What Matters

by Gracie Leigh

  Sam wasn’t there. Instead, she found old Mr. Nowak nursing a huge pot of what looked like cabbage, but smelled like heaven. “What on earth is that?” she blurted before she registered the odd wave of disappointment that Sam’s absence fuelled.

  “Chlopski posilek. Polish peasant food. You can have some later when it’s done.”

  Eddie peered into the pot, absorbing the fact that the Nowak family was indeed Polish. “Are those the sausages you serve for breakfast?”

  “That’s kielbasa, missy. Better than the rubbish you English people eat.”

  “I don’t eat any kind of sausage. I’m a vegetarian.”

  Mr. Nowak’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “A what?”

  “I don’t eat meat.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t like it.”

  “You eat potatoes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mushrooms?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, then you can eat the kluski śląskie. Put some flesh on your bones.”

  Mr. Nowak muttered something else in Polish and returned to his pots and pans. Eddie left him to it and fetched her apron from the staffroom. When she returned, she realised that she didn’t actually have a clue what to do. With no breakfast service to set up for, she was at a loss, and regretted not bothering to ask what the café served the people of Vauxhall on Friday nights. Kluski śląskie, maybe?

  “Don’t just stand there, missy. Light the candles. My grandson says you’re a good worker. Don’t prove him wrong.”

  Eddie blinked. “Sam says I’m a good worker?”

  Mr. Nowak grunted, engrossed in his melting pot of sausage and cabbage. “Of course he does. You wouldn’t work here if he didn’t.”

  Good to know, but Eddie still couldn’t quite believe it. She wandered around the empty café, lighting tea lights and the larger candles that were dotted around. The flickering glow was pretty and soothing and gave the café an ambiance it lacked in daylight, and Eddie found herself smiling, though she dreaded the onslaught of business that was bound to come when rush hour started.

  But. Sam thinks I’m a good worker. Despite the irritation that bloomed whenever she thought of him, that he’d complimented her to his grandfather made her grin so hard her cheeks ached.

  And she was still smiling when the man himself appeared an hour later. He greeted her with a curt nod and immediately began arguing with his grandfather in Polish. Eddie couldn’t make head nor tail of their heated exchange and tried to make herself scarce.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Mr. Nowak roared. “Come back here and tell this boy to stop bossing me around.”

  Eddie froze in her attempt to sneak past Sam and his grandfather. “Erm—”

  “Leave her out of it,” Sam growled. “She doesn’t give a shit about either of us.”

  “Hey!” Eddie spun around to face Sam’s fierce scowl. “That’s not fair.”

  “True, though, isn’t it?” Sam challenged. “Pops is flipping his lid because I want him to go home and put his feet up. I’m pissed off because he’s calling me a lazy git for my trouble. Who’s right?”

  “If your point is that I don’t care,” Eddie said. “Then who’s right is irrelevant.”

  “Whatever.” Sam turned back to his grandfather and continued the conversation in Polish.

  Eddie took her cue to turn tail and slink back into the café. In her absence, a few customers had filtered in, mainly older men who had the same accent as Mr. Nowak. They pointed to the red wine on the shelves behind the counter and sat themselves, leaving Eddie at a loss. There were no menus anywhere, and the only food to be seen was Mr. Novak’s big pots and pans, the names of which had completely escaped Eddie.

  She searched her brain for the last time she’d eaten in a restaurant that wasn’t the French food Ian insisted on every time they went out. Water. I’ll get them some water. She rummaged under the counter and turned up a couple of carafes. A lemon caught her eye. She sliced it up and added it to the water-filled carafes and carried them to the two occupied tables.

  “Do you know what you’d like to eat?”

  The men at the tables glanced up, and most of them smiled, though their responses made even less sense to her than the argument still going on by the door.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m new here and I don’t speak Polish.”

  The man nearest her reached out and patted her arm. “We eat whatever Artur and Samuel have cooked tonight. Do not worry about us.”

  Fair enough. Eddie left the old men alone and returned to the counter. By then, more elderly men had appeared. She served them red wine and lemon-spiked water, and peered into the bubbling pots, wondering just how long Sam and Mr. Nowak were planning on tearing lumps out of each other. The old men seemed relaxed and at ease, but the breakfast shifts she’d worked had taught her that hungry customers didn’t stay that way for long. What on earth was she going to do when they started demanding their dinner?

  “You gonna stand there staring all night, or what?”

  Eddie jumped and spun around to find Sam right behind her, his glare a weary incarnation of the one he wore most mornings. “I’m not staring, I’m paying attention.”

