Three Little Words

by Jenny Holiday

  And the drawl.

  Oh, the drawl.

  But the world was full of good-looking guys with charm to spare. And Gia had seen a lot of the world, so she could make herself immune to any man, even one whose voice sounded like slightly scratchy honey. Which wasn’t a thing, but whatever.

  So, deflector shields engaged, she would go home with Bennett Buchanan long enough to get her bearings and make a plan. She would eat something, because half her problem right now was blood sugar.

  She would not sleep with him.

  “Put this on.” He shrugged out of his parka and placed it over her shoulders—she had not been prepared for the storm. Then he produced a baggie. It was full of pecans. He opened it and held it out to her.

  Her mouth didn’t just water; it did this weird gushing faucet thing. She actually had to sort of suck up a big pool of spit so as not to drool on the floor.

  She bit into one, and flavor exploded on her tongue. It was unexpectedly spicy. But after the burn, underneath it, there was something else. A deep, caramelized, smoky sweetness that felt like a reward.

  He shook the baggie to indicate that she should take some more.

  All right, who was she kidding? She probably would sleep with him. If they were going to be snowed in, what else were they going to do?

  “Did you make these?” The baggie, and the absence of an artisanal tin from some SoHo gourmet shop, suggested the answer was yes.

  “I did.”

  That was…interesting. Reese Witherspoon’s southern rom-com boyfriends usually had monogrammed hankies in their pockets, not pecans.

  By the time they reached Penn Station, where they changed to the subway, she’d eaten the whole baggie. Sixty-seven pecans to be precise—she’d counted. A plain pecan contained ten calories, and who knew what was in the magical elixir he’d coated them in.

  She refused to think about it. She had some breathing room. She was on vacation.

  And she felt better for having eaten.

  Because that was how food worked. Your body needed fuel, and food was that fuel.

  She almost fell asleep on the subway, lulled by the infusion of calories and the rumbling of the train.

  “Next stop is us,” Bennett said, seemingly minutes but actually almost an hour later.

  She shook her head to rouse herself as he hoisted his duffel bag onto his shoulder and reached for the handle of her suitcase.

  Us.

  He hadn’t meant anything by it. In fact, what he had meant was me. Next stop is me.

  What must it be like to have a house—or an apartment, or whatever? When Gia was working, she lived out of hotels. When she wasn’t, she went back to her parents’ place or stayed with her friends in Toronto. But that was a far cry from having an apartment you came back to so frequently and repeatedly that the nearest subway stop was “yours.”

  They emerged on 181st Street, and holy crap it was snowing.

  It hadn’t started yet when they’d left Newark under a white sky—which was why she’d been so annoyed at the airline. Why cancel a flight when there wasn’t a speck of snow on the ground?

  As they’d trained in, though, it had started—big, fat flakes falling leisurely against the windows, so pretty that Gia had half wished she could open the window and stick out her tongue to catch them, let the cold, metallic taste of them merge with the spicy sweetness of the pecans. And, judging by how much was accumulated on the sidewalk, it must have really started coming down in earnest while they’d been underground on the long subway ride to Bennett’s.

  Gia loved snow. When she was a kid, snow had meant escape. She’d bundle up and go outside, which was one place her mother, ever concerned about ruining her makeup, wouldn’t follow. And when Gia was bundled up, she was just one of the kids. What she looked like didn’t matter—in their small Ontario town, they all wore the same face-concealing uniform of hat and scarf.

  So snow lifted her spirits, usually. And this was pretty snow. Clean, insistent, country-like snow. Snow that wasn’t messing around.

  She probably would have started twirling like Maria von Trapp: Maria Takes Manhattan Edition if she hadn’t been so worried about getting Wendy’s dress to Florida.

  And, you know, if she hadn’t been trailing along behind good ol’ boy Bennett Buchanan.

  “Damn, that took forever.” He stopped in front of a restaurant. “You must be starving.”

