Completely Smitten

by Kristine Grayson

  “He told me.”

  “And then you somehow confirmed that no one else knew this?”

  Sofia glanced over her shoulder at Blackstone, as if she were wondering whether or not to step in. He held out a hand, subtly enough to keep her from moving. Vari ignored it, but Ariel saw it all.

  “I saw the pictures of your—grandfather?—with Hemingway. I had to do a lot of searching before I found them. Darius knew all about it.”

  “Mmm,” Vari said, but he seemed taken aback.

  “You look a lot like your grandfather,” Ariel said.

  Blackstone raised his chin ever so slightly. He watched Vari as if he were afraid the other man was going to say something wrong.

  Vari shrugged.

  “You know Darius, don’t you?”

  “This is not the place for this discussion,” Vari said.

  Ariel felt hope build. “What is?”

  “Maybe after work.”

  “You just got here. I’m leaving soon.” She sounded demanding and knew it. This man was supposed to be her boss and she was acting like she didn’t care.

  “You’re not in a great hurry, are you?” There was a slight edge to his voice, as if the Andrew Vari she had met in Idaho were trying to get out, but he wasn’t allowing him to.

  She felt very uncomfortable. Everyone was staring and she could feel their concern, although she didn’t think it was for her. It felt like they were closing ranks, like she had become an enemy suddenly, for attacking Andrew Vari.

  What was it about this rude little man that inspired that kind of loyalty?

  Probably the same thing that drew her to him.

  “I used to be in a great hurry,” she said. “But now so much time has passed that it would be silly to say that I am.”

  He nodded once, as if he were satisfied with her answer, and then he said, “You look a little pale. Are you sure the ankle is all right?”

  She wasn’t quite sure how to answer that. Was he trying to get rid of her, or did he actually feel concern? And if he did, why did he? Because she was working there now?

  “I’m just tired,” she said. “I haven’t done this kind of work for a while.”

  “But she’s very good at it,” Sofia said in a hearty voice that Ariel hadn’t heard from her before.

  Vari didn’t even turn around. He continued studying Ariel. “I’m sure she is.”

  She flushed. His tone was so ambiguous she couldn’t tell if he was patronizing her, being serious, or making fun of her, but she couldn’t just let the sentence hang between them.

  “Mr. Vari…,” she said.

  “Yes?” He had that look of expectation on his face again.

  “I know you and I got off to a rocky start—”

  “I wouldn’t call it rocky,” he said. “Bizarre, strange, stalkeresque, maybe, but not rocky.”

  “Andrew.” Blackstone spoke for the first time. He did not sound pleased.

  Ariel glanced at her new employer. He gave her a slight nod, as if he were encouraging her. “All I was going to say is that I’ll be very professional here. I work until I get good at something. That’s what I do.”

  Vari looked her up and down. Usually she objected to men who gave her the once-over, but she didn’t feel he was doing that. Instead, he seemed to be taking her in, trying to see all of her.

  “The poor start was partly my fault,” he said. “I hate it when my vacation ends. I’m not pleasant.”

  “It seems that was a difficult time for both of us.”

  “Indeed,” he said. “And now times will be better, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Good.” He turned, a sharp, masculine movement executed with the precision of an athlete, something she hadn’t thought he was. Yet, as he walked around the maître d’s desk toward Blackstone, he moved with an athlete’s grace.

  Blackstone was watching him too. He mouthed a “thank you” to Vari, a movement so faint that Ariel wondered if anyone else had caught it.

  Thank you. For what? For being nice to her? Had Blackstone stepped in? She felt embarrassed. He was her employer, after all. She hoped he hadn’t intervened in her life just because he had felt sorry for her.

  She shook her head once. She had gotten herself into an interesting position. Nearly broke, working a job she thought she was too good for when she got out of college, living in a town with no family or friends—not that she ever had much support from her family.

