by Layla Reyne
A tear streaked down her cheek, and Miller yanked her into his arms. He could never stand to see her cry, at fifteen or almost forty. “You’re going to have a beautiful wedding.” He looked over her head at Greg. “Both of you.”
Sloan glared up at him, the litigator fighting back. “It’d be more beautiful if you were there too.”
Holding his course was harder with each tear she shed. He never wanted to bring her pain, but this was better for all of them. It’d save them more pain in the end. He dropped another kiss on her crown before retreating to the windows, staring out at the wintery park again.
“Why, Miller?” Greg asked behind him. “Explain it to me.”
In the glass, he caught the reflection of Greg’s hard dark eyes. “Of all people, I shouldn’t have to explain it to you.”
Greg crossed his arms, not giving an inch. “Well, you do.”
“We’re chefs.” Miller turned and rested back on the ledge, facing him. “Our lives revolve around taste—perfecting seasoning, pairings, entire menus. How much salt to add? Does it need acid? Where’s the perfect balance of sweet and savory? If I lose the ability to taste, to do those things that are essential to my daily life, both for work and my soul, which is highly likely with the course of chemo I need, not to mention radiation and possible surgery, then what the hell am I supposed to do with myself? Who the fuck am I?”
“None of that may come to pass,” Greg argued. “And even if it does, you’re not the first chef to have cancer or to lose their taste buds. We’ve seen others do it and succeed. You’ve got twenty years of sense memory to fall back on. Losing your taste buds doesn’t mean you don’t know how to run a restaurant or kitchen.”
He pushed away from the window, hands flailing. “Like the one I just ran into the ground?”
Greg clasped his shoulders and gave him a hard shake. “One bad venture, Miller. I’ve had three. Your past accomplishments aren’t erased by that one failure or this disease, and neither is the person you are out of the kitchen. To me, to Sloan, to the rest of your family.” His eyes flickered to the door and back. “To Clancy.”
Miller shrugged him off. “Don’t bring him into this.”
“But isn’t he? I know what I saw in New Orleans.”
Sloan, sitting on the edge of the bed near Miller, patted his ass. Her eyes were still wet, but knowing. “Something you want to tell me, honey?”
“Don’t look so smug, dear,” he said, lowering himself next to her.
She brushed her long curls out of the way and snuggled up to him. “If he’s what convinces you to live, then I’ll be smug all I want.”
“Why are you so stubborn?” Miller grumbled.
“Why are you so stubborn?” she parried back.
Greg rolled his eyes. “Why did I ever get mixed up with you two?”
“Because you love us too,” Sloan said with a grin.
“I do.” He claimed the spot on Miller’s other side. “And I’m not ready to lose you.”
“Greg,” Miller forced out of his own tightening throat. “I don’t want either of you to see me like that, to have to spend your time—”
“Our choice.” His friend’s hard brown eyes had turned soft and pleading. “Don’t give up on us, Miller, and I promise, we won’t give up on you.”
Someone cleared their throat on the other side of the room. Miller whipped his head around, looking over Sloan’s carrot-top, to find Clancy in the entry way, his shoulders slumped and arms dangling at his side. Resigned.
Had he heard their conversation? Or was his reaction about the room?
“Let me guess, no other rooms,” Miller said, venturing on the latter.
“None.”
“We’ll make it work,” he said to Clancy.
Greg bumped his shoulder. “If this night goes as it usually does, you’ll both be too drunk to care at the end of it.”
“Where exactly are we going?” Clancy asked.
Miller smiled. “Where it began for the three of us.”
* * *
“Well, well, well, look what Old Saint Nick dropped on my doorstep.”
The voice bellowed. Bellowed. No other word for it, booming over the crowd noise in the small, packed pub.
Clancy stepped out from behind Miller, expecting to find another man Miller’s size. He wasn’t expecting an elf. Or rather, a short, rail-thin older man with weathered skin, dark eyes, and a smattering of salt-and-pepper hair peeking out from under an elf’s hat.
