by JD Hawkins
The realization comes slowly, as slow as the sweeping movements of the music, as the veiling of the night sky: I’m happy. Happier than I’ve been in a long time. Maybe ever. Here, against him, in a love so real and present I can smell it in his scent, feel it in the tenderness of his fingers in my hair, hear it in the soft thump of his heart and the deep swell of his breathing, and everything else seems irrelevant, pointless. My sister’s advice, Asha’s, it all starts to make sense. Why would I need anything more than this?
And why am I about to throw it all away?
I remember Asha’s advice to ‘follow your heart,’ but which way do you go when your heart is split in two?
17
Cole
She’s turned my world upside down, inside out. And the thing is, I love it. If you had told me before I met her that there would come a time when I would delete the numbers of the models in my phone, when I’d be carefully preparing a picnic and agonizing over each thing I put in the basket, then I’d have said you were crazy, and probably had security escort you off the premises. But here I am.
I’ve never run from a challenge, never stopped at an obstacle. It’s just that, until now, the challenges I’ve faced have been the ones best tackled with brute force, with determined strength, focused decisiveness. Challenges that have made my body ache, my emotions spike, my talents stretch to their limits. Problems solved with animal strength and stubbornness.
But Willow…she’s a different kind of goal, and now the challenge is different. Now I need to open up old wounds and finally let them heal, unfurl the barriers I’ve erected between me and the world, allow myself to trust, to express, to love. It might be the hardest thing I’ve done yet, but the payoff is incredible.
I’m in such a good mood that I almost forget I have a mentoring date scheduled with Chloe when I turn up at Knife early one morning. She’s standing out front with Maggie waiting for me, and after exchanging a few pleasantries with Chloe’s supervisor I lead the girl into the restaurant to spend some time in the kitchen.
It’s not exactly what I had in mind for today, but if anything Willow has had me losing my temper a lot less, and going with the flow a lot more. We make for the industrial fridge to see what we can play with and then spend almost an hour cutting fresh produce into fancy shapes and building colorful mason jar salads, all while I give Chloe a lengthy discourse on where vinegar, salt, and different varieties of olive oil come from.
Maybe I’m starting to warm to the kid, or maybe it’s just this new perspective, but the time flies, and I’m about to show Chloe how to make Knife’s secret recipe house pesto when Maggie arrives to pick her back up. We thumbtack the pesto idea for next time, and once they’re gone I clean up and perform checks across the whole restaurant.
Michelle arrives first, as always, and I grab her attention as she’s putting on her whites in the hallway and tell her to stop by the office for a chat.
She looks calm but a little surprised as she sits in front of the desk, still tightening her dark, unruly curls into a ponytail.
“What’s up?” she says anxiously.
I don’t blame her for feeling a little bemused; Michelle’s good enough that we barely need to say anything to each other anymore. As a head chef she’s basically a machine, efficient, unyielding, and if she were to cash in all the days off that she’s owed we wouldn’t see her for months. Over the years she’s worked with me she’s also learned exactly how I operate, and can pretty much pre-empt what I’m gonna do before I actually do it—so the surprise in her deep brown eyes isn’t entirely unwarranted.
“How are things?” I ask, leaning forward in my office chair.
Michelle laughs, a short and easy one, ever relaxed and resourceful.
“Is this a performance review or something?”
Now I laugh. “No, nothing like that. Just been a while since we touched base.”
Michelle eyes me keenly. “You know you can be direct with me, Cole.”
I nod and laugh again. “Right. Ok. Tell me, what do you think about Willow?”
“Willow?”
“Yeah.”
Michelle pauses a second before speaking.
“As a chef or…”
“As a chef,” I say, smiling. Michelle’s as observant out of the kitchen as she is in it.
“Well she’s pretty great, honestly. Works fast, good communication, stays calm. She’s been a little off her game the past few days, but we’ve been a bit busier than usual and I’m sure it’s nothing worth worrying about. All in all I can’t fault her.”
I nod. Figures she’d be slipping a little here and there since we got together—I’d be slipping too with the way my mind’s been flying.
“You think she’d make a good head chef?”
“For the Vegas place?” Michelle asks, pausing again to pout and think. “Yeah. Probably. I know she’s young but she’s no amateur—she’s definitely ‘got it.’ It’s hard to say for sure, but I could definitely see her as head of a kitchen—later if not sooner. She thinks fast on her feet, is always on top of what’s going on in the kitchen, and there’s nothing she can’t cook…she doesn’t take any shit, either, despite Leo doing his whole ‘hazing’ thing.”
“Good. That’s what I wanted to hear,” I say, leaning back a little at her confidence-affirming words. “It’s not for Las Vegas though—it’s for here.”
Michelle frowns, looks at me, then shakes her head. “I don’t understand. Are you letting me go?”
“Never. Nothing like that. But how about this: How would you feel about taking on the Vegas place?” I ask. “I’d rather have an experienced head like yours in charge of a new team than Willow.”
Michelle sits back as if winded by the news. “Hmm,” is all she says.
