by Kate Meader
“He’ll never retire. What would he do if he wasn’t running the kitchen at Lorenzo’s?”
“Relax. Cook at home. Spend more time with Mama.” He raised an eyebrow, and she laughed. “Okay, that’d drive her crazy. But they could travel. They’re always talking about visiting the relatives in Italy but they can’t leave the restaurant. They could sell it and be comfortable.”
Dante understood the need to keep busy, to stay fulfilled. He glanced over at Cade who was watching a video with Gina and trying to learn some dance movie no doubt inspired by BTS.
“He’s going to make a great dad,” Allie murmured.
Dante’s heart swelled. “Not sure that’s going to happen.”
“Why? Because of the obvious?” She placed her hands under her breasts and pushed them up with a smile.
“There is that, but it’s more a career thing. We both travel so much. And either one of us could be moved out of Chicago.”
“Cade,” Allie called over and thumbed at Cosmo. “You want one of these?”
“Can I have that one?” Cade joked.
“I’m tempted …”
“Mom!” Greta sounded horrified.
“Just kidding!” Allie rolled her eyes at Dante. Kids, so literal.
Dante locked gazes with Cade and arched an eyebrow of query. He’d seen Cade with kids, especially Harper’s girls, and knew he had a knack for bonding with them. But they’d never talked about it because talking meant they had to consider everything that could go wrong. Dante’s contract not being renewed. Cade traded to another team. The explosion of their carefully-calibrated world that existed at the favor of a business entity that cared only about the bottom line.
Cade’s hazel eyes dipped to Cosmo and flickered with something that looked like doubt. No, they wouldn’t be going there.
“Better get on it, Dante,” Allie commented. “Or you’ll be too old to pick the kid up.”
The sound of the front door opening and a heavy tread told them Jerry was back from the cash-n-carry. He put his head around the door.
“Dante. Cade.” Never a wasted word with his brother-in-law.
Shifting the baby’s weight to his shoulder, Dante stood to shake his hand. Only now he realized Jerry wasn’t alone.
“Nonna!” Greta rushed by him to hug the small-framed woman behind Jerry.
His mother.
Dante couldn’t speak. Children had been born, birthdays celebrated, holidays had come and gone in all the time since he’d seen her last. Thirteen years, a third of his life on the other side of a line she and his father had drawn—that’s how long since he’d been in the same room as her. That room had been his grandfather’s hospital room where Dante had taken to heart the man’s advice to be true to himself. Two days later, and the day before his nonno’s funeral, Dante had come out publicly.
His father refused him entry to the church for the funeral of the man he’d loved and honored all his life.
“Mama, Happy Thanksgiving.”
Her eyes searched his, her gaze committing to memory the changes the years had wrought. She looked good, her edges softer, her eyes as bright as ever.
“Are you here alone?” he asked.
“No, your father …” He looked behind her.
Lorenzo Moretti stood in the doorway, big, still vibrant, a little older, but weren’t they all? He halted, his expression darkening on seeing his only son.
His mouth twisted. “Sofia! What is this?”
Dante felt a hand at his back, and he leaned into it, knowing it was Cade.
“It’s time we sorted this out once and for all.” Sofia whipped off her apron in some sort of statement. “We’re going to be civilized about this, so no one will be screaming in front of the children.”
“Wouldn’t want to take your job,” Jerry muttered, a rare stab at humor at which Dante would normally have laughed his head off.
Cade stepped around Dante and put out his hand. “I’m Cade Burnett, Mrs. Moretti. It sure is a pleasure to meet you.”
His mother blinked up at all that Texan heat and took his hand. “Nice to meet you, too, Cade. Call me Giulia.”
Chapter Three
Sofia placed three bottles of wine on the dinner table. “Open one of these, will you?”
Dante shot her a look. “Oh, we’ll need more than that.”
“Why do you think I sent Jerry to the cash-n-carry?”
Dante groaned. “That’s no place to buy wine.”