  “I’m sorry I ate all your pecans.”

  “Plenty more where they came from.”

  She glanced up at an awning bowing under the weight of half a foot of snow. They were at a restaurant called Boudin.

  “We don’t have to eat out,” she said. “We can just go to your place.”

  As soon as the words left her mouth, she regretted them. She’d only meant that she didn’t need a fancy restaurant meal—she’d be perfectly happy to hit a bodega and hunker down at his place while she called around to figure out where she was going to stay tonight.

  Or, you know, decided whether she was going to sleep with him.

  Honestly, it was the path of least resistance, and that was usually how it went. Some dude would make advances, and if she had the itch, she would assess suitability. If the guy in question was being too over the top about her beauty, or about the fact that she was a model, she might deflect, but sometimes not, because really, beauty was what she had going for her, and there was no point in pretending otherwise. She had learned her lesson on that front. What do they say? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

  Gia wasn’t the kind of person who needed to be fooled twice.

  But she didn’t want to make it sound like she was entertaining the notion of sleeping with him, so Forget the restaurant; let’s go to your place probably hadn’t been the smartest thing to say.

  He didn’t seem to take it the wrong way, though, just held the door open for her and said, “This is my place.”

  “Oh. You live here?” She craned her neck—there did appear to be apartments above the retail level.

  “Nope, but if you want food, we’re better off here than at my apartment. I think I have tea and mustard in my fridge there, and that’s pretty much it.” When she didn’t answer—she was confused—he said, “Come on. We’re letting the snow in.”

  She obeyed, and was hit with a wall of the most wonderful smell. It was some kind of garlicky roasting meat, maybe, mixed with…something kind of herby and green?

  A hostess approached. “Welcome to— Chef! I thought you were in Florida!”

  Chef.

  Ah, everything suddenly made sense. His claim that this was “his place.” The incredible pecans.

  “Flight was canceled.” He shoved his bag and Gia’s suitcase to one side of the vestibule. “Can you get one of the guys to take this stuff downstairs?” He took the garment bag Gia had been carrying and handed it to the hostess. “And make sure they hang this up?”

  “Sure thing.”

  Bennett scanned the room, his eyes moving back and forth like he was reading something that required his utmost concentration. Gia followed his gaze. The place was narrow and deep—home to maybe twenty tables along a banquette that ran along one side of the place as well as a bar. It was dark and cozy, lit only by candles. And that smell. Oh, God, that smell. Gia wanted to bottle it so she could spritz it around at will.

  “What the hell is Eddie doing behind the bar?” Bennett called after the retreating hostess.

  “Blanca called in sick.” She shot him an anxious look over her shoulder.

  “Blanca called in snow, you mean.” His pacifying tone from the airport was gone, replaced by something rigid and sharp and unforgiving. The hostess grimaced, and he waved her on.

  “Come on.” He gestured for Gia to follow him into the restaurant’s dim interior. At the bar he pulled out a stool for her. Then, eyeing her handbag, he pulled out another one. “I think that bag is going to need its own stool.”

  She shrugged. “I like big bags
and I cannot lie.”

  The corners of his mouth turned up. She was proud to have made him smile. Which was strange. Usually it was the guy making lame jokes at her.

  “Chef?” said the man behind the bar, presumably Eddie. “Oh, thank God. Everyone keeps asking me how oaky the chardonnay is and shit. The only reason I haven’t totally ruined your rep is that it’s pay-what-you-can night, so the bar is lower.”

  “The bar is not lower on pay-what-you-can night,” Bennett said sharply, and there was so much barely tethered ire in his voice that Gia winced on the bartender’s behalf.

  “Right. Sorry, Chef.”

  Bennett walked behind the bar and rolled up his sleeves. “I imagine they’re behind back there without you?”

  Eddie nodded.

  Bennett sighed and hitched his head toward the rear of the restaurant, which was all the urging Eddie needed to hightail it back to the kitchen.

