I was already halfway across my room to pull my work clothes out of the closet, and I stopped and said, “That would completely save my ass. But are you sure?”
Gage shrugged. He was even taller than I was, and a former college wrestler built like he was ready to audition for 300. His dark blond hair tended toward the sheepdog look, and a recent set of Celtic tattoo bands at his wrists and upper arms had just healed enough to remove the bandages and serve as catnip for every girl he passed in the street. At first glance he looked like the kind of brain-dead douche who needed an operating manual to toast bread, but he was actually completing a master’s degree down at Brown University.
Burned too many times before, I’d been a little reticent when he’d first moved in. But he’d done his share of cleaning, kept his stuff from encroaching on the common areas, and always paid his half of the rent on time. Admittedly he made a huge lasagna every Wednesday that incorporated about two pounds of Italian sausage and ground beef and forced me to undergo a test of willpower every time I opened the fridge and saw the delectable leftovers sitting in conveniently-portioned plastic containers, but no living situation was perfect.
“I just got back from class,” Gage said. “It’s not like I’m in the middle of anything. Besides, it’s not exactly in my best interests for you to get fired.”
Given that he’d signed a yearlong lease, that was certainly true, but beneath Gage’s grumbling I knew that he would’ve ferried my oversleeping ass to my job regardless. I routinely caught him helping our elderly downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Bandyopadyay, carry in her groceries. Each time he claimed he was just keeping his kept boy-toy options open.
“You’re saving my bacon, Gage,” I called as he left the room.
“Yeah, your tofu bacon,” he grumbled loudly from the living room.
I changed as quickly as I could in the bathroom. My stubble was reaching wolfman proportions, and in my hurry to shave it off I nicked myself three times, once badly enough that I had to stick on one of those little round Band-Aids. My hair was a predictable disaster, but the restaurant I worked at had specific hair policies, so I shellacked it down until I looked ready to head out to a Prohibition speakeasy. Basic needs met, on went the tuxedo pants and the white buttoned shirt. Technically we were supposed to get them dry-cleaned between every two shifts, but since the restaurant refused to reimburse us for the costs and paid only minimum wage, I got by with just Febrezing the crap out of them each day and tossing them into the laundry at the end of each week, while keeping my fingers crossed that the delicate cycle would be okay. Then I pulled on my black dress shoes, which I’d purchased secondhand and which had required only a few applications of glue and a Sharpie to look (from a distance) acceptable. Then the black vest, and finally I put the finishing touches on my bow tie. There was a rule against clip-ons, so I’d had to learn how to actually tie it—after months of practice, I’d gotten to the point where the end result was only a little crooked.
A glance in the mirror confirmed that my appearance met and did not exceed the base minimum standards expected at my job. It would have to do, so I shrugged and grabbed my keys, ran out the door, and pounded down the stairs. In the parking lot, Gage was already waiting in his little green hybrid. I jumped into the passenger’s seat, and he handed me a sandwich.
“I was making my own lunch anyway,” he said, clearly heading off my thanks before I could even start. “And if you pass out from hunger during your shift, your boss would probably take the opportunity to fire you.”
I took a huge bite and groaned. “I’ll do your dishes for a week,” I promised.
Gage glanced over at me from the road. “A straight guy just made you food. Try again.”
I took another bite. “Two weeks?”
Now he shot me a grin. “Sounds a little closer.”
“I know your game. You’re just trying to guilt me into more dishes.”
He shrugged. “Or, you know, doing a real grocery run when it’s your turn.”
“I’m a vegetarian, Gage. I have moral objections to standing at the deli counter.” Mostly because of how good everything looked. I’d gone vegetarian in order to date a vegan, but I’d stayed one because it helped suppress some of my creepier vampire instincts. That didn’t make being around a sizzling hamburger patty any easier, though.
“And I have moral objections to tofu hot dogs. Also, beer?”
“I got the beer! Keystone Light!”
Gage rolled his eyes. “Like I said. Beer?”
“You’re a snob,” I accused him. After all, the Keystone Light was drinkable. Kind of. Mostly it was just really cheap.
