Three Little Words

by Jenny Holiday

  “My parents shipped me off to the best rehab money could buy. I spent three months detoxing and talking about my feelings and shit.”

  “Did it work?”

  “It did.” No thanks to his parents—though they had at least paid the bill.

  “And then everything was fine?”

  He usually didn’t talk about his past. In his New York life, Noah was the only one who knew about it. But it was turning out to be strangely easy to talk to Gia. Therapeutic, almost. “Nope. My parents refused to come to any of the parts of my therapy they were supposed to be involved in. There were these family counseling sessions where we were supposed to talk about our relationship and about supporting my future—helping me steer clear of drugs.”

  “That’s harsh. Why send your kid to rehab and then not actually do what you need to do to make it work?”

  “They wanted to just throw money at the problem to make it go away. That’s pretty much how they handled anything even remotely unpleasant. They were obsessed with appearances—especially my mother. There was no way she’d lower herself to sit in a group therapy session and potentially talk about her own culpability in what had happened. Nope; in their eyes they’d written the check, and that was it.”

  “But what about when you got out? Didn’t they want to set you up for success?”

  “They didn’t want me to come home afterwards. It was the summer after my senior year, and their plan was they’d ship me straight from rehab to Chapel Hill, where they wanted me to go to college—which, I hasten to add, I’d only gotten into because my grandfather and father went there and gave them a shit ton of money over the years.” He snorted. “Let’s just say that, drugs aside, I wasn’t a model student in high school, but there’s a building at Chapel Hill with my family’s name on it. So my parents got me off the hook legally, paid a small fortune to clean me up, and then they told me I had to go to college to ‘uphold the family name’ or they would disown me.”

  “So did you go? I guess you pretty much had no other choice.”

  “I didn’t go.” He paused, remembering the fights they’d had when he’d called them from rehab, trying to reason with them. “Not only did I have no desire to go, I was seriously worried about relapsing there. I wouldn’t know anyone. There would be booze everywhere, and probably drugs, too. I would be in over my head academically and therefore stressed out. I wanted to move home, get a menial job, and focus on staying clean. At least for the short term.”

  “Wow. You know, it manifested differently, but my mother was also obsessed with appearances. It must have been hard to move home and deal with that in a time when what you needed was unconditional support.”

  He didn’t miss the remark about her mother and made a mental note to try to find out more about it later, but for now he was oddly committed to seeing his story through. Gia had somehow opened him right up like one of those oysters she’d eaten this morning. “It probably would have been hard, but I didn’t get to test that theory, because they didn’t let me come home. Having a recovering addict at home was not part of my mother’s vision for her life. They said it was Chapel Hill or nothing.”

  “Like nothing nothing? Like, they disowned you?”

  “Yep.”

  “But where did you live?” she asked urgently.

  He was kind of touched by how invested she was in his story. Her concern seemed so at odds with the entitled, princessy attitude she so often projected. And also at odds with anything he deserved.

  He shrugged. “Around. Couch surfed. The problem was my old friends weren’t good for me to be around. They were still partying every night.” He paused, wondering if he should tell her the rest. “I lived on the streets for a while at the end there.”

  “Wow.”

  He had shocked her. It was shocking, if you only knew him in his current incarnation. But, gratifyingly, her shock wasn’t tinged with lots of the stuff he often got when he told his story: disgust, pity, judgment.

  “So that’s why…” She trailed off, and he suspected she was thinking of their encounter with the homeless man outside his restaurant that morning.

  “Yes,” he said quietly, wondering how he could take some of the heaviness out of this conversation. He didn’t regret telling her, but now that he was done with his tale of woe, he kind of wanted to move on.

  What she said next accomplished the task for him. “How did you get from all that to having the best balls in Manhattan?”

  He laughed, a big, genuine one.

  “I was literally plucked from the street by Marc Lalande. He was a chef.”

  “This was the guy you were talking about on the train!”

  “Yeah.” After they’d spoken briefly about Charleston, Bennett had spent the rest of their train journey brooding over his old mentor. “He caught me eating out of the dumpster behind his place. He took me inside. More like forced me inside, actually—I was wary of everyone at that point in my life. He gave me dinner, but then he made me wash dishes afterward.”

  “Ah! All the pieces fall into place. Saved by a chef with a heart of gold.”

  “He would hate to be characterized that way—he was a right bastard most of the time—but he did have a soft spot for downtrodden losers. It came from being raised in the church—his uncle was a Catholic priest, and he’d done the whole altar boy thing. And he did save me.” Part of Bennett hated admitting that he’d ever been the kind of person who needed saving, but he absolutely had.

  “So, cue the movie montage in which he gradually turns you into an upstanding citizen?”

  He laughed again. He’d seen flashes of Gia’s sense of humor last night, and it was coming out again today. She seemed to know instinctively that a little humor to leaven his story was exactly what the situation called for. “Pretty much. He was the first adult I met who didn’t give a shit about my background, and so, paradoxically, I wanted to impress him. He fed me a few nights in a row, made me wash dishes, and then told me if I showed up every day and stayed clean, he’d give me a permanent job. So I showed up and stayed clean. He taught me how to get control of myself and my world.”

