7. The Consolation Menu
The Consolation Menu
"Are you serious right now?"
The words came apart in her mouth on the way out, the first sound I'd ever heard leave Madeline Dubois that hadn't been chosen first, considered, or delivered with the care she brought to everything else she said.
Aurelia moved fast out of my arms. Feet hitting the floor, grabbing for the ruined nightgown, pulling what was left of it around herself, and stepped behind my shoulder.
And I stood there and shielded her with my body, because what else was there to do?
The full light was on me now, on my open shirt, my chest, my beard, on everywhere Ru's essence had written on my skin - my own release smeared across my stomach from where I'd leaned against her.
The counter glistened with her juices. The air smelled of sex, of us.
The scene was filthy. There was nothing to misread. No version of this room that required interpretation.
Madeline's eyes slowly went down me once in a clinical inspection, and came back up having catalogued everything.
"I can explain."
That was a lie. There was no explanation that survived what she was looking at. Her eyes moved past me and landed over my shoulder.
"Let me guess." Her voice had gone somewhere I'd never heard it go. "You're Aurelia."
"Hi." Ru's voice came from behind me, timid in a way I'd never heard before.
"Of course you are." Madeline let out a wet chuckle. "So this is what everybody meant about you running women off? This is whore behavior!"
"Madeline." I cut in without raising my voice, and the conversation died right where it stood.
Behind me Ru's hand came up and took a fistful of the back of my shirt. And I thought, God, please don't let this bring on a migraine, and right underneath that I thought something plainer and worse. I'd fucked this woman over.
I knew I'd break Madeline's heart tonight, but not like this.
I was going to do it sitting down, lights low, talk real soft and show her that I really cared.
But Aurelia showed up and my plan went out the window.
And I could read Madeline plain as a temperature gauge.
Everything in her was looking for somewhere to put the shock and hurt, and the easiest place in that doorway was the woman standing behind me.
I wouldn't allow it.
Every service, something goes wrong. Sauce breaks, plate comes back, a line cook opens his hand on a mandoline in the middle of a Saturday and there's blood on his station and forty covers still on the board.
And the room turns and looks at one man.
Not to see if he's sorry. They look at Chef, to see if he's still running it.
So I ran it.
"You talk to me. Not her." I told Madeline.
"You don't get to—"
"I do." I said as level as I could with hands loose at my sides where she could see them, because a man built like me learns young what his own body says before his mouth gets a turn, and I have never once in my life wanted it saying the wrong thing to a woman.
"Every word you got, you aim it right here.
I did this, Madeline. She don't take a single hit for me. "
"That's noble." Madeline huffed, and rolled her eyes. "That's real noble, Dillion."
Madeline made a sound that was close to the sound a pot makes right before the lid goes, some pressure building with nowhere sanctioned to release yet.
This girl probably wanted to slit my throat right there in my own kitchen, and the thing was, she'd get away with it.
Her family had the kind of money and the kind of lawyers that made problems disappear before the ink dried on a police report.
I'd just be gone, folded quietly into some story about a tragic accident, and I'd be looking down, or more likely up, at the whole thing thinking to myself, you brought this on yourself, Dillion.
To my surprise, instead of attacking me, she turned and walked away.
"Madeline! Let me talk to you!" I desperately called after her as I sped walked in her direction.
"Talk?" She stopped and turned to look at me, already a few steps up. "About what, Dillion? About how I caught you with the woman you told me wasn't even in the picture? In this house? With me upstairs? Waiting on you?”
“Let me explain —”
“How many times? Tell me that. How many nights has this been happening while I slept in your bed thinking I was finally getting somewhere with you?"
"Never. Tonight was—"
"You lied to me!"
"Madeline—"
"Why am I here?" It came out of her raw, stripped all the way down, no boarding-school diction left.
"Why did you bring me here, Dillion? Why did you cook for me and hold me at night and let me sit across from you at that table and ask you straight out if there was somebody else, and you look me in my face and dress it up so pretty I felt terrible for asking?
