11. Home Cooked #2
"She looks so happy, Dillion." Jade's voice had gone soft the way it does when a woman who knows exactly what it costs to build something good with somebody and doesn't take it lightly when she sees it land right for other people too.
"You can see it. Some brides, you look at the pictures and it's all dress and flowers and you can't find the actual person under it. Not her. That's just Aurelia, happy."
"That's exactly what she is." I looked at the screen a second longer "Happy. Took her long enough to get there. Took both of us."
"That's 'cause it wasn't thrown together," the Chief said, serious for a second in the middle of all the fussing over photos. "That's what happens when it's right. Everything just falls in the direction it was always supposed to go."
"Yeah," I said. "That's exactly what it was."
Jade wiped under her eyes. "Ugh, these pregnancy hormones. I cry about everything. That's enough sentiment for one morning. We really do need to talk timeline before I let myself cry some more."
I chuckled and pocketed the phone. Wasn't near done being proud of it, but the two of them had a proposal that needed real answers, and there'd be time enough later to keep showing off.
"All right," I said, pulling the paperwork back toward me. "Talk to me about timeline."
"Menu locked by the beginning of September the latest," Jade said while sniffling, trying to be all business again. "Staff counts two weeks out. And we'd love a walkthrough of the green sometime in the next month."
"That's exactly the kind of thing I was hoping you'd—"
A knock, and Bloom's head came around my office door before I'd even gotten the word come in all the way out. My assistant had good instincts about most things, timing wasn't usually one of the ones I had to worry about with her, which meant something was already off before she opened her mouth.
"Sorry to interrupt, Chef." She wasn't sorry, not really, or she was, but not enough to have waited.
"Aurelia's on line two. Says it's not an emergency, but…
v" Bloom's eyes cut toward the Mitchells for half a second, weighing how much to say in front of company, and decided on the short version. "She don't sound like herself."
"Take that call, Chef, we'll be on our way." Akil was already up, grabbing Jade's bag before she could reach for it herself and helping her waddle out. "We'll be in touch about the walkthrough and have that contract over to you."
"Talk soon," I said, already picking up the office phone, hitting the line that was blinking at me. Bloom pulled the door shut behind the Mitchells on her way out, giving me the room.
I sighed. Sat back down.
"Talk to me, Ru."
"Did you see the new post on The Westonberry Times?" No hello. Straight into it, which told me exactly how deep in it she already was. "I know Madeline had something to do with it. I know it, Dillion."
"I ain't seen anything yet." I was already pulling my laptop toward me, one hand on the mouse, the other still holding the phone to my ear. "What's it say?"
"It's this whole feature, 'Westonberry's Most Eligible Bachelor, Weds.' Talking about your whirlwind marriage, the license barely filed, and speculating why so fast."
Her voice was climbing with every sentence now, stacking up.
"And sources close to the situation say the bride was, and I'm quoting this, Dillion, 'a longtime family friend who reentered the picture during a turbulent summer.' Turbulent, like I'm a weather system or something that happened to you instead of somebody you chose."
I found the article, read the headline and felt my jaw go tight before I even got to the byline.
They'd grabbed a photo of us kissing outside the restaurant a week after we got back, her up on her toes, my hand at the back of her neck. It was a moment that had belonged to nobody but us, and now it was sitting under a headline with somebody's speculation dressed up next to it.
"Baby, listen to me—"
"There's a whole section speculating whether there was, quote, 'overlap' with someone else this summer.
They don't say her name, but everybody in this town knows exactly who they mean, and everybody's gonna be looking at me sideways at the farmer's market like I stole somebody's man.
" Her breath was coming fast now the way I was used to only hearing from her during a storm.
"I sat next to Miss Betty at church Sunday and she asked me, real sweet and innocent, if I'd 'always known you were the one, even back when you were seeing other people.
' Seeing other people. I didn't know what she meant then. I know now."
"Ru." I kept my voice leveled. "Breathe for me a second."
"I am breathing."
"You're not, you're doing that thing where you talk faster than the air's coming in.
" I closed the laptop. Didn't need to read the rest of it to know this was some writer with an axe to grind and half a source, dressing up gossip as journalism.