“Eli!” Miller shouted back. “How old’s that costume by now?”
The man dressed as an elf, Eli, cut through the crowd and greeted Miller with open arms. “Come smell it and tell me.”
Miller made a token effort to wave off the impending hug, but judging by his wide smile, and how tightly he wrapped the older man in his arms, he didn’t care much about the stinky costume. He practically swallowed Eli, whose arms barely reached around Miller’s chest.
“You’re too skinny, Sykes,” Eli conversely determined. “Fire a double shepherd,” he shouted toward the kitchen, before giving hugs to Greg and Sloan. “And you two, of course. My three musketeers.”
“Four this year,” Miller said, dragging Clancy forward. “Eli, this is Clancy Rhodes.”
Eli raised a brow. “Your...”
“A friend spending the holidays with us.”
Clancy’s stomach didn’t exactly flutter, more like a wonky somersault, both confused and pleased. Friend was more than he deserved after butting his nose in where he had no business, but friend wasn’t half as much as he really wanted.
Eli didn’t give him more than a moment to obsess over it. “Elliott O’Connor,” he said, hauling Clancy into a hug. “Do you know what you’ve gotten yourself into, kid?” He pulled back and cut his eyes to Miller, Sloan, and Greg. “Double, double, toil and trouble there nearly tore this place apart.”
“We did no such thing,” Sloan said.
A chorus of “Bullshit” rang out from the crowd.
None of Clancy’s friends argued. “You three worked here? This is the pub you mentioned before?”
Greg nodded as he collected their coats and scarves and hung them on one of the hooks by the door. “Everyone here tonight is an Eli O’s alum.”
“It’s a Christmas tradition.” Eli wagged a finger at Miller, Sloan, and Greg. “That they started.”
“So who’s gonna tell me that story?” Clancy asked.
Miller pointed at Sloan. “She’s the mastermind. She tells it best.” He cleared them a spot at the bar and pulled a stool out for Sloan.
Clancy claimed the one next to her, assuming Miller would take the one on his other side. When he moved the opposite direction instead, Clancy shot out a hand and grabbed his wrist. “Hey, where are you going?”
Miller flipped his hand over, squeezing Clancy’s, and Clancy’s stomach fluttered more than somersaulted this time. And again when Miller smiled, fondly like he had last night, before it’d all gone to shit. “I’m gonna go eat.”
Greg rejoined them and slung an arm over Miller’s shoulders. “Did someone say eat?”
Miller squeezed Clancy’s hand once more, pecked Sloan’s cheek, then headed toward the kitchen with Greg.
“Save us some,” Sloan called after them.
Miller returned, “Yes, dear,” to the crowd’s laughing amusement.
Half-turned around on his barstool already, Clancy surveyed the pub. It was bigger than he’d first judged. Long and narrow toward the front, where they sat at the bar, but beyond the other end of the bar, and the spiral staircase that led upstairs, the space opened up considerably. Tables filled half the space, a pool table and dart lanes the other. The mezzanine level above, visible through the metal balcony rail, held more tables and dart lanes.
Clancy twisted back around to look at the bar
. It was old and well-worn, with too many chips and carvings to count. The other side had all the usual bar stuff, as far as Clancy could tell, but he didn’t spend too long looking, his attention drawn instead to the antique mirror over the back bar. It was plastered with pictures, more than a few of them of Miller, Sloan, and Greg. Toes hooked through the stool rail, Clancy leaned forward to get a better look.
Until his view was abruptly cut off. “Well, hello there, handsome.”
Clancy shifted back, considering the bartender who’d rested his forearms on the bar top directly across from him. He was cute, thirty-five or so, with jet black hair and black eyes to match. Given his features and short height, Clancy guessed a relation of Eli’s.
“Ever the flirt, Pattycakes,” Sloan said.