" Her breath heaved. "The butcher knew and I sat at your table feeling crazy for having instincts.
You made me feel crazy for being right."
"She's my friend. It's complicated —"
"Bullshit!"
"This ain't — fuck…Madeline, " I couldn't even get my words together, couldn't string a single sentence that would make any of this survivable.
"Fuck you, Dillion. Seriously." Her voice had gone somewhere past composed now. "Let's recap, since apparently I need to spell this out for both of us. I called you out on the fact that at least one of you was in love with the other. Did I not?"
"Yes." I answered without defense loaded behind it, because I'd decided somewhere in the last five seconds that whatever she needed to say to me tonight, I was going to stand there and take it on the chin.
"And you told me I wasn't competing with anyone. Am I correct?"
"Yes, Madeline."
"Then why on the exact night I put this nightgown on for you, after damn near begging you to give me more of you and yes, to fuck me, am I standing here watching you fuck your best friend?" She added air quotes.
She waited. I said nothing. There was nothing.
"Oh, wait." She laughed, and there was nothing in it but wreckage. "She's not your best friend anymore, is she? Because you two fell out. Yet, look at you."
Her gaze dropped down my body with disgust.
"You're so out of control right now, you're not even present.
' she crunched up her face, "You're standing in front of me apologizing and your whole face and chest are soaked in her.
It's drying in your beard and staining your silk.
You haven't noticed that your penis is still hanging out of your pants. "
I looked down and sure as shit, there it was. My dick out in the open, on soft, no business being anywhere near this conversation. On display for a woman who'd begged me for it all week, while I was drowning in somebody else the whole time.
Took me three tries to get myself back in my pajama pants. Hands wouldn't quit shaking. Fingers gone thick and stupid on the drawstring, like they belonged to somebody who'd never dressed himself before.
"Pathetic," she sneered. "I threw myself at you! I stood in your kitchen and told you I wanted you, and this -" she gestured at me, "- this is what you chose. This mess! You don't deserve me! All of this could have been avoided if you’d just been honest with me. You’re a fucking coward!"
Every word landed exactly where she aimed it, and I let it land, didn't flinch, didn't reach for anything to soften it, because flinching would've made this about my comfort instead of hers, and I'd already taken enough from this woman without stealing that too.
She deserved to say every single thing she needed to spit at me.
Still, I closed my eyes, hoping for half a second that I'd wake up somewhere else, that I'd had too much bourbon and cracked my head on something and none of this was actually happening.
When I opened them, nothing had changed.
Still the beach house. Still every inch of me marked up with everything Aurelia had just given me.
Still Madeline standing there in a dress she'd saved for a night I'd promised her, looking at me like she was watching a building she'd trusted collapse in real time.
"You're a lying piece of shit." She spat it.
"I know." I meant it plain, no cushion on it, because arguing with the truth of that sentence would've been the last insult I owed her, and I'd already run up a bill too high to keep adding to it. “But, tonight I was gonna tell you that —”
"Everyone in this county thinks you're some kind of hero. Chef Duckworth, protector of women, man of honor. I actually believed it too. But you're not protecting anybody except yourself, Dillion. You're just good at making people believe whatever story keeps you comfortable."
"Please, Madeline. Let me just —"
I climbed a step toward her but, she quickly backed up two.
Her hand tightening on the banister, her body putting the math of the staircase between us, as a reflex you can't fake and can't take back.
Proximity to me had become something she needed managing, something to keep a measured distance from, and I stopped dead on that stair like I'd hit glass.
Because I've been a lot of things to a lot of women. I've been the friend, the fool, the shoulder, the man waiting at the end of the ferry. But I have never, not once, not in my whole tattooed, juvie-built, wrist-breaking life, been a thing a woman flinched from.
That was the one line. My grandfather built me around that line.
We protect women. Asher was the thing women flinched from.