"Listen to me. You know what's true. I know what's true.
Everybody who matters knows what's true.
A blog post written by somebody with a grudge and a byline don't get a vote in what we are. "
"It's embarrassing, Dillion."
"Gossip's only got the power you hand it, and I ain't handing it none, and I need you not to either.
" I sat forward, elbows on the desk, like she could feel through the phone that I was leaning into this the same way I'd lean into her if she were sitting across from me.
"This doesn't stop me coming home to you every night.
Doesn't stop us moving forward with a single plan we already made.
Everybody who matters knows who you are to me and how long you've been here, and what you mean to me.
And if the rest of this town wants to twist that into something ugly, they can sort it out the day they can't get a table here no more. "
There was quiet on the line for a second, then she let out a deep sigh.
"You're not even a little mad?" she asked.
"I'm mad at it’s upsetting my wife. I'm about two phone calls from finding out who runs that site and having a conversation with them. I ain't scared of a blog post, and neither should you be. Let people talk, Ru. Let 'em talk till they're tired. We'll still be married when they run out of words."
She laughed. "You can’t call that blogger, Dillion. No one even knows who Lady Westonberry is.”
“Bet I’ll find out.”
"You're not."
"We'll see." I could hear her settling, the fast breath finally slowing all the way down to something normal. "You good?"
"I'm good…I love you."
"Love you too. I'll be home in a few hours. Tonight I'm making you dinner and we're not thinking about The Westonberry Times one more time."
"Okay. I love you, Dilly."
"I know. I love you more."
She hung up, and I slumped down in my chair, knowing she was right. Madeline likely had something to do with this. Couldn't blame the woman for it either.
I married Aurelia just over a week after Madeline walked in on us in that kitchen, caught me with my dick out, holding Aurelia to carry her to make love to her while her whole body still shaking through the last of an orgasm, a mess between us like something had spilled and neither one of us had thought to clean it up.
I closed my eyes and let the cringe run all the way through me. It was fucked up. There wasn't a softer word for it, and I'd stopped looking for one. I could only imagine how she felt, finding out days later that the woman I swore up and down wasn't a problem was suddenly my wife.
I did that girl wrong. Simple as that.
The guilt was gonna sit on me a while. But the happiness of finally being a husband to the love of my life kept crowding it out anyway, kept elbowing it back into a corner every time it tried to take up the whole room.
Two things could be true at once. I just hoped God forgave me the way I kept asking Him to.
And I hoped, somewhere down the line, Madeline found her way to forgiving me too. Not for my sake, for hers.
"I'm cuttin' out a little early," I told Raymond, closing up my black LOEWE leather military backpack.
"Had a feeling when Bloom said Aurelia was on the line.
" He said it confident, waving a hand like the question had been an insult to his own competence.
"Should've married you off years ago. Now I actually get to run a kitchen, let everybody find out what they're made of without you breathing down their necks every service. "
I chuckled. "Just don't burn my restaurant down."
"Man, you know you trust me." He brushed it off with the back of his hand, already turning back toward the pass. "Stop acting like that."
"Yeah, I trust you." No joke behind it as I dapped him up on my way past.
I grabbed the trash on my way out, figured I'd do it for them since I was already headed out back anyway. Hauled it out back where I always parked, tossed it in the dumpster, and was still adjusting my backpack strap when I heard it.
"Got the girl, huh?"
That voice. I'd know it in my sleep, in a crowd, underwater. I slowly turned around, already knowing before I finished turning, and there he was.
Asher was leaning against my brand new BMW.
A crisp white i7, one of the wedding gifts from my parents that I wouldn't usually bring to work, too much car for that.
But it had been sitting in the parking garage that morning looking just right, and I hadn't been able to talk myself out of it.
And now here was a man whose wrists I'd broken, standing against the hood of it like he'd put the down payment on it himself.
I didn't move at first. Just stood there by the dumpster with my bag half on one shoulder, running the math the way I always run it — where his hands were, how much space was between us, what kind of night this was fixing to be.
"So, what's up?"
"How she doing?"
"My wife?" I watched something flicker behind his eyes at the sound of it even though his face tried to stay still. "She ain't no concern of yours."