Just One Taste

by Louisa Edwards

  He should’ve kept his damn mouth shut. This was none of his business; he was basically just the hired help.

  Eva looked around the little group she’d just tossed a bomb into, and settled her gaze on Wes. She handed him a sleek red card on her way out. “Here’s my info,” she said. “Call me if you get your shit together and decide you want to make a move on 422. It’s a good property, and I’m definitely interested—but I’d rather work with Market than compete with you. After all, I live on the Upper West Side. Why deprive my neighborhood of its best restaurant by putting it out of business in its first year? Frankie, darling, walk me out.”

  Looking more than a little dazed, Frankie offered her his arm and escorted her outside. Miranda watched them go, an indecipherable look on her pretty face, then leaned up to murmur to Adam, “I think I’ll go make sure Frankie’s not in over his head.” And then she was gone, too, leaving Wes at the bar with Grant and Adam.

  “Holy crap,” Wes said stupidly, staring down at the card in his hand. “What the hell just happened?”

  “What happened,” Grant said, swaying drunkenly, “is that, once again, it’s all on me. Everyone else wants to play a round of wait-and-see, and if I don’t do something, we’ll never get anywhere. I’m going to have to do it again.”

  “You’re not making a lot of sense, man,” Adam said.

  Grant screwed up his face and took a defiant slug of bourbon. “I make plenty of sense. I do nothing but make sense. And no one listens! Just like when we were all working for Devon Sparks and you wanted to start Market and I said you should, but you wanted to …” He hiccupped. “To wait.”

  The bartender, Christian, materialized in front of Wes. Finally, his beer! He was starting to think he might really need it.

  “Hey, Grant,” Christian said quietly. “What’s up?”

  “You!” Grant rounded on him. “Another shot of bourbon.”

  The bartender squinted. “You’ve had a lot to drink, huh? Maybe it’s time to slow down, drink some water. Stop talking about stuff you might regret saying later.”

  Adam and Wes exchanged a clueless glance while Grant shook his head vigorously.

  “Shut up,” he slurred at Christian. “You think you know everything, just because I told you my secret. What I did. But the joke’s on you, pal.”

  “What are you talking about?” Adam asked, a grim note in his voice.

  Grant started to laugh, this rough, tight sound that made Wes uncomfortable. “I’m talking about the fact that I lied to you, Adam. When I told you that rumor, that Devon was promoting that other guy to head chef over you, that was a lie. I said it so you’d finally be willing to quit that awful place and take a chance on our own restaurant.”

  Whoa. Wes did his best to disappear while sneaking a glance at Adam out of the corner of his eye. The guy was clearly shell-shocked, staring down at his friend, Grant, who’d slumped over the bar and looked ready to pass out.

  Adam lifted his eyes to the man behind the bar. “You knew about this?”

  Christian nodded. “He got drunk one night a while back, spilled his guts. I told him you’d understand, he should tell you the truth. I hope I was right.”

  Adam blinked a couple of times, his face blank, before bending to try and peel Grant off the bar.

  Wes moved to help, but Adam waved him away. “I’ve got this,” he said in a flat monotone. “Go on, go have fun. Chris, we’re going out the back way. Will you tell Miranda I’ll meet her at home?”

  The bartender nodded and Wes stood back, watching his two bosses stagger to their feet. “If it helps,” he offered, “I won’t say anything about this. To anyone.”

  Adam glanced over his shoulder, and something around his eyes softened. “Thanks, man. I owe you.”

  “After everything you’ve done for me?” Wes shook his head. “You really, really don’t.”

  Chapter 23

  Wes sank down into the seat next to Jess, grateful the guy was sitting with his back to the bar.

  “What took you so long?” Jess asked.

  Wes shrugged. “Some drama with the restaurateur lady.

  Hey, you’ve got trouble, my friend. Your sister showed up and cornered Frankie outside for a confab.”

  “Oh no.” Jess’s lips went white and bloodless, his eyes wide. He was the textbook definition of panic.

  “Oh yes,” Wes confirmed.