  “You make it sound so easy.”

  “It was, in a weird sort of way. I mean, it wasn’t.” He shuddered, thinking back to those nights alone, first in the restaurant office where Lalande let him sleep in the early going, and then in the crappy single room he’d rented in a grungy boardinghouse. When he’d been on the streets, he’d gone to meeting after meeting—usually several in one day—and had spent the rest of the time hanging out with his sponsor, who was a mechanic and let him lurk in the garage where he worked. The restaurant job was progress, but it had also meant less time for meetings. He’d spent his first paycheck on a phone so he could call his sponsor when, after a long shift at the restaurant, he felt like he was going to die of craving.

  “It was the right opportunity at the right time for the right reasons,” he said, making sense of it for himself even as he explained it to Gia. “I think some part of me knew I was headed for an early grave if I didn’t stay off drugs. And the chance to actually make something of myself, without the assistance of all these opportunities I hadn’t earned, appealed to some part of me that wasn’t totally jaded. It was the first job offer I’d ever had that hadn’t come from my parents’ connections—and at the same time it felt like my last chance.

  “And honestly, I loved being in the kitchen. The collective mania of the dinner rush, the satisfaction of performing an action and seeing a concrete outcome, whether that be a bunch of clean dishes or a plate of shrimp.”

  He smiled at those particular memories. He’d known right away, that first night in Lalande’s kitchen as a proper staff member—a lowly dishwasher—that all the pain of staying clean was going to be worth it. And he had vowed to work every day of the rest of his life to deserve the second chance he’d been given.

  “I worked my way up over the course of a few years from dishwasher to Lalande’s sous-chef. Then he made me l
eave—kicked me out of the nest, so to speak. Sent me to a Michelin-starred place in New Orleans. I didn’t love it, but I learned a ton there—about technique but also about how not to run a kitchen. The place was a mess behind the scenes. But it turned out I loved Cajun cuisine—Lalande’s had been straight-up classical French. So after two years in New Orleans, I was bristling to start my own place.”

  “So you came to New York?”

  He shrugged. “I was done with the South.”

  “Yet you ordered your interior designer to recreate it inside your apartment.”

  He quirked a grin. “What can I say? I’m a man of contradictions.”

  “All the best people are.”

  Why did that feel like the biggest compliment anyone had ever given him? The shame that had been unspooling in his gut earlier, as he had told her about the accident, was gone, leaving behind a not-unpleasant emptiness.

  Silence settled, but despite the fact that he’d just massively spilled his guts, it wasn’t uncomfortable.

  A few moments later, she broke it by saying, softly, “Thank you for doing this.”

  “No problem. I think we’re through the worst of the storm.” Their conversation had distracted him, and now the visibility was better and the snow was tapering off.

  “No, I mean the whole thing—the idea of driving. Putting me up last night. Putting up with me last night.”

  He thought of that foot. On his thigh. And damn him, he started to feel like maybe he’d made a mistake in rebuffing her. But no. If a man crumbled every time he encountered serious temptation, what did that say about him? And he had spent his entire adult life controlling his cravings. “Since we seem to be through the worst of it, how about pulling up a map and seeing if you can figure out a place to stop for the night?”

  She smiled. “Sure thing.”

  “I’m starving.” Now that the fear had passed, he realized just how hungry he was. And if it was true for him, it had to be doubly so for her. Even if she had snacked that morning, post-oysters, they’d spent the rest of the day with each other, and as far as he knew, she’d eaten nothing. “You must be, too.”

  The smile slid off her face, and she paused in perusing her phone and looked out the window for a moment. “I am,” she finally said. “I am starving.”

  Chapter Five

  They ended up checking into adjoining rooms at a Best Western in a little town about halfway between D.C. and Richmond, Virginia. Then Bennett left, promising to return with dinner.

  Gia took a quick shower, then wiped a circle into the fogged-up bathroom mirror and stared at herself, just as she had done in the bathroom at the airport in Baltimore. Just as she had done in most bathrooms for the past year.

  She sucked in her cheeks. Lifted her chin. Examined her angles.

  Her stomach twisted in on itself.

  She was so hungry.

  Gia had a problem with food, and she knew it. Half the reason she knew it was that she spent a lot of time trying to convince people she didn’t have a problem with food.

  She told herself it was a little problem. A temporary fix. On par with “I’m going past the speed limit because I’m late for an important event but otherwise I’m a good and responsible driver.”

  But she was starting to fear that she was lying, even to herself.

  She was going to have to get a hold on herself for this wedding, though, because Wendy was onto her. She’d made a few pointed remarks about Gia’s eating behaviors, and she hadn’t been wrong.

  It was just that everything was different than it used to be. Not so long ago, Gia could eat whatever she wanted with no consequences. She would joke about her volcanic metabolism as she shoveled French fries into her mouth.

  Then something happened. Age. Or so she assumed, as she’d gotten her thyroid checked and all that.

  In her moments of rationality, she would tell herself that modeling wasn’t ever going to be a career you did forever. She was already on the older end of things. Unless she wanted to move to catalogs, she didn’t have that many more years ahead of her, no matter the circumference of her waist.