She stares stonily at some spot on the wall behind me, face blank, though I don’t need to be a mind reader to know she’s thinking at a million miles an hour.
“Of course, I’d do everything I can to support you out there. Find you a nice place—or put you up in a nice hotel suite until we find something you like. Relocation costs all covered in full, pay raise, and I’ll throw in a healthy bonus. New car. Whatever you want. I don’t want you thinking I’d put you out there ‘cause you’re not doing a good job here—if anything, you’re the only person who I know will have that place running like Knife inside a month. You’re the best I’ve got.”
“Yeah,” Michelle says, “I get it.”
She stares a little longer.
“Do you want to take some time to think about it?”
“No,” Michelle says, looking back at me finally with a smile. “I’ll do it.”
“You sure? I know it’s a big move, and you’ve been in L.A. half your life.”
“Yeah,” she says, with a little more conviction now, smile a little broader. “To be honest, I could do with a new challenge. I’ll miss the crew here, for sure. But this is just what I need right now. I’ve been feeling lately like, ‘what’s next?’ and I think this is it. The next step.”
“Congratulations. You’re gonna do a hell of a job.”
I offer my hand across the table and Michelle shakes it firmly.
“Little drink to celebrate?” I add, standing up and moving toward the wine crates.
“No thanks,” she says, standing up and tightening her ponytail again. “We’re low on béchamel and I’m expecting quite a few orders of the tuna mornay today.”
“Well don’t think you’re going to Las Vegas without having a drink on me first.”
Michelle laughs as she makes for the door, stopping once she has her hand on it to turn back. “Cole…”
“Yeah?”
“Did you speak to Willow already?”
“No. I was waiting for your answer first. I’m going to ask her today.”
Michelle nods.
“Well, she should be in for her shift soon. You want me to send her in?”
“That’s the idea.”
Michelle leave
s and I take a moment to relax now that the hard part is done. I had no idea what she would say—Michelle’s life is a closed book—and if she’d said no to the Vegas job, I would have really had to rethink things.
Now, though, it’s just plain sailing. All I’ve gotta do is wait for my girl to walk through those doors, and then offer her the job of a lifetime. I take the flowers I picked up for her and the delicately-wrapped gift out from under the desk and place them in front of me. I select the perfect wine from the crate and pull it close, ready to open and celebrate.
I’m about to make both our dreams come true.
18
Willow
I dash into the rear entrance of Knife feeling like the forces of excitement and euphoria are carrying me, a hurricane of glee that pushes me onward. The windows I picked out are going into the new location today—Andre assures me that his guys are the best—and it’ll be done by the time I get off work if I want to see. It’s a small thing, but it sets a smile on my face that I haven’t been able to remove all morning, and though my body is going through the motions of putting on my whites and starting my shift, my consciousness is flying about thirty-thousand feet in the air.
“Hey Michelle. Hey Warren. Hey Carrie,” I say, chirpily. Then, even though—no, because— he hates it, “Hey Leo, how you doing?”
Before Leo can grunt and shake his head at me like an old man seeing a young couple kiss in public, Michelle comes over.
“Willow?” she says, and I look to see a rare kind of smile in those strong, dark features. “Cole’s in his office. He wanted to have a word with you.”
“Oh, sure,” I say, nodding, my heart racing now for different reasons.
I finish washing my hands and take my time drying them as slowly as possible on the journey to the back office. Once again it feels like things are moving way too fast for my Idaho-cultivated pace. I’ve signed the contract, the windows are going in, and Tony’s sending me interior decorating inspiration pictures throughout the day—it’s all really happening, and that means it’s really time for me to come clean with Cole. The longer I keep it a secret the worse it’s gonna be when he finds out, the deeper we’ll have embedded ourselves within each other, and the higher the chance of him discovering it himself, which would be a disaster (the location is only a few streets away, after all).
I need to tell him.
Now.
Except I can’t. I’ve managed to put it off this long by telling myself I’m just ‘waiting for the right opportunity,’ but I’m starting to wonder if there’s ever a ‘right’ time to tell your boss and lover that you’re betraying them. That you’re repaying their faith in you as a chef by leaving to start your own restaurant, and perhaps even worse than that, responding to the trust they’ve put into you as their lover by doing the one thing that emotionally scarred them permanently. Plus, every time I’m with Cole it’s like nothing else exists. I fall for him deeper each time we talk, with every intimate touch, every look from those eyes another knot that bonds us together. How can you do the right thing when it means hurting someone you love? How do you follow your dreams when it means giving up what you’ve worked so hard to build? I’ve spent nights sighing myself to sleep over it, praying for some intervention that’ll somehow make it better, some other way for this to go that might make everybody happy.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he might not be upset, maybe he’ll appreciate that this is my dream, and that I couldn’t say no. Maybe being with him and working on my own place is absolutely fine. Except every time I think those things I remember the pain in his eyes when he told me about Jason betraying him, the vulnerability in them when he said he trusted me. That resolute defiance to never trust anybody ever again, to never open up to anybody—a defiance he gave up starting on our first night out, when he told me all his secrets.