  She wasn’t sure how she had come to this place, but she had seen herself reflected in Vari’s eyes, and she didn’t like what she saw. A woman who was obsessed with a man she’d only met once, a woman who had pushed so hard that the only contact she had with that man made him think her bizarre.

  Ariel took a deep breath. It was time to change that perception. She would do a good job here. A very professional job. And her personal life would be no one’s business—especially at Quixotic.

  * * *

  Darius stepped into the kitchen and slammed the palm of his hand against the metal table leg before him.

  Damn her. She looked so beautiful standing there in her dress. She spoke to him softly and asked about Darius as if he were a completely different person.

  And he was, too. Darius knew he was, even though the man she wanted was him. The duality hadn’t bothered him for centuries—not like this.

  Never like this.

  He kept expecting her to recognize him, and he wasn’t sure why. She had such clear green eyes, such a sharp intelligence flowing through them, that he thought she, of all people, could see past this shell he wore to the inner man.

  Apparently she couldn’t.

  “Stalkeresque?”

  Blackstone had come into the kitchen and was standing behind him. Darius raised his head. The assistant lunch chef was huddled over the stove, stirring something that smelled of burgundy wine and garlic. The salad prep person and that day’s busboy looked away when they saw him glance in their direction.

  “Yes, stalkeresque,” Darius said. “We have to have the problems on the table.”

  “We do?” Blackstone crossed his arms and leaned against the wall.

  “Yes, we do.” Darius walked down the narrow hallway past the break room. Just beyond it was the former closet that Blackstone used as an office.

  Darius went inside. A table acted as a desk. A computer hummed on top of it. The single filing cabinet dominated the back wall, and a large analog clock rested above that. A transistor radio that had to date from the 1950s sat on a shelf and played 1970s rock and roll from one of Portland’s less memorable radio stations.

  “I thought you were going to be civil to her.” Blackstone closed the door. Darius had known he would come this way.

  “I was civil to her. I just had to define our relationship. That’s all.”

  “Which is?”

  “Manager/employee.”

  “Not lovelorn man/beautiful woman?”

  Dar’s back stiffened. She was lovelorn too—and for him. But he was the only person who knew it.

  “When we’re at work,” he said slowly, “we’re manager and employee.”

  Blackstone held up his hands, as if warding off the words. “All right. Do it your way.”

  “How would you do it, oh tall, dark, and handsome one?” Darius asked. Immediately, he wished the words hadn’t come out of his mouth.

  “I seem to remember a discussion about charm yesterday,” Blackstone said.

  “I seem to remember the sidekick telling the hero that sidekicks don’t have charm.”

  Blackstone grunted and sat on the edge of the table. He must have bumped it as he did so because the computer’s screen saver clicked off, revealing an open recipe file.

  “Hasn’t anyone told you that each person is the hero of his own life?” he asked.

  “Oh?” Darius asked. “Is that why women in those old movie serials always called their rescuers, ‘my hero’? Or maybe that’s why there’ve been so many articles lately on the
dearth of heroes. I’m sure that when athletes and movie stars are called cultural heroes, that’s just a rhetorical term. I know it is when it refers to those broad-minded individuals who risk life and limb to save a child from a burning building. They’re not heroes—at least to other people. They’re only heroes in their own minds.”

  “Sarcasm,” Blackstone said dryly, “is always the refuge of a person losing an argument.”

  “Is that why it’s one of your favorite verbal tools?” Darius grabbed the computer’s mouse and closed the recipe file. The computer asked him if he wanted to save it. He almost clicked no.

  Blackstone stood behind him for the longest time, silent and unmoving. Darius had to play with the computer, even though he didn’t want to, as if none of this concerned him. He opened the employee files and started a new one for Ariel, even though he didn’t have her application in front of him.

  “When most people say things like that, it’s hyperbole,” Blackstone said. “But with you and me, it isn’t.”

  Darius typed in her name, his fingers caressing the keys.