“I’m just saying, Fort. When it was my week I bought Sam Adams. After one of those bottles of piss that you’re trying to call beer, I was giving serious consideration to going and siphoning off some of your Fiesta’s antifreeze instead.”
I finished the last bite of the sandwich, balled up the paper towel that he’d wrapped it in, and threw it at his head while we were stopped at a red light. Gage whipped it right back, but I ducked and it went out the open window, where it bounced against the Honda next to us. The girl driving was so involved in her texting that she didn’t even react, and we both cracked up.
“That crazy fitness routine of yours is paying off,” Gage said after a final snicker. “Your reflexes are getting fucking catlike here.”
I managed an uncomfortable little chuckle. Working out was why a drag queen had wolf-whistled at me last week when I’d been bending down to pick up a quarter at the bus stop. The evolution of my reflexes from their previously arthritic state was part of the transition, and something I preferred to try not to think about.
“Oh, hey. Are you just working the lunch shift today?” Gage asked.
“No, dinner as well. Full nine hours. Why?”
“That speed-dating thing is tonight and I just wanted to check to see if you had changed your mind.”
I snorted. “I appreciate the offer, but I still don’t even know why you’re so excited about it.”
He shrugged. “Looks fun, and I’ll be meeting twenty women in an hour and a half. Plus finger food. It’s worth trying.” He slanted a look at me. “Why, did something interesting happen to you during your ten free minutes last week?”
“Yeah, I figured out that the reason the shower is draining so slowly is because your boy-band hair sheds like a Wookiee.” Gage laughed again and let it drop. We talked about other things for the rest of the drive, until he dropped me off at work with five minutes to spare.
Since breaking up with my last girlfriend, Beth, I hadn’t gone out at all. Part of it had been sheer exhaustion from my new schedule, but a large part had also been reticence. Dating Beth had ended pretty badly, with her cheating on me blatantly and often. Gage had heard the whole story, and seemed to have made it his private mission to prove that there were plenty of nice women out there. I’d stopped bothering to count the number of times that we’d been picking up takeout or going to a movie and just happened to run into one of the women from his master’s program, or that I’d come home to find that an old friend of Gage’s had just stopped by for a drink, and just happened to be adorable, single, and age appropriate. It hadn’t worked, of course. It wasn’t Gage’s fault that I was less human than I used to be, and feeling a little conflicted about going out on a date with some nice nursing student whose blood I might sometime in the future want to drink.
Clocking in and getting to work was a relief because it got my mind off of both my existential moral headache and the thought of just how long it had been since I’d gotten laid. I’d worked in food service before (sometimes I thought I’d done just about every possible minimum-wage job before), but mostly at diners or the occasional chain buffalo-wing joint. Working at Peláez had been a very new experience. For one thing, there was the joy of carrying huge trays of food while in black tie. For another, they act
ually employed a guy whose entire job was to go over to the table and advise people on their wine selection. Then there was the food itself.
In most restaurants, bringing the food over was a maximum of three trips. Once to bring over salads or appetizers, another for the entrée, and one last visit to bring over dessert and coffee. Peláez, though, took itself pretty seriously. Part of that manifested in its no-clip-on-tie policy, but the bulk of it resulted in portions so tiny that a typical plate actually consisted of a single mushroom wrapped in bacon and sprinkled with caviar. Serving a single person their lunch involved ten trips with ten different plates, and I wasn’t allowed to just stand there while he popped the bite into his mouth, and whip the plate away. Oh no. I had to busy myself by scampering over to another table and bringing over their minuscule bite of food. Then swinging back to pick up the now-empty plates from table one and bring those ones back.
It was probably a good thing I’d started working out, because all those trips from the dining room back to the kitchen racked up some serious miles.
The benefit to the job was that it left me with very little time to brood. On the downside . . .