  Jess started out of his seat, clearly intending to break up whatever private chat his sister and his ex—the guy she’d hated almost from the start, and had done her best to separate Jess from—were about to have.

  “Shit, I’m sorry. I have to …” Jess gestured helplessly.

  Wes’s pocket vibrated, his phone alerting him he had a text message, and he pulled the thing out, his heart pumping madly, the crazy situation with Grant and Adam forgotten.

  Important bits of his psyche seemed to be wired to that phone whenever he and Rosemary weren’t in the same room together. If there was a chance she might be calling or messaging him, he was tuned in to every shrill chirp or beep from that damn phone.

  Dn 4 day—hpthsis tsting wll. Where r u?

  He grinned, parsing out the text-speak on his tiny, illuminated screen. His first impulse was to just call her up and tell her how glad he was that the hypothesis was testing well, and that she was done with work for the day. But he knew Rosemary preferred texting. She liked the time it gave her to compose her replies, to consider her options—if he called, she’d be all jittery. Which, to be fair, was one of his favorite Rosemary modes, and he didn’t always resist the impulse to fluster her.

  Tonight, however, he was feeling merciful. Using his thumbs, Wes typed out:

  @Chapel. Corner of Bond & Bowery. Meet me?

  He hit send and laid the phone on the table, attempting to stop the excited, nervous bounce in his leg. He and Rosemary had seen each other every day since that miraculous afternoon in the park, sometimes just for a few minutes to grab a cup of coffee, sometimes for a few hours to grab a little something else.

  Every time they came together, it was hotter, sweeter, more personally devastating than the time before. If they kept going like this, Wes wasn’t entirely sure he’d survive it. He was, however, completely certain he’d die happy.

  “No worries,” Wes told Jess as his phone chirped at him. He snatched it up and waved it jauntily.

  “C u soon” was Rosemary’s entire message, and he couldn’t help lighting up.

  “Looks like I’m going to have company of my own before too much longer,” Wes said.

  “Great.” Jess looked relieved. He was a good kid—Wes could never quite help thinking of his friend that way, even though they weren’t that far apart in age. There was an innocence about Jess, though, an inherent optimism that Wes hadn’t felt in himself in a long time.

  Plus, Jess was just plain nice. He never liked to leave Wes sitting by himself—which, if Wes were into pop psychology, he’d probably want to read a lot into, about how Jess’s parents died when he was a kid, leaving him alone with his older sister, the two of them against the world.

  Whatever. Wes refused to believe a person’s past necessarily dictated his future. “Call me later, fill me in on the fireworks.”

  “Will do.” Jess laughed, but it was tense. Wes watched the kid hurry away, dodging the seething mass of humanity in the empty space between tables that served as a dance floor. He worried about Jess sometimes, the way he wore his heart right out there in the open where the whole world could take potshots at it.

  He was still thinking about that as he watched Jess finally make it to the bar door Frankie and Miranda had left by. The young man pushed the heavy door open and went to step through, nearly crashing into a slight, older guy who was coming in. Jess, well-brought-up little dude that he was, took an apologetic step back and held the door open to let the older man through.

  Wes’s vision blurred and narrowed to the bar’s newest occupant—it was his father.

  Fuck
.

  Thomas Murphy shook his leonine head, spraying water droplets in a gentle arc over a group of Lower East Side punks with pierced septums and crazily colored hair. His father bowed, ridiculously charming and old-fashioned, and said something to them. And instead of responding with shouts of outrage, they smiled at Thom and greeted him like a long-lost brother.

  They’d buy him a drink, Wes knew, and send him on his way with good wishes and promises of lifelong friendship. It was one of his father’s superpowers—everyone he met instantly became his best bud.

  Wes pounded back the rest of his beer and slammed the bottle on the table. He had to head his dad off before Rosemary got here.

  Static filled his head, panic speeding his heartbeat at the thought of the demons of his past meeting up with the woman he hoped would be his future.

  Before he could even stand up, though, he felt a presence behind him and jerked around to see his father standing at the back of his chair with a pleased expression on his handsome, lined face.

  “My Weston! Fancy meeting you here.”

  “Come off it, Pops,” Wes growled. “You knew damn well I’d be here.”