“That’s what your father always says,” his mother added with more fake cheer than the Christmas tree in the corner. She bustled by him, adding napkins to the place settings. Sofia had brought out her wedding china as if lunch wasn’t already weighted in enough significance.
Dante chanced a look at his father who sat stiffly in an armchair, no give in his posture or expression. He’d yet to say a word to his son. “Papa, would you like a glass of wine?”
His father scrunched up his face, apparently surprised Dante had spoken to him. Did he think they could ignore each other in this thirty square feet of hell?
“It’s too early for drinking.”
Maybe in another universe. In this one, we are right on time. Dante studied the Pinot’s label, a toucan wearing a baseball cap. Not just any baseball cap, but a camo one because this toucan was an army veteran?
He turned to Cade, ready to share the joke. Ugly wine labels were their currency, a fun way for them to express their growing intimacy during those early, heady days of seduction. But his partner was too busy chatting with Dante’s mom, showing her something on his phone. Was he catching her up on their summer vacation pics to Naples last July?
“Let’s start with this one.” Dante grabbed the corkscrew because he would not be doing this sober. Breathe. It was just lunch. A chance to eat and hear his dad complain about the restaurant or how the neighborhood was changing or millennials were ruining everything. He smiled ruefully to himself—how bad could it get?
Sofia had outdone herself, plying them with so much food that chewing was the primary activity for the first thirty minutes. In between bites, his mom and sisters kept up a steady stream of chatter to cover the awkward fact that this was the first time all of them had been in the same room in a couple of centuries.
Then Cade joined in, bless his big Texan heart.
“This pasta is the bomb, Sofe. And this sauce is something else, just the perfect amount of heat. You’ll have to give Dante the recipe.”
“Dante wouldn’t know what to do with it,” his sister said blithely. “He was always the worst of us in the kitchen.”
“Too busy at the ice rink,” his mother chimed in with an indulgent look his way. He wanted to smile at her, let her know it was okay, but was it? She’d turned her back just like his father. Those soft looks of regret might have tempered his pain years ago. Today, he would need more.
Dante would not be begging for scraps of affection at this table.
“I dunno,” Cade said. “I fell for him over pasta so he was doing something right.”
“Don’t think it was the pasta,” Dante murmured, prompting an affectionate thigh squeeze from his man. Dante released a breath, so relieved Cade was here. If he got through this, it would be because this guy kept him sane.
“Well, yeah, Dante got a papal dispensation so he could practice,” Allie said. “No weekends in the restaurant for the golden boy.”
Dante laughed, one eye on his father. “Right. I made up for it by working seven days a week in the summer. And my pasta is excellent.”
“Too much flour,” Sofia said. “And you never let it rest.”
“It’s true,” his mother, smiling in memory. “You were so impatient, Dante. You had to have everything now.”
“I don’t like waiting around for things to happen. Not even for pasta to dry before cooking.”
“So what do you think, Mr. Moretti?” Cade asked. “Has Dante got any skills in the kitchen?”
So far his father had r
emained quiet, letting the conversation swirl around him. Dante assumed he’d be happy to go the entire lunch without speaking but tell that to Cade Burnett. Direct in speech and action, he was the bravest person Dante knew. By drawing Dante’s father into the conversation, he was laying down a challenge: there’s time to fix this.
Everyone held their breath, waiting for Lorenzo Moretti to pronounce.
“Dante didn’t need to apply himself. He always had bigger fish to fry.”
His father had wanted his only son to be a lawyer, a profession he could have bragged to his friends about. Not even a career in professional hockey before it was cut short by injury was enough to make him proud. Much too brutish, hockey lacked the finesse of soccer.
“He’s right,” Dante said, cutting the old man some slack. “I was too distracted to give pasta my all.”
“Sure, too distracted,” his father muttered. “Ma non con lo sport.” But not with sports.
“What does that mean?”
Lorenzo waved it off. “Not now.”