  “To what? The cabbage?”

  “Piss off,” said Eddie crossly. “I’m just wondering what your grandfather is planning on serving tonight.”

  “Nothing. I sent him home.”

  “You sent him?”

  Sam had the grace to share a soft, sheepish smile that changed every facet of his entrancing face. “Well…pushed, if we’re splitting hairs, but not before he told me to feed you a bowl of his kluski śląskie, which means he likes you, though I don’t know why. It’s not like he’s seen you do any actual work.”

  Lacking an intelligent retort, Eddie poked her tongue out and returned her attention to the pan of cabbage and sausage. “I know what this one is. Is it the only main course you have on?”

  “Yes. We serve the barszcz first, which is a soup, then the kluski śląskie and the chlopski posilek. And that’s about it, apart from wine and a few gallons of coffee. They won’t want anything else.”

  The way Sam’s gravelly voice wrapped around the Polish words did odd things to Eddie. Her blistering hangover from the previous week was long gone, but her head swam as she gazed at him, lost in the molten magic of his brown eyes. She leaned closer, drawn to him. For a brief moment it seemed that he was drawn to her too, but then he blinked, and the haze around them evaporated like it had never been there at all.

  Sam reached for a large metal bowl. “Ready to earn your keep?”

  “Um…I guess?” Eddie watched him drain a pan of boiled potatoes and add them to the bowl, and then tip in flour and seasoning. “What are we making?”

  “Your dinner, apparently. Don’t mind getting your hands dirty, do you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Sure about that? You don’t seem the type.”

  “Stop telling me what type of person I am,” Eddie snapped. “Just tell me what I need to do.”

  Unfazed, as ever, by any sharp word Eddie threw his way, Sam proceeded to instruct her in the art of mixing and shaping small potato dumplings that looked a lot like the Italian gnocchi that Eddie had eaten before.

  Sam rolled her eyes when she said as much. “There’s nothing Italian about them. Look, stick your thumb in them like this. See? Nothing like gnocchi.”

  Eddie had to admit that he was right. In particular, the dumplings she’d shaped looked more like doughnuts. “What now?”

  “We cook them, obviously.” Sam dropped the dumplings into the largest pan on the stove and simmered them briefly in salted water until they floated to the surface. Then he disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a pan of mushroom sauce.

  Eddie’s mouth watered as Sam tossed the sauce and dumplings together, reminding her that she’d eaten nothing but fruit, eggs, and cheese for days. “That looks amazing.”

  �
��It ain’t bad.” Sam added pepper. “But you won’t get any until we’re done, so stop your drooling and help me plate up the soup.”

  Eddie did as she was told, distantly surprised at how much easier following Sam’s direction was when he wasn’t acting like a prize git. She thought about telling him, but serving the collection of elderly Polish men kept her too busy for the next hour or so, and by the time she’d cleared the main course plates from the tables, she didn’t have the energy.

  She took her final tray into the kitchen and loaded plates into the dishwasher. “Coffee now, right?”

  “Right,” Sam said. “Then we’ll have our own dinner.”

  Eddie couldn’t wait. The Polish food had looked so delicious that even the meat dishes had made her stomach rumble. She served twenty-three mugs of coffee in record time, and then rejoined Sam at the counter.

  He passed her a heaping plate of kluski śląskie that he’d topped with paprika and a drizzle of sour cream. “Sit. Eat.”

  Eddie didn’t need telling twice. She sat at the nearest table and dug into one of the nicest plates of food she’d ever had. It took her a while to notice that Sam had joined her, and was picking at his own food, apparently more interested in the short work she was making of hers. “I can’t help it,” she said with her mouth full. “It’s so good.”

  “So I see.”

  Eddie swallowed. “What’s the matter? You don’t like women who eat, or something?”

  “I like women just fine, thanks.”

  Eddie didn’t doubt it. Sam Nowak was probably a lothario…a womaniser, and the thought of him surrounded by crowds of beautiful girls was almost enough to put her off her supper.

  Almost, because she wasn’t giving up her plate until she’d licked it clean.

  A change of subject was definitely in order, though. “So, how much do you charge for everything we served tonight?”

  “Charge?”

  “Yes…charge. You don’t give it away for free, do you?”

  Sam took a sip of the red wine he’d brought to the table. “Erm, maybe?”

  “What?” Eddie frowned, which usually earned her the sharp end of Sam’s tongue, so she reached for her own tumbler of wine and took a healthy swallow. “Okay, you need to enlighten me, unless there’s a punchline I’m missing.”