“Where’s the fucking vegetarian?” boomed across the kitchen halfway through the main lunch crowd. Like a deer in the headlights, I froze in the act of taking a plate. All down the line, the sous-chefs and assistant cooks eyed me while keeping up the controlled chaos of chopping knives and boiling pots. Down the main aisle rolled my personal nemesis, Chef Jerome, and all around him people ducked down into instinctive head bobs of respect, doing everything possible to avoid attracting his gimlet eye.
I gave a deep sigh. “Here, Chef,” I called.
He came toward me. Chef Jerome looked like old photos of Rasputin, only instead of weird robes he wore bright orange Crocs and an impeccable white chef’s coat. His long wiry mass of black hair was always contained in a ponytail, but he’d had to rig an old hairnet into a beard net to prevent his strange, straggly, end-of-days-prophet, chest-length beard from contaminating the food. His eyes were always dialed to ten on the fanatic scale, but for Chef Jerome, the only true religion was Foodie, and I was a heretic in the eyes of his lord.
Coming up to me, he held a fork wedged into a single mouthful of food. Also known in this restaurant as a thirty-nine-dollar entrée.
“Open,” he said balefully.
I did my best. “Chef, really, I—”
“OPEN.” The vein on his forehead started to throb, a sure sign that he was nearing the breaking point. The last time he’d hit it had been last week, when Lorraine was on meat duty and had miscalibrated her micrometer, resulting in lamb cubes that were two centimeters larger than Chef Jerome had asked for. The ensuing fit had broken eight plates, violated two chicken carcasses, and required fourteen completely comped meals for the people in the dining room who’d overheard language that made Gordon Ramsay sound like a Mormon.
Heeding the throbbing vein, I shut up and opened my mouth. Like the parent of a toddler, he popped the little food niblet in.
Chef Jerome’s feverish eyes documented every movement of my jaw as I chewed. “And?” he asked, his eyes going full Manson-lamp.
I swallowed reluctantly, my mouth already mourning the loss even as my stomach practically danced a jig. “Yes, it’s amazing,” I muttered.
“Filet mignon in an orange glaze with a dusting of jalapeño, motherfucker,” Chef Jerome screamed in my face. Then he looked up and shook his fist at the ceiling, as if challenging the heavens. “There will be no goddamn vegetarians in this kitchen!” This Scarlett O’Hara moment of Chef Jerome’s happened several times a week. And it was a small comfort that as bad as things were for me, they were far worse for Josh the vegan.
My day then got even worse as I walked back into the dining room and noticed the homicidally envious looks that my fellow waiters were shooting me. That only ever meant one thing, and I gulped as I went back to my tables.
Sitting in the middle of my section was Suzume Hollis, kitsune, sometime friend, and all-time tormenter. She caught my eye, raised her wineglass ever so slightly, and gave me the smallest curl of that smile that always hit me like an electric shock to my spine. Then, without missing a beat, she turned her attention back to the expensively suited middle-aged man who sat across from her.
I’d met Suzume when my mother hired her as my bodyguard, but after she’d risked her life to save me from a homicidal pedophile vampire we’d kind of become friends. Being friends with Suzume involved receiving a lot of forwarded e-mail humor and having to endure her love of pranks. In the first month alone of being friends, she’d TPed my car twice, sent a male stripper-gram to my door, and broken into my apartment to fill my closet with 237 cotton-candy Tribbles.
Those incidents had been various levels of amusing (particularly the Tribbles, which had been funnier before Gage and I had had to get down to the serious business of actually trying to eat 237 cotton-candy Tribbles), but then Suzume had decided that my work hours were fair game.
All of the kitsune in Providence were the daughters and granddaughters of the White Fox, who had been a geisha in Japan before emigrating to America. Upon arrival, she’d gone back to what she’d known best and had set up an escort business. While none of the kitsune actually did any of the escort jobs themselves, they did manage and run all of the other aspects of Green Willow Escorts, and lately Suzume had been put in charge of screening prospective clients.