“You keep bringing in these beautiful boys, gorgeous. What am I to do?”
Sloan threw an arm out in front of Clancy. “This one’s taken, Patrick.”
And Patrick wasn’t really his type.
Wait, what? He was taken?
Before he could ask Sloan what she was on about, Patrick stuck out his bottom lip in a cute, full pout. “There went my Christmas present.”
“Bring us two Negroni, and I’ll leave you a big tip for a present.”
“A water,” Clancy cut in. “And a Jameson, neat.”
Patrick grinned. “Miller called ahead and warned me.” He leaned over the bar and kissed her cheek. “Congrats, babe. If anyone deserves it, it’s you.”
She patted his cheek, smiling sweetly. “Thanks, Patrick.”
“I’m still not making you that Negroni.”
“I just want a taste.”
“Nope!” Patrick laughed all the way to the other end of the bar.
“You know you can’t have alcohol, right?” Clancy said, doing his doctorly duty.
“Oh, I know, and I wouldn’t. But as the former bartender of the bunch, I have to give them a hard time.”
“You used to tend bar?”
“Yep, they cooked, and I waited tables until I was old enough to get behind the bar. Never looked back.”
Patrick returned with their drinks, made sure they were all set, then scurried off to fill more orders.
“You know,” Clancy said, voice lowered, “when I texted you an SOS last night, I didn’t mean you had to rush here.” After he’d so royally overstepped, and sensing the tour was going to go from awkward to worse, he’d texted the person who knew Miller best, begging for an intervention.
Sloan smirked. “I was already on my way.”
“Of course you were.” Clancy rolled his eyes, and Sloan sputtered around a sip of water. Clancy laughed and handed her a napkin. “But seriously, thank you for coming.”
“I wanted to be here with him.” She balled up the napkin and tossed it over the bar into a back bar bin. “We do this every year, and Greg and I were already out on Long Island. I was just trying to give you and Miller some space.”
“I don’t think space is what he needs right now. That’s why I suggested you bring Greg too.”
Miller needed the people who were most important to him, and he needed to be reminded how much he meant to them.
“I realized that too,” Sloan said, “once Greg filled me in on what happened in New Orleans.”
Clancy stared into his whiskey. “I didn’t want that to be their last meeting.”
“You know what’s going on, then?”
He touched his throat, in the same place he’d felt the lump in Miller’s Friday night. “He’s got cancer.”
“Advanced stage.”
“Fuck.” Clancy threw his whiskey back in one go. There was no other appropriate response. Well, besides covering his face with his hands and having a good cry, but that was the last thing Sloan needed, on the verge of tears herself. It wasn’t late stage, but advanced was hardly better. He knew the statistics, and remembered his patients, those who’d survived and those who hadn’t, those who’d be at the benefit in a few months and those who wouldn’t. Depending on the exact size and location of Miller’s tumor, and how far it’d spread, he could have less than a twenty-five-percent survival chance.
Don’t tell me how to live what’s left of my life, Miller had said last night.
What’s left... The thought he’d had and dismissed in New Orleans came roaring back. “He doesn’t want to get treatment,” Clancy put together. “That’s what this is all about. A tour of last suppers?”
She blinked back tears and took a long drink of her water. “A side effect of the recommended treatment is loss of taste. And if they need to do surgery, he could lose part of his tongue and throat.”
“Fuck his taste buds,” Clancy cursed low. “And we can reconstruct the rest. If he doesn’t get treatment, he’ll lose his life.”
“If he can’t be a chef, if he can’t taste, he thinks that’s as bad as being dead, maybe worse.”
Noise erupted from the far end of the bar. Miller had emerged from the kitchen carrying a giant tray of food and wearing a huge grin. Everyone around him was cheering and smiling too. He was the center of everything, in a kitchen of one or a pub of fifty. And not just because he was a chef, but because that sort of life, that sort of warmth, bleeding out of him in his smile, his eyes, and the laugh lines around them, drew people in. How could it not?