  But she wanted to be the one who decided that. She wanted to say, one day, “I’m done,” and have it be her choice. And—this was the key point—when she made that choice, she would have something lined up to move on to. Because even though she could easily afford it, she didn’t want to just retire. Gia had been hustling her whole life, since her mother had entered her in her first pageant. She didn’t know how to not hustle.

  The problem was, she was deluding herself. There was nothing to move on to. She had no skills to speak of. She’d dropped out after her first year of university. Even before that, she’d never been good at anything—she didn’t play sports, or chess. She didn’t have a passion for politics or movies or anything like that. She’d had a moment there when she’d been in Girl Scouts for a year, and she’d loved it. Going for badges, learning how to do stuff. Selling cookies—she’d sold the most in her troop by far because she’d had the idea to set up a table outside an old-folks home. But then her mom had made her quit in favor of circus school, saying that Girl Scouts was taking too much time away from preparing for and competing in pageants.

  Circus school.

  Her mom had been convinced that it would help her clinch the talent portion of pageants, that it was something more memorable than dancing or playing an instrument. She’d been right, of course. There was nothing like a twelve-year-old walking on a wire strung eight feet off the floor to snag the judges’ attention.

  But short of running off to join the circus, Gia couldn’t do anything. She had nothing of worth except her face. The size and shape of her body. Her physical shell. That phrase, more than a pretty face? It didn’t apply to her. It sounded harsh, but Gia didn’t believe in self-delusion.

  She was kidding herself if she thought she could have a second career.

  So then what was she left with, having reasoned herself full circle? Trying to hang on to the one she did have as long as she could. Trying to make sure episodes like that of two days ago—when she hadn’t been able to fit into the size two they’d earmarked for her and had to switch dresses with Lily Alexander, who’d had to have the size two pinned—didn’t become a thing. Because that kind of news traveled. She had an unplayed voice mail from her agent, in fact, that was probably on this very topic.

  And so she was left with the one variable she could control: what went into her mouth.

  But she wasn’t even being smart about that. She wasn’t uneducated about this stuff. The way to slim down wasn’t to consume twelve oysters all day—that would only put her body into starvation mode and make it harder to lose weight.

  So. Okay. Bennett would bring back dinner. She would eat it. Then she would go to Florida, and she would eat there, too. Get herself back on track with actual healthy, careful eating, not just mindless calorie deprivation.

  She could do this.

  A knock on the adjoining door startled her. She scrambled to get into her pajamas. Her skin was fully dry. How long had she been standing there in her towel, brooding?

  “Good evening,” he drawled when she opened the door. He held two pizza boxes and a bottle of wine. His eyes raked down her body, as they had last night. She would have thought the assessment was heated, but that must not be right, given his reaction to her previous advances.

  She stepped aside to let him in.

  “Weather looks good for tomorrow.” He set everything down on the small desk in a corner of the room. She brought over two glasses, and he grinned and twisted the cap off a bottle of red. “Best I could do under the circumstances,” he said apologetically. “I figured no corkscrews at the Best Western, and I bought this at a place called Liquor-n-Gas.”

  “I’m not picky.” She held out her glass and pondered the fact that she had given him no reason to actually believe that claim. A significant portion of their time together had involved him witnessing her going postal on airline officia
ls.

  He sloshed some wine into her glass, but when she held out the second one, he shook his head. “I don’t drink. I just thought you might want a glass of wine after this day.”

  Oh, of course. He’d referenced drugs in the story he’d told her about his past, but it made sense that he didn’t drink, either. He was looking at her funny, though.

  “What?” she said.

  “Usually when I tell people that, they try to argue with me. How can you work in the restaurant industry and not drink? How can you have a credible wine list if you don’t know what any of it tastes like?”

  “Makes total sense to me.” She lifted her glass to clink against his bottle of tea. “You just need to come up with some snappy comeback about how you used to be a meth-head.”

  He laughed, which gratified her, and she tipped her head back and drank, ordering herself not to think about how stupid it was to drink your calories.

  She opened the pizza box. “This smells amazing.” It smelled so good her hands started to shake.

  “Yeah, I’ve learned that when you’re in Nowhereville, USA, in search of food, your best bet is to find a local mom-and-pop pizza place and ask them for their best pie. This guy”—he pointed to the box, which read “Mister Tony’s”—“turns out to have an actual Neapolitan granny. He’s mostly churning out New York style, but I flattered him into doing us up a pizza Margherita that he makes for staff meals. Of course, the dough won’t be right.”

  “Of course not.” Gia tried not to smile. Bennett was pretty cute when he was geeking out over food.

  “You have to ferment the dough for a true Neapolitan pizza…” He trailed off, belatedly realizing she was teasing him.

  “And what’s in here?” She opened the second box to reveal two enormous slabs of bread, each slathered with not only way more cheese than was on the pizza, but easily more cheese than she’d eaten in the past year. “You didn’t have enough cheese on bread today at lunch?”

  “There’s no such thing as too much cheese on bread. And this version of it is Mister Tony’s bestselling Wall of Cheesy Garlic Bread—that’s its actual name.”