiping down tables, tucking that one stubborn strand of hair behind her ear. I think about them more than I should. Think about what they’d feel like pressed against my chest. Wrapped around my-
I shift in my seat, adjust my grip on the wheel. This is ridiculous. I’m thirty-four years old. I’ve dated models, actresses, women who grace magazine covers and charity galas. I’ve never once found myself distracted by a waitress’s hands.
She turned down my offer like the money was an insult.
Looked me in the eye, said she was fine where she was, and walked away like she was daring me to prove her right about whatever assumptions she’d made.
And instead of killing my interest, it made it worse.
Because she’s right. I can’t buy her. I can’t charm her with expensive dinners she didn’t ask for.
I can’t do any of the things that have worked on every other woman I’ve ever wanted.
She walked away from me. Twice. Once at the anniversary dinner, when she was falling apart in that hallway and still managed to reject my help. And again three days ago, when I offered her a better position and she looked at me like I’d insulted her.
All I can think about is the way she smelled in that hallway the night we met.
Vanilla shampoo and something warm underneath, something that might just be her skin.
The tremble in her voice when she told me the last four years of her life had been a lie.
The fire in her eyes even when she was falling apart, even when tears were threatening to spill, even when everything in her life was crumbling.
I want to know what she looks like when she’s not falling apart. I want to know what she looks like when she laughs, really laughs, not that polite server smile she gives customers. I want to know what she looks like when she lets go.
I want to be the one who makes her let go.
A red light. I stop. Run my hand over my face like I can wipe away these thoughts.
This is dangerous. She’s still married, even if her husband is a piece of shit who doesn’t deserve her.
She’s my employee, which creates a power dynamic I’m not comfortable exploiting.
She’s a mess of legal problems and emotional wounds, and she made it very clear she doesn’t want my help, doesn’t want my attention, doesn’t want anything from me except to be left alone to do her job.
And I still can’t get her out of my head.
The light turns green. I accelerate, then take a detour without consciously deciding to, my hands turning the wheel toward a route I know by heart.
My mother’s house. The path there is automatic, muscle memory built over years of Sunday dinners and unexpected visits and holidays that always smelled like her rosemary bread.
She refused the mansion I bought her when the first restaurant turned profitable.
Refused the penthouse overlooking the river when I opened my tenth location.
Refused everything except this three-bedroom ranch in the neighborhood where she raised me alone, with the cracked driveway she won’t let me repave and the roses she won’t let anyone else touch, not even the landscapers I’ve tried to hire.
I pull into her driveway and find her on the porch, settled into her favorite wicker chair with a book open on her lap that she’s clearly not reading.
The porch light catches the silver threading through her dark hair, and I feel that familiar twist of guilt and love and fear.
Except it’s not just age anymore. Stage four.
The doctors gave her a year, maybe less, and she refused treatment the same way she refused the mansion and the penthouse.
She made me promise not to treat her like she’s dying.
So I bring her bread and let her scold me and pretend I can’t hear the clock.
“You look tired,” she says without looking up.
“Hello to you too, Mom.”
“Sit.”
I sit on the porch steps. Thirty-four years old, owner of sixty-five restaurants, net worth I stopped counting after it hit ten figures, and I still sit on her porch steps like I’m ten years old with a skinned knee, waiting for her to tell me everything will be okay.
She’s quiet for a moment, turning a page she definitely hasn’t read.
The evening air smells like her roses and the jasmine climbing the trellis by the door.
Somewhere down the street, a dog barks. A car passes.
Normal sounds from a normal neighborhood that I could never quite leave behind, no matter how far I climbed.
Then she closes the book and looks at me. Really looks. The way only she can, with those dark eyes that have always seen straight through every lie I’ve ever tried to tell. She used to say she could read my face like a newspaper headline.
“What’s her name?”
“What?”
“The woman. The one you’re thinking about so hard you forgot to bring me the bread you always bring.”
My hands find my knees, grip them. “I’m not thinking about anyone.”
“Eric.” She gives me that look. The one that used to make me confess to breaking her favorite vase when I was seven, to stealing cookies before dinner, to every small childhood crime I thought I’d gotten away with.
“I carried you for nine months and raised you for eighteen years and loved you for thirty-four. I know you better than anyone in this world. You’ve barely looked at me since you got here.
And you have that crease between your eyebrows, the one you get when something is bothering you, when something is keeping you up at night.
” She sets the book aside on the small table next to her chair. “So. What’s her name?”
I don’t answer. I can’t. Saying her name out loud feels like admitting something I’m not ready to admit.
My mother smiles, satisfied with my silence like it’s all the confirmation she needs.
“That serious, huh?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Nothing doesn’t make you drive to your mother’s house at seven o’clock on a Friday night without calling first. Nothing doesn’t put that look on your face.” She pats the step next to her chair. “Come up here. Sit with me properly.”
I move up, settle onto the top step so I’m closer to her level.
She reaches out and touches my hair briefly, the way she used to when I was small and worried about things that seemed enormous then and laughable now.
She smells like she always has. Roses from her garden and the lavender soap she buys at the farmers’ market every Saturday.
“Tell me,” she says.
“There’s nothing to tell. She’s…” I search for the right word and can’t find it. “Complicated.”
“The good ones always are. The easy ones bore you in a month.”
“She doesn’t even like me.”
My mother laughs. A real laugh, warm and surprised, the kind that crinkles the corners of her eyes. “Even better. You need someone who makes you work for it. Someone who doesn’t fall at your feet because you’re handsome and rich and used to getting what you want.”
“She’s not making me work for it. She’s making me crazy. She won’t even look at me, Mom. She finds excuses to be on the opposite side of any room I’m in.”
“Same thing, if you ask me.” She reaches over and pats my cheek, her palm warm and familiar against my jaw.
“You know, at this rate, I’ll have to come back as a ghost just to meet your wife.
Haunting your wedding from the afterlife.
Very dramatic. You’d hate it, but I’d get to wear something floaty and white, so really it’s a win for me. ”
“Mom.” I can’t help the smile tugging at my mouth, even as I try to sound exasperated.