“There’s so much more to him, to his life,” Clancy murmured.
“I know that,” Sloan said. “And the more people who can help Miller see that the better.” She curled a hand around his arm. “I don’t want to lose him.”
With Miller moving closer and closer to the center of his world too, Clancy didn’t want to lose him either.
* * *
Miller stood by the upstairs balcony rail, nursing his bottle of Gravity Stout and taking in the packed pub. There wasn’t much to distinguish this Eli O’s Christmas party from the last one. The bar had a few hundred more carvings in it, the dartboards a few thousand more pinpricks, and there were more gray hairs on guests’ heads and less hairs on Eli’s, but all in all, it was the same homey Irish pub and the same loud, rowdy party Miller had started twenty years ago and attended every year since.
And yet everything about it this year felt different.
As hard as he tried to smile and be the circus ringleader everyone expected, Miller stood apart from it, watching from the outside, even as he’d physically stood right in the middle of the crowd. He was the one who’d put himself on the perimeter, mentally and emotionally, after the hard sell Sloan and Greg had lobbed at him. It was getting harder to stick to his decision, but as much as his friends thought—or more accurately, hoped—it would all turn out okay, promised that they wouldn’t leave his side through treatment and recovery, Miller couldn’t ask them to do that. He couldn’t ask Sloan to give up the precious time she would otherwise devote to the cannoli, to Tyler, to becoming an equity partner at the firm. He couldn’t ask Greg to give up time at Dram or to look at him without pity when Miller couldn’t taste anything or had to eat through a tube. He couldn’t ask his family to worry about him, not when his parents were ready to retire comfortably and not when each of his sisters had successful jobs and kids to raise. His family was finally—finally—in a good place, and he would not bring them down. And he couldn’t ask Clancy to take a chance on a guy he’d only known a week.
Wasn’t that just the kicker? His parachute, in the form of a sexy, green-eyed doctor, had arrived after he was already speeding too fast toward the water.
“Thank you for bringing me here.”
Speaking of the mixed blessing.
Clancy approached, glass of whiskey in hand.
“Good food, yeah?” Miller said.
“Can’t complain about shepherd’s pie, bangers and mash, colcannon, and boxty on a cold night like this.”
“What’d you like about it?”
&n
bsp; He seemed to consider a moment. “I can taste the history of this place, of Eli’s family, in it.”
Miller felt the same. This place was home for Eli’s family, and for a time, had been home for Miller’s found family too.
“It’s also great for soaking up this,” Clancy added with a tip of his glass. “Though I was promised a night of drunken debauchery.”
Miller leaned his forearms on the rail and pointed at his two best friends. “They’re behind the bar now. Party’s just getting started.”
Sloan flipped two bottles at once, deftly catching them, spouts down, and poured the booze directly into a shaker. The crowd cheered.
“So she really did tend bar here,” Clancy said, hip to the rail next to Miller. “She told me she did, but I didn’t totally believe her until now.”
“Best bartender Eli ever had.” He raised a single finger to his lips. “Don’t tell Patrick.”
Clancy mimed zipping his lips and throwing away the key. As usual, they didn’t stay closed more than a minute. “How long were you all here, together?”
“Me and Greg, just a couple of years before we moved on to other kitchens, but Sloan stayed. She put herself through CUNY undergrad and Columbia Law.” Miller glanced back at his friends, remembering fondly how Sloan would get home from classes, wrangle him and Greg out of their beds, shove extra-large coffee mugs in their hands, then drag them here every night, never a minute late. She never slowed down. Still didn’t, even pregnant. She’d make a great mom. No sleep necessary.
Clancy drifted from his side to a nearby table. “You all love it here.”
“This was home, and the energy...” Miller gestured at the bar crowd below and the dart players behind them. “Oscar’s was a great place to learn the fundamentals, and Martha’s Vineyard a good place to get our feet under us, but this was our first time really out on our own.”