  Then he turned to Gia. “What are you drinking?”

  “This is your restaurant,” she said, stating the obvious, because standing behind the bar with a sense of ease that couldn’t be faked, he looked like the king of the castle.

  “Yep.” He must have decided he wasn’t going to wait for her drink order, because he reached for a bottle of wine from a rack above the bar and set to work uncorking it.

  “I need those juleps, Eddie.” A frazzled-looking server set a piece of paper down on the bar, not realizing Eddie wasn’t bartending anymore. “And two glasses of sauv blanc.”

  “You got it.” Bennett set a wineglass in front of Gia and poured a generous amount of ruby liquid into it.

  The server looked up, startled. “Chef?”

  “Hey, Tosha. We’re a bit behind here, but I’m gonna get us caught up.”

  “You’d think we’d be dead in this weather,” Tosha said.

  “Nah. Not on pay-what-you-can night. Do me a favor and put in an order of the boudin—straight up and balls—for me, will you? Tell them to rush it. I’ll have your juleps up by the time you’re back.”

  “Pay-what-you-can night?” Gia asked as he produced a bowl of the magical pecans and slid them across to her. “What does that mean?”

  “Exactly what it sounds like. You order, we feed you, you pay what you’re able to. If you can’t pay, that’s okay—you can still eat.”

  He set a bunch of other stuff in front of her, too: a cutting board, a bowl of limes, and a small knife. “Some people—like you—pay in labor.” He took one of the limes and demonstrated what he wanted her to do—cut it into sixths but cut off the pointy ends first, and then spear a cocktail skewer through each of the resulting wedges. His hand moved fast, producing six perfectly shaped wedges in a matter of seconds.

  She opened her mouth, but then she closed it when she realized she had no idea what she meant to say. Her impulse had been to object, but why? The place was clearly slammed. And if the rest of whatever he was planning to feed her was as good as those damned pecans, she’d gladly work for her supper. This was certainly more interesting than the usual “You’re so gorgeous; I can’t believe I’m out with an actual model” date.

  Not that this was a date.

  She took a drink of her wine. She wasn’t a connoisseur, but as with the pecans, there was a layered complexity to the wine that was both startling and delightful. It started out tasting like berries but deepened into something darker, almost smoky. It was an unexpected juxtaposition. It was also utterly delicious.

  Well, hell. She took another drink—tried not to make it too obvious a gulp—and picked up a lime.

  They worked in silence for a few minutes, Gia chopping, Bennett…dancing. It was really the only word for it. He moved quickly but with laser-like precision, every reach, pivot, and pour perfectly calibrated to achieve his aim with both economy and grace, his concentration unshakable. He was utterly in control of himself and his surroundings.

  When she finished with the limes, she pushed the cutting board forward slightly—not more than an inch or two. But he noticed and wordlessly replaced the limes with a bowl of lemons with one hand while he garnished a margarita with the other.

  She paused for a moment, part of her still feeling like she should be objecting to being put to work like this, but when she cast around for a reason, she couldn’t come up with anything, so she picked up the knife again. She was probably still on the defensive from the shoot, where she’d had to accommodate all manner of unreasonable requests, from “Can you try to stop shivering, because your nipples are showing” to “Can you stand on one foot while we do this next section of shots because your one leg looks weird like that and it will be better if it’s not in the shot.”

  Bennett was already back to his work anyway, so the window for her to object had closed. He’d made an astonishing number of drinks in the ten minutes they’d been here. Currently he was methodically dividing a bunch of mint he’d muddled among four glasses.

  This would be perfect for today’s picture. On the train she’d thought idly about taking a picture of the snow later, but suddenly she wanted to capture the image of his calm, masculine grace at the center of all the kinetic energy of the restaurant.

  She dug in her bag for her camera, looked through the viewfinder, overrode the flash so he would be lit only by the candlelight, and took her time waiting for the perfect shot. She would only have one chance, because that was how her system worked but also…

  “Did you just take a picture of me?” He turned to her, his brow knit in bewilderment.