  “Over the centuries, you’ve been angry at me a lot. I’ve done a lot of stupid things.”

  Darius moved the cursor to the next line, asking for birth-date. He had no clue what hers was.

  “But you’ve never been mad at me for who I am and how I look before.”

  Darius moved the cursor to the next line. Address. He didn’t know that either.

  “Yet twice in two days, you’ve yelled at me for things I can’t change.” Blackstone leaned his head against the wall. “I mean, I could change them, I suppose. I could spell myself so that I looked different—at least for a while. Or I could dye my hair or hunch, or something. But I get a feeling that’s not the real problem.”

  Darius moved the cursor to the line for phone number. He didn’t have that either. He knew so little about this woman.

  Maybe that was the problem.

  He was as obsessed about her as she was about the tall, handsome Darius she had met.

  “If you want me to fire her, I can still do it,” Blackstone said.

  Darius sighed and closed the file. “I don’t want you to fire her.”

  “Then what can I do?” Blackstone asked.

  Darius shook his head. “It’s not you, Aethelstan.”

  “You said that yesterday, but here we are, one day later, and you’re still yelling.”

  “Yeah,” Darius said. “I am.”

  He swiveled his chair. Blackstone was studying him.

  “Have you ever met Cupid?” Darius asked.

  “The Cupid?” Blackstone asked.

  Darius nodded.

  “The Cupid, as in the little cherub in diapers who stabs everyone?”

  Darius frowned. “Who taught you your mythology?”

  “No one,” Blackstone said. “I knew most of it was wrong, so I never bothered to learn it very well.”

  “No kidding.” Darius crossed his arms. “Cupid doesn’t stab people.”

  “Oh,” Blackstone said. “He’s one of us, I take it?”

  Darius nodded.

  “What does he do?” Blackstone looked at him.

  “Shoots arrows at people,” Darius said.

  “To make them fall in love?”

  “Yeah,” Darius said softly.

  “You think he’s behind this?”

  “Maybe,” Darius said. “I saw him the morning that I met Ariel.”

  “Did you get hit with an arrow?”

  “No,” Darius said.

  “Would you remember it if you did?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Darius said, remembering how startled Robin Hood had looked when he saw an arrow sticking out of his chest. He had stared at the arrow for a long time before he had looked at Maid Marian. Of course, by then the arrow had faded away—and the entire war against King John had, in a single moment, escalated.

  “Then how can you blame him?” Blackstone asked.

  “Because he may have new tricks,” Darius said. “Like you said, I don’t normally act like this.”

  “What are you going to do?” Blackstone asked.

  “I’d love to choke the life out of the little weasel,” Darius said, “but that’s not going to be feasible. I’m in enough trouble as it is.”

  Blackstone nodded, apparently not realizing that Darius was referring to trouble with the Fates, not with Ariel. “Do you need my help?”

  “Not yet,” Darius said, “but if anyone asks, just say I was provoked.”

  Blackstone leaned forward. “You’re not going to do anything rash, are you?”

  Darius smiled. “When have you known me to be rash?”

  And before Blackstone could answer, Darius clapped his hands and disappeared.

  * * *

  Ariel was following Sofia through the dining room, inspecting table setup for dinner. Suddenly a white light flared through the kitchen wall.

  “What was that?” Ariel asked.

  “What?” Sofia looked around, as if searching for something. “I didn’t see anything.”

  “That light,” Ariel said. “Straight in front of us. The kitchen wall.”

  Sofia stopped, then crossed herself. “You might want to do that,” she said.

  “I’m not Catholic,” Ariel said.

  “You might want to convert,” Sofia said.

  “Why?”

  “You’re one of those.”

  Ariel frowned. This conversation had taken a strange turn. “One of whats?”

  “The ones who can see.” Sofia had lowered her voice.

  “See?” Ariel was still staring at the wall. It looked normal now. “See what?”