Yet, Madeline Dubois was standing on my grandmother's stairs in her creased silk, tears finally coming down, keeping two steps of air between us like a woman who'd learned something tonight about what I was.
I stepped back down and gave her space.
"You're right," I said, and my voice came out hollowed. "You're right, and I know you're right, and I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry?" She laughed, but it broke apart in the middle, turned into something closer to a sob before she caught it and forced her face back into order.
"You made me feel like I mattered this week, Dillion. You held my hand through town like people were supposed to see us. And the whole time, you were thinking about her. Some part of you was waiting for her to show up and she did. Looking back, you’ve been leaving the door open the entire week. "
"I thought I could do this."
It came out broken, and I understood, even as I said it, that I was about to give her honesty at the one moment it would cut worse than the lie. I gave it anyway, because accountability was what was required of me as a man in that moment. It was the only thing I had left that wasn't counterfeit.
"I thought if I brought you out here, if I gave myself the whole week, I could want you the way you deserve to be wanted, live up to the expectation of who you believed we could be.
Bury whatever happened between me and Aurelia.
But I can't, Madeline. She's been in my head since the day I met her.
Seven years. I have never once gotten her out, no matter who I was standing in front of. "
Her face came apart then. All at once, the composure she'd been holding through sheer will giving out, and I hated myself in that moment.
"That's not fair," she whispered, voice trembling. "You don't get to say that to me. That I was practice…a bandaid over a wound you weren’t trying to feel anymore."
"You weren't practice."
"Then what was I, Dillion?" She asked in the worst register she owned. "Tell me what I was, since you're finally in the truth business tonight."
For once in my life, the man with an answer for every table had nothing worth serving.
Every true thing sitting in my chest right then would've cut her deeper than silence would, and standing there saying nothing felt like its own kind of insult.
So I reached for something gentler instead, some middle ground between the whole truth and nothing at all, already knowing gentle wasn't going to land the way I wanted it to.
Knew it and did it anyway, because a man can know exactly what he's about to do wrong and still not have anything better ready in time.
"I wanted to be the man you wanted. The man you deserved. I thought I could—" I could hear myself doing it, plating comfort, garnishing a gut wound, and I couldn't stop. "Madeline, you're a good person. I like spending time with you. I like—"
"Shut up!"
It tore out of her at full voice, both hands coming up like she could physically stop the words in the air.
"Do not stand there and like me, Dillion! Do not hand me the consolation menu! I did not fall asleep in this dress to wake up and get told I'm a good person!"
"I'm sorry." A child's offering came out my mouth and I didn’t have anything better.
"Stop saying that." And the volume dropped out of her all at once, which was worse, tired in a way that scared me more than the screaming had. "It doesn't mean anything if you weren't sorry enough not to do it."
I looked at the ground. Made myself look back up, because she deserved my eyes for the rest of it, whatever the rest of it was.
"Madeline, just—"
She turned toward away from me and started climbing the stairs with her head held high, dismissing me.
"Go be with her," she said, without turning around. "Since that's who you want. In the morning you'll make me breakfast like none of this happened. Then you'll drive me to my family's place on the other side of the island, and we are never going to speak about this again."
"Okay." There was nothing left in me with standing to argue.
"And clean yourself up." She glanced back, finally stopping and her eyes went down me and back up. "You reek of everything you gave her that I begged you for all week. And Madeline Dubois," her chin came up, "does not beg."
She turned back around and made her way back up the staircase. I stood there and listened to the door slam shut. The weight came down on my shoulders. I'd hurt a woman whose whole crime was asking me to be honest. I'd fed her scraps of me all week and called it kindness.
Now she was behind a door and the woman I'd done it all for was also in this house, in the wreckage and both of those facts were mine. Every plate in this house tonight had my name on it. And one of them was still on the counter, going cold.
I wiped my face with both hands, took one breath the way you take it before you walk back into a dinner rush that fell apart while you were gone, and went down to her.