I stand outside the closed office door, take a deep breath, and knock quickly.
“Come in,” Cole says through the door.
Here goes nothing.
“Hey,” I say, as I step into the office and Cole walks toward me, shoulders rolling, his body seeming even larger in the small room.
“Hey, babe,” he replies, shutting the door behind me and taking me in for a slow kiss, the kind he usually gives me first thing in the morning, as if thirsty for my lips. A kiss that makes time slow, turns my insides to warm honey. A drug that makes me lose my sense of place, struggle to catch my thoughts, as if they were passing birds.
He pulls back and smiles at me for a second, gazing at me as if I’m the most incredible thing on earth, so sincere I can almost believe it myself. Then he moves toward his desk.
I laugh nervously.
“We probably shouldn’t do that at work,” I say, just trying to shift the mood somewhere more pragmatic.
“Who cares? I’m the boss,” Cole says, leaning back to pull a bouquet from behind him. “I don’t like keeping secrets anyway.”
My stomach drops. I move closer to take the flowers from him and smell them.
“Flowers? Why…what are these for?”
“For being talented…smart…fascinating…and,” his hands wind around my hips, pulling me to him so that he almost crushes the flowers between us, “so incredibly sexy.”
I laugh and try not to make it obvious I’m pulling back, making as if I’m adjusting my whites.
“Also,” he continues, pulling a bottle of wine from nearby, wielding it the way he does when the wine is particularly good, “to celebrate.”
“Celebrate?”
Cole smiles even more broadly, and I can see the deep joy within him, the buildup of enthusiasm that led up to this moment. He doesn’t answer right away, as if savoring it, and instead scoots a chair beside me with his foot and leans back once again on the desk.
“You’re gonna wanna sit down for this,” he says, happily.
“Okay…” I say slowly, easing back into the chair, still clutching the flowers on my lap.
“You know Fork is on track to open in about five weeks, right?”
“Sure,” I nod.
“And that we were still looking for a head chef,” he goes on.
“Yeah. You found someone?”
“Better than that. I decided to move Michelle there. I just offered her the position about five minutes ago and she said yes. That does leave a spot open here, however…”
I experience the same kind of slow motion terror that I imagine car crash observers do. The rush of adrenaline, the prickle of fight-or-flight responses, the sensation of sheer, unavoidable helplessness that only exists in that moment after something has been set in irreversible motion, and the inevitable fate it’s going toward.
“Uh huh,” I mumble.
Cole pauses, drawing the moment out once again, his enjoyment of it—and his obliviousness to my discomfort—evident in the sparkle of those eyes.
“Willow. I want you to take the position. I want you to be the head chef here at Knife.”
After a long pause, I manage to unstick my vocal cords.
“Oh. Um. Wow.”
A crack in Cole’s smile appears when he sees my reaction, but it quickly repairs itself. He chuckles warmly.
“It’s a lot to take in, I get it. I didn’t really want to tell you at the start of a shift and give you no time to absorb it, but I couldn’t wait any longer.”
I drop my head in my hands, unable to look at him. “Cole…I just…”
“You deserve it though. You’ve been fantastic here since you started, you’ve got the raw talent and the drive, and to be honest, I should have thought of this ages ago. Would have saved myself a lot of trouble. Better late than never though.”
“Cole…wait…”
He kneels in front of me, and I look up into those darkly narrowed eyes, still sexy, as if he’s so unused to being happy he can’t quite smile without it seeming somewhat dark.
“You know, this could be the start of something incredible,” he says, his voice lower now that his face
is so close to mine. “We could take this place to the next level. You were so right about those burgers—they brought the rest of the menu to life, balanced out all the serious dishes with something simple and low key. And your ideas about Fork… We work so well together. The way we challenge each other—”
“Cole, please…”
He takes my hands in his, too lost in the momentum of his own ideas to recognize the panicked look on my face for what it is.
“We could collaborate,” he says, eyes up now as if watching his dreams play out above my head. “I mean, Knife would still be a restaurant focused on French cuisine, but together we could put a twist on it, a stamp. Just think of what we could come up with together. My experience and your creativity.”
“No,” I manage to say, though I don’t say it forcefully.
Cole’s eyes look back at me, his smile dropping a little.
“Ok,” he says, standing up again and leaning back on the desk, “we don’t have to collaborate. Just an idea. You could just take the head chef position and carry it on as normal if you’re not comfortable doing more just yet. We can revisit—”
“No,” I say, this time with the heaviness it requires. “I mean, no to the job. I can’t be your head chef.”
Cole freezes, the glint in his eye dulling as he looks at me. “You can’t be serious. You really want to stay a line cook? You’re better than that and you know it. If you’re anxious we can take it one day at a time, have you move forward at your own pace—”
“No,” I say, my stomach dropping as I realize that this is it, that there’s no turning back. “I can’t be your line cook anymore either. I have to hand in my notice. You see I’m…well, I’m starting my own restaurant.”
Cole’s face hardens, his eyes squinting at me as if trying to read between the lines of what I just said. “You can’t be serious. You’re starting…your own restaurant?”