  “Punchline? To what? I’m not joking, Eddie, and you certainly ain’t laughing.”

  “That’s because your jokes normally leave a lot to be desired,” Eddie retorted, though it didn’t escape her notice that this was the first time Sam had ever looked her in the eye and uttered her name. God, why does it matter?

  But it did.

  It mattered a lot.

  Hot under the collar, Eddie drank more wine. Sam did the same and pushed his half empty plate Eddie’s way, silently inviting her to finish up the kluski śląskie he’d left. “Can’t waste it if we’re giving it away, eh?”

  The mushroom-smothered dumplings were too tempting to ignore. Eddie dragged the plate towards her and dug in, much to Sam’s apparent amusement.

  “Where do you put it all?”

  “Hollow legs,” Eddie said. “Anyway, enough about my gluttony. Explain to me how you can afford to give away twenty-three meals every night? Because it is every night isn’t? The man with the trilby told me he’s here every day.”

  Sam shrugged and tucked a pendant Eddie had never noticed into his T-shirt. “Pops has always done it since he came over here in the sixties. Times were hard then, but our peasant food is cheap to make, so it didn’t make sense to watch people go hungry.”

  “That was sixty years ago.”

  “So? Not everyone has the means to become something different. Besides, those men over there…they’re our friends now, our family. We have the time and the food to give, and so we give it.”

  Though admirable, it struck Eddie as slightly absurd. Jimmy’s did a roaring breakfast trade, but surely that didn’t cover opening the café every night for free. Or did it? Truthfully, she had no idea, and so she kept her ignorance to herself. “What happens now?”

  “Nothing.” Sam leaned back and flicked a switch on the wall. Low music filled the café. “This lot will sit around until midnight with the Dire Straits and coffee while I clean up, then I’ll lock the doors and go to bed.”

  “You sleep here? Where?”

  Sam treated Eddie to another mirthful grin. “In the kitchen…on the counter, obviously. We’re poor immigrants, remember?”

  “Nonsense, you were born in Leeds. Stop pulling my leg.”

  “Why? You make it so easy.”

  “You’re such a buffoon.” Eddie finished her second plate and shoved it away. “Where do you really sleep? Is there a flat above here?”

  “Yeah, though half of it’s full of my grandmother’s things.”

  “Does she live there too?”

  “No. She’s in a home in Pimlico. That’s why I’m here…to help Pops so he can go and see her every day.”

  “Oh.” Eddie didn’t know what to say, and the revelation cast a new light on the enigmatic young man who had hardly left her thoughts since she’d met him. “How long have you been in London?”

  “Seven years.”

  Eddie absorbed that and studied Sam’s face. When he wasn’t scowling, his features were boyish and young, but also timeless, and it was clear he was the kind of man who was going to age like a dream.

  Sam allowed her scrutiny for a moment, drinking his wine, then he sighed. “What are you staring at now?”

  “You,” Eddie admitted. “I’m trying to work out how old you are.”

  “Older than you.”

  “I know that, but it’s not by much, is it?”

  “Depends how old you are.”

  Arsehole. Why does he always have to make things so difficult? “I’m twenty-two,” Eddie said. “And I think you’re about a year older than me.”

  Sam snorted. “You think I’m twenty-three? Man, I take it all back. You can stay.”

  Eddie didn’t know whether to be offended or intrigued, but her insane curiosity won out. “All right, all right. No need to laugh at me. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  Oh. “Well, I wasn’t that far out.”

  “Far enough for me to let you go home. Go on. I’ll finish up here.”

  “What?”

  “Go home,” Sam repeated. “There’s not much left to do.”

  Even if that had been true, there was no part of Eddie that had any desire to leave the café—to leave Sam—just yet. She stood and picked up their dirty plates. “Thanks, but I’d rather pull my weight.”

  Sam didn’t argue, and with two of them hitting the kitchen with what seemed like an odd compulsion to outwork the other, the clearing up was done in no time at all.

  “Seriously,” Sam said for the third time. “You can go. I’ll be fine.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “No? Why not?”

  Abruptly, Sam was standing very close to her, though he hadn’t actually moved. Eddie swallowed, sure that he’d hear the stampede that her heart had struck up, that he’d feel the sudden heat in her blood. “Because—um—”

  She had no words. The kitchen, steamy from the sink and the dishwasher, closed in on her, and so did Sam. He backed her into the counter and bent his neck so their faces were inches apart. “Why do you want to be here, when you have the rest of the world at your feet?”

  “I don’t have anything at my feet.”

  