The other waiters were insanely jealous because Suzume never sat in their sections. Instead she was always perched in mine, balancing perfectly on that edge where appropriate business attire starts meeting the opening act of a male sexual fantasy. Today she was in a dark blue silk blouse tucked into a black skirt that ended demurely just below her knee but was so formfitting that I wondered how the hell she maneuvered herself into her car. The string of black pearls around her neck made her skin look luminously pale, and her black hair was in a sleek yet complicated arrangement held together by two long red lacquered chopsticks. She had only a little makeup on around her eyes, drawing attention to the most obvious marker of her Japanese ancestry, and making them look even darker than usual. The man sitting across from her, who probably spent all of his time in boardrooms or wherever rich and powerful men hung out, was clearly already completely enraptured by the time I went over to tell them the day’s specials.
I wasn’t sure if it would make my fellow waiters more or less jealous to know the particular method that Suzume used to torment me during these meals. Somehow she arranged the conversation so that every time I arrived at the table it was just in time to hear the filthiest, most ear-searing and brain-fragmenting portion of a conversation focused on what particular sexual practices this potential client was interested in. And each time I had to try to keep a straight face after hearing a horrifyingly salacious fragment concerning people’s front ends, hind ends, or other parts that I’d never even particularly considered, she’d look up at me with the most demure and ladylike expression, blandly asking for another roll or complimenting the most recent dish, and her eyes would be gleaming with foxy amusement. Meanwhile the rich and powerful men across from her would be putty in her hands, completely eager at the end of that dinner to pay the exorbitant fees that Green Willow Escorts charged.
After an hour of torture, I was finally able to bring over the bill. As always, Suzume reached for it just a hair too slowly, and the newest client insisted on paying it himself, puffing up with importance as Suzume murmured her appreciation in velvety tones.
The next time I swung around, her dinner partner was gone and Suzume was nursing a cup of coffee. She always stuck around—she couldn’t stand not being able to gloat to someone.
“Did you like the bit about the hot wax?” she asked as soon as I came over. With her financial prey gone, she’d dropped her Mysterious and Demure Woman of the East routine and was grinning at me with her usual enthusiasm.
/> “I am going to have nightmares for a week thanks to you,” I bitched as I started collecting the dessert plates. Usually I’d leave that for the busboys, but despite my front I could never resist the chance to spend a few minutes talking with her.
“I almost thought you were going to miss the spanking bit, but then you showed up with the reconstructed artichoke. It was awesome.”
“The food or the other thing?” I asked. “I would’ve thought that you’d heard every weird sexual fetish on the planet by now.”
“I have,” she admitted frankly. “But watching your face makes it interesting all over again.”
“Damn it, Suze, he stole the freaking napkin. You do this on purpose every time. Get them all riled and worked up, and then I’ve brought the coffee and they have to walk out of here, so they grab the napkin to provide a visual block.”
She gave me a very smug look.
“Do not look that proud,” I scolded. “That’s not nice to do to any guy.”
“Are you saying that on behalf of your gender, or”— she swept her gaze downward—“are you speaking from more personal experience?”
“I’m immune to you now,” I said, picking up the pile of plates and stomping off to the kitchen.
Not fast enough, because I could hear her taunting, disbelieving laugh behind me.
She was right. I wasn’t immune at all.
Suzume was gone when I went back to deliver more huge plates with tiny portions to the rest of my tables, and the rest of the night dragged on, noticeably duller after the excitement of her presence.
We stopped seating people at nine, which meant that the last stragglers didn’t head out the door until quarter past ten, and the cleanup didn’t finish for me until almost eleven. I pulled off my bow tie and wadded it into my pocket while I waited at the bus stop, keeping a leery eye on my surroundings. Peláez was in one of the nicer sections of Providence’s downtown, near art galleries and the theater, but it was still dark and nearly deserted, so I stayed as alert as my poor, tired brain could manage. It had been a long week, and I felt deep relief when the bus finally pulled up and I climbed aboard. Tomorrow was Saturday, and it was not only my day off work, but the only day that I wouldn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn and drive down to Newport and train with Chivalry. He and Bhumika always had a standing date on Saturdays—brunch at a charming local restaurant, then over to one of their favorite auctions.
Iron Night Page 4