“Why not now, Papa? You have something to say. We’re all family here.”
“You want to talk about this in front of the children?” His father’s disgust was another place setting at the table.
“You brought it up.”
“Dante,” Allie said, ever the peacemaker. “We’re trying to have a nice lunch.”
His father’s dark blue eyes gouged strips from Dante’s heart. “Back when you should have been working in the kitchen, you were always sneaking off with whomever you could turn to your …” Another impatient hand gesture.
“Yeah, dad, I was converting all the sous chefs and dishwashers.”
“What’s converting?” Gina asked.
Jerry said to his daughter, “I’ll explain later, sweetheart.”
Lorenzo shook his head, as if Dante’s presence was a pollutant. The table went quiet again, but that current of unease still remained.
He shot a look at Sofe, who shrugged as if to say, what are you gonna do? How about not putting him in this position in the first place? His father had no desire to make up with his son, and neither of them appreciated being ambushed. They had that much in common.
But maybe his mother wasn’t a lost cause. “So, Mama, how’s the restaurant?”
She smiled in relief. “Busy as ever. Your father just hired a second sous chef.”
The conversation stayed neutral—covers at the restaurant, additions to the menu, a new bar they’d installed. Though Dante knew most of this from his occasional monitoring of social media, he contributed minimally, lest anything set his father off.
He was first to his feet to clear the plates. The kitchen looked like the safest place in the house right now.
“Oh, I’ll do that,” Sofia said as he rinsed the flatware and put it in the dishwasher.
“No, I will.” He turned off the running faucet. “What in the hell were you thinking, Sofe?”
Two spots of color highlighted her cheekbones. “You’re talking to each other now. It’s a start.”
“You call that talking?” I make him sick. Nothing’s changed. No one had missed that crack about Dante “turning” people.
The summer Dante turned sixteen, he’d spent his afternoons doing food prep and chopping vegetables for soffritto in Lorenzo’s kitchen. He’d much rather have been playing hockey even though he put in three hour practices each morning. But there was one consolation to being forced to work in his father’s hot kitchen.
Matty Marino.
His father’s sous chef, Matty had taken classes at the Institute of Culinary Education in the city and thought he was the shit. At nineteen years old, he was loud, brash, an excellent chef, and a troublemaker who enjoyed pissing off Lorenzo. So many sentences started with “Well, at ICE, we learned that …” and whenever Lorenzo exploded in insulting Italian and stormed off, Matty would wink at Dante, and say, “That went well.” Which made Dante laugh because no one stood up to his dad like that and lived to tell the tale.
But it wasn’t just Matty’s irreverence that attracted Dante. He liked the guy because he clearly had a plan for his life. He might be starting in Lorenzo’s of Brooklyn but he wouldn’t be satisfied with the same job in the same restaurant for the next thirty years. His ambition was as sexy as his attitude. Call it puppy love or teenage infatuation, but Dante was hooked.
Practically every day that summer, they hung out in the alley behind the restaurant while Matty took a smoke break. Dante didn’t smoke—he was too serious about hockey to pollute his body that way but he put up with secondhand smoke and garbage-scented air just to listen to Matty talk.
Until the day the talk turned flirtatious.
“I see you lookin’ at me, paisano,” Matty had said. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking.” But something in his tone said it was okay for Dante to look at Matty that way. It was okay to want, even if you couldn’t have it. Because want was the first step and admitting it was the second.
Dante did the bravest thing in his short life up to that point in time: He swallowed his fear, met this older kid’s eyes head on, and said, “You have a nice smile, Matty.”
Just saying it felt like an admission that could end badly. He may as well have shouted from the rooftops, I’m gay.
But Matty didn’t take the compliment badly. He didn’t turn into a neighborhood jerk, whose masculinity was threatened by a kind word. No, he just gave Dante more of what he wanted. Stretched that loud mouth wide into a knowing grin.