  “The ghosts.” Sofia was whispering.

  Blackstone had told Ariel of this. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” she said.

  “Then how do you explain what you just saw?”

  Ariel shrugged. “A power surge? Problems in the kitchen?”

  “To cause a white light? Ariel, if that were the case, we’d hear sirens, fight off fire-trucks, hear yelling and screaming. There’s been nothing.”

  “Does everyone else see a white light?” Ariel asked.

  Sofia shook her head. “Sometimes they see things disappear or appear. Or float. Sometimes they can see through the walls. Sometimes they hear voices.”

  Ariel did feel a bit disconcerted. The only other time she had seen lights like this, she had just fallen off a cliff. “What does Blackstone say about it?”

  “He says if there are ghosts here, they are benign ghosts.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  Sofia shook her head once. “That’s why I try to be here only in the daylight, so that there are fewer of them. But in the winter, in the twilight, sometimes…”

  She didn’t finish her sentence. Instead, she headed toward the front of the restaurant, where the windows showed the darkening sky.

  Ariel trailed behind her like a duckling. “I thought we were checking the tables.”

  “I’m sure they’re fine.”

  “Then what are we doing?” Ariel said.

  “Staying here.” Sofia had reached the maître d’s podium and she clung to it as if it were a lifeline.

  “Why?” Ariel asked.

  “Because,” Sofia whispered, “we’re only a few steps away from the door.”

  Ariel resisted the urge to shake her head. She wasn’t used to being around superstition. There had to be a scientific explanation for the lights.

  She left Sofia’s side and headed back through the restaurant, checking the tables as she went. The white linen tablecloths, the large bone china dish whose main purpose was to be whisked off the table as soon as the patron sat down, the expensive silverware, the napkins folded like tulips, all were in place.

  This restaurant was like an old clock that had been kept in perfect repair; everything moved along in its time, just like it always had. When Sofia left, Ariel would take her place as a cog in a very big wheel.

  Nothing was o
ut of order and there were no more flashing lights. Yet the feeling of discomfort remained.

  Ariel let herself into the kitchen, feeling her shoulder muscles stiffen as she did so. She was bracing herself for another encounter with Andrew Vari.

  But she didn’t see him. Only the cooks and the busboys, and the evening wait staff, who were just beginning to show up for their shifts.

  Then Blackstone came out of the back room. He stopped when he saw her, looking like a little boy who had just gotten into trouble. As he walked toward her, he smiled, and his entire demeanor changed. He became the charming employer, the man who had befriended her the day before.

  “Is everything all right?” he asked.

  “I was just going to ask you that,” she said. “I saw a light against the back wall.”

  “A light?” He sounded confused.

  “Sofia said it was ghosts.”

  He laughed. The sound rang hollow. One of the chefs looked over, his pale skin blotchy from steam.

  “I warned you about the superstitions around here,” Blackstone said.

  Ariel nodded. “I know. Only I’m the one who saw the white light.”

  “A white light,” he repeated, sounding a bit stunned. “You saw it through the wall?”

  Interesting choice of words. “I saw it against the wall.”

  He nodded.

  “I’m worried that it could be a short or some kind of electrical problem.”

  He gave her a half-smile. “You have an analytical mind.”

  “Isn’t that allowed here?” she asked, smiling in return.

  “Of course it is,” he said. “It might even be better.”

  “Better than what?”

  He seemed surprised that she had heard his last comment. “Better than the rest of us.”

  He put his hand on her back and propelled her back toward the interior of the restaurant. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go see if we can find that short of yours.”

  Somehow, though, she knew they wouldn’t. And she knew that he knew they wouldn’t. They were going through the motions, for a reason she didn’t entirely understand.

  “Shouldn’t I bring this to Mr. Vari?” she asked as they left the kitchen. “I thought he was the one who took care of problems with the restaurant.”

  “He is, usually,” Blackstone said. “But I think I’d better handle this one.”