  “Can’t con a con man.” Thom chuckled, toasting his son with the glass in his hand. It was amber-colored liquid, and Wes knew that since he’d gotten someone else to spring for it, his dad would be drinking a good small-batch Irish whiskey. If he were on the make, it would be clear and fizzy, something that looked like a gin and tonic but was actually straight tonic with lime. When Thom was working, he liked to pretend he was drinking something stronger than he actually was. The fact that he had a real drink in his hand made Wes relax his shoulders slightly.

  Until it occurred to him that his father certainly knew what signal that would send to his only son and ex-partner in crime. The choice of Bushmill’s might be a perfectly calculated decision intended to knock Wes off his guard.

  There was no way to know. Wes’s head ached, reminding him why he’d left his father’s world.

  “No, don’t,” he hissed as his father rounded the table and pulled out the chair Jess had vacated. “You’re not staying.”

  “No?” Pops was all surprise, tinged with a little hurt. “But you’re all alone here.”

  Not for long, Wes almost said, but he gritted his teeth on it, knowing that would give him away.

  “I’m not staying,” he said instead, standing up. Maybe he could head Rosemary off at the door, get both of them back uptown to the soft, dark haven of her hotel room.

  “Ah, but you can sit here long enough to finish your drink.” For the first time, Wes noticed the glass in his father’s other hand.

  He groaned. “You got those punks to front you for two Bushmill’s?”

  “That Noelle is lovely, isn’t she? In a rough-and-tumble sort of way.” His father’s sharp blue eyes glittered with appreciation as he glanced over at the exuberantly dancing orange-haired punk goddess. Noelle was the lead singer of Frankie’s band, Dreck, as well as a part-time bartender at Chapel. She had a cute, Kewpie-doll face that she offset with traffic-cone-orange dreadlocks, ripped jeans, and camo wife-beaters.

  “Gross, Pops,” Wes said. “She’s, like, twenty years too young for you.”

  “Fuck that. You’re only as old as you feel, boy.” Blithely ignoring Wes’s obvious annoyance, Thom plunked himself down and slid the second glass of Irish whiskey across the table.

  Wes resisted the urge to turn and glance at the door. He tried to calculate how much time he had before Rosemary walked in.

  She was uptown, at least fifty blocks away. Even if she got a cab right away, and if by some miracle she encountered zero traffic, she was still looking at half an hour in transit. Minimum. She could maybe cut that down by taking the subway, but as convenient and practical as it was, Wes knew she’d never be able to force herself onto the 6 train. Underground petri dishes on rails, she’d shuddered once, clearly envisioning herself stumbling out of the subway car infested with every virus, bacterial infection, and parasite known to man.

  There wasn’t enough hand sanitizer in the world.

  Rolling his shoulders, Wes fought to relax. He eyed the Bushmill’s. Maybe that would help.

  “So, how’s the restaurant racket?”

  Wes took a sip of the Irish whiskey, sweeter and smokier than its Scottish cousins. “Subtle, Pops. If you want to know how flush I am, just ask. Are you out of money already? The poker players in the city must be better than you remembered.”

  Thom sat back in his chair, the picture of insouciance. Unless you happened to look at his sharp eyes, like the tawny gold gaze of a hawk zeroing in on a fieldmouse.

  “My sweet motherless boy, who I raised on my own from a pup, and he’s in a blazing rush to get rid of me,” he lamented. “I noticed it the other night, too. Practically pushed me out the door of your apartment—you couldn’t even be bothered to give me a bit of a challenge when you hid your extra cash!”

  Shit. Wes fought not to shift expressions, but he couldn’t help the slight, involuntary widening of his eyes. Somehow, Thomas Murphy always managed to surprise him.

  “Come on, Pops,” he said, uneasily aware of how completely the opposite of convincing that was. “I’m always glad to see you when you blow through town.”

  “Usually, you are. That’s what has me so perplexed,” Thom said, never taking his predatory gaze off his son’s face. “Makes a man wonder.”

  Which was exactly what Wes had hoped to avoid.

  Quick! Deflect!