Dante never wanted the moment to end, but if it had to, he wanted Matty to kiss him or punch him, anything to break the tension. He was hard behind his apron and he already had enough spank bank material from this conversation to last a lifetime. Anything more and he might have a cardiac arrest on the spot.
“I’ve seen you play,” Matty said and added, “Hockey,” as if there might be some confusion about Dante being a player vs. play-ah. “You’re going to make it but shit, it’s gonna be tough for you.”
Dante didn’t understand. He’d have to work hard? Beat out hundreds of other NHL hopefuls? The ice held no fear. Off it? That was another thing altogether.
“I’m not scared,” Dante said, knowing with the words out on the air what Matty meant. It would be hard because he’d never be truly himself. He’d never find someone to love the way he needed. His family would stop talking to him if he chose to be honest.
Matty smiled again, more rueful, and threw his smoke to the ground, stomping it out. Usually that was the signal to return to work but that day, he lingered.
“You ever been kissed, Dante?”
“Sure. Girls in school.”
“Nah, paisano. I mean, you ever been kissed? Properly? Not some fumbling shit with a gallina you’re not even interested in.”
Dante had shook his head and licked his lips and sent out every signal he could think of short of grabbing Matty and doing the job himself. Matty’s gaze dropped to Dante’s mouth and then—then—then—he curled a hand around Dante’s neck.
His lips brushed Dante’s. Hardly any pressure, barely a taste, and Dante was trembling. A desperate moan erupted from him, enough to give Matty the green light, and that kiss turned wild, sloppy, hot. Only a few seconds, but enough for Dante to know what he might have doubted. He liked boys. He liked men. And he most definitely liked Matty.
It hadn’t gone any further but when they returned to the kitchen, his father knew. Dante’s cheeks were flushed, his eyes probably bugging out. His body felt like it belonged to him at last. Usually, he only felt that way on the ice, and knowing he wasn’t completely off-base and that someone like Matty might be waiting for him on the other side gave him hope.
Matty left the next day, though there was some confusion over whether he quit or was fired. A week later, he was on his way to L.A. for a new job. Last Dante heard he was executive chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant in San Diego. Married to a firefighter with kids as well.
Lorenzo
told Dante he didn’t need him in the kitchen anymore. “Go play your hockey,” he’d said. But Dante knew the score. He didn’t want his son around corrupting any more of the restaurant’s staff. Better to keep his perversion hidden.
Even now, almost twenty-five years later, it had to stay hidden.
His sister bit her lip. “He’s of that older generation, Dante. It’s hard for him to adjust—”
“How long will it take? I’ve been out to family since I was sixteen, to everyone else since I was twenty-five. Nonno Gianni accepted it. Accepted me. You think wine and food is going to change hearts and minds?”
“We just thought it was time to do something.”
“Who’s we? Because Jerry couldn’t give a shit and Allie doesn’t seem to be on board.”
“Me. I thought it was time.”
Dante swung around and met the flinty expression of his favorite person in the world: Cade “Alamo” Burnett.
Chapter Four
“You had something to do with this?” Dante divided a glance between Cade and Sofia. “You both planned this?”
He knew the two were friendly, bonding over Cade’s love for Sofia’s kids. He’d been thrilled they got along but maybe he should have been monitoring this unholy union more closely.
Cade rubbed his jaw. “If there’s a chance these fences could be mended, wouldn’t you want to take it?”
“Cade, this is not something that can be fixed over a family lunch. We’re talking years of fucking dysfunction and icing me out.”
“Sometimes you’ve got to make the first move, Dante.”
And sometimes the age difference between them was so stark. Sure, Cade had made the first move on Dante, took a leap so large that Dante could never imagine being in his skates. His bushy-tailed optimism was the reason they were together, his charm and deep-seated goodness seducing a hesitant, jaded Dante. Cade had always believed in the fairy tale, that love will win out, and fathers and sons had a special bond that could be strained but never truly broken.