  …because you couldn’t be stealthy with a Polaroid camera. Especially this old-school one—it sounded like an old man wheezing when it took a picture.

  “Yep.” She stuck the camera back in her purse and set the photo on the bar.

  His bewilderment turned to amusement as he bent over the photo, which was doing its wonky slow-mo developing thing. “Why?”

  Usually people commented on the Polaroid aspect of things, the retro novelty of an instant camera.

  “I do this thing where I take one photo a day.”

  “And what do you do with the pictures?”

  She dug around in her bag and extracted a Sharpie. Careful not to touch the still-developing image, she wrote the date on the white bottom part. “I do this, and then I stick it in my bag. I keep meaning to get organized and get a scrapbook or something, but I’m not very crafty.” She chuckled, thinking back to her friend Elise’s wedding. Maybe she should get the Queen of Pinterest on the case.

  Bennett was back to work, pouring shots of whiskey into the mint- and ice-filled glasses. “So is your bag one of those bottomless Mary Poppins–style ones?”

  Her bag was legendarily large, and there were a lot of photos rattling around in there, but her Polaroid habit was pretty new. She’d stolen the camera from a job about three months ago. It had been another unpleasant shoot. The photographer had been going for a retro look, so in addition to the regular setup, he’d been shooting “candids” with the Polaroid. But when “candids” turned out to also mean creeping on the girls while they were changing, he’d suddenly discovered his camera had gone missing.

  The server called Tosha reappeared at the bar, and as if on cue, Bennett garnished the last of the mint juleps he was making for her and set it on a tray with the wine she’d ordered.

  “How are they doing in the kitchen?” he asked.

  She just rolled her eyes, said, “Pay-what-you-can night,” hoisted the tray of drinks, and took off.

  “So,” Gia said, “how often do you do pay-what-you-can night?”

  “First and third Sundays.” Bennett wiped his hands on a towel and leaned over the bar to look at the still-developing photo.

  She turned to take in the full room. “So all these people can order whatever they want and pay you literally nothing.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sounds like an excellent business plan,” she teased.

  He was still hunched over looking at the picture. “It’s not business. I
t’s charity.”

  Huh. Of course it was charity, but honestly, she’d expected him to have some other angle. Everyone had an angle in this city—or at least in her slice of it.

  “But not of the bullshit, society-pages variety,” he added, his lip curling up in a sneer. “Not that kind of charity.”

  “What kind, then?”

  He looked up suddenly and met her gaze. His stillness, after he’d been in motion for so long, was jarring. His attention was jarring.

  The candles on the bar bathed his face in warm light. He looked like he belonged in a painting. “‘If anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?’ That kind.”

  Was he…quoting the Bible at her?

  Bennett craned his neck toward the kitchen. “Where the fuck is the boudin I ordered?”

  Yeah, there was no “probably” about it anymore. She was definitely going to sleep with him.

  * * *

  Bennett shouldn’t have come back. He should have just taken Gia to the Mexican place two doors down. It was better that he not know what a shit show his place became in his absence, despite the fact that they’d gone over and over how everything was going to operate while he was out of town.

  And the way everyone kept saying, Oh, well, it’s just pay-what-you-can night.

  Fuck that shit.

  Someday Boudin would be a full-time pay-what-you-can restaurant—a place where anyone could come for a meal, regardless of their ability to pay. A community restaurant. He had to believe that. He forced himself to keep the faith even when it seemed like no matter how much money he managed to save, it would never be enough to make it happen. It was what he’d been working for all these years. Why he was living in one room. Why, Noah’s wedding aside, he never went on vacation.

  But until then, he was doing this high-low thing, where he hosted fancy people most of the time and opened the doors to everyone a couple of times a month. The juxtaposition made for some snobbish remarks, even from his own staff, which made him irate.