  “Maybe I’d be happier to see you if you didn’t steal from me,” Wes growled, fisting his drink and leaning forward aggressively. “It’s tiring to know I need to nail anything easily fenced or pawned to the floor unless I want to lose it.”

  “Psht.” Thom waved that away as if Wes’s words were gnats buzzing too close to his face. “Way of the world, Wes, just as you were taught. No, that’s not it. You’re hiding something from me, something you want to keep all to yourself a lot more than you wanted that extra fifty bucks the other night.”

  Wes snorted to hide his growing unease. “A hundred, but who’s counting, right?”

  “What you were counting on was that I’d strip your pockets and leave quietly, go along on my merry way and never the wiser that my son was into something big. Something too good to share with his old man, who raised him—”

  “From a pup, a poor motherless boy, yeah, Pops, I know. I’ve heard the patter—it stopped tugging at my heartstrings when I was about six.” Wes stood, his chair scraping loudly against the wooden floorboards. “And I’m not into anything. I’m out of the life for good, I told you that when I got out of Heartway House.”

  Thom shook his head sadly. “That place ruined you. If I’d known where you were …”

  Wes felt the old, toxic bitterness trying to turn his guts inside out like a lemon on a reamer. “You’d have done exactly nothing, because we both pulled the job that landed me in there, and they wanted you more than me. If you’d come within fifteen miles of me, they would’ve grabbed you. They knew you were the mastermind behind that scam, not some fifteen-year-old kid,” he said, working hard to keep his voice low and even. “Besides, Heartway House did not ruin me. It was the making of me.”

  “You were never the same after,” Thom said, something dark shadowing his eyes as he lowered them to the glass of amber liquid in his hand. “They took your courage, your hunger—that fire in your belly to be the best, to get one over, to make your bones.”

  Something creaked loudly, and Wes realized he was gripping the back of his chair hard enough to warp the wood. He shook his head. “No, Pops. They didn’t take that stuff from me, they just helped me redirect it. I don’t have to lie and manipulate anyone anymore, I just have to do a good job on the line, hold up my end, and send out great food.”

  Tapping the rim of his glass, Pops squinted through the smoky air of the bar. “I believed that for a while, but now … You’ve got something going on the side, my Weston, do
not try to deny it. What did I say when I came in? You can’t con a con man.”

  Wes had never really understood those scenes in movies or soap operas where someone got so pissed off, they threw a wine glass into the fireplace or against a wall or something. It always seemed so obvious, like you’d be stupidly telegraphing your most vulnerable emotions to the whole world.

  At this particular moment, though, he thought he could relate. The ugly brew of frustration, dread, nervousness, and anger as his father expertly boxed him into this corner made Wes want to shatter his glass, throw his chair, and upend the table for good measure.

  “Fine,” he gritted out. “I’ll tell you, but then you have to promise to leave it alone. Do you swear?”

  Thomas Murphy gave him a look that made his son sigh. “Right. I know, I wouldn’t buy it, even if you did swear. But seriously, Pops—this isn’t a con, it’s my life.”

  His father blinked up at him, his eyes fathomless and dark with the nameless pain that lurked under Thom’s easy charm. “All of life is one long con. Never forget that, and I’ll know I’ve taught you enough to get by in this world.”

  Wes stared down at him, caught as he always was by the painful claws of affection his father dug into his heart. “Pops. I don’t want to fight.”

  “Who’s fighting? We’re just talking. And as long as you’re up, what do you say to getting us another round?” Darkness slid away, masked by his father’s broad, bright smile, and Wes suppressed the urge to shake the man until he dropped the act. But it was useless—no matter how close he sometimes got, Wes knew his dad. The guy had structured his entire life so as to never have to confront his real emotions and problems.

  Will the real Thomas Murphy please stand up?

  Never gonna happen.

  Wes tried to shrug it off. “Sure, you want another Bushmill’s?” At Thom’s nod, Wes turned and gave Christian the high sign for two more glasses of whiskey. Pops nudged Wes’s seat back from the table with his foot, a wordless invitation to sit back down and continue the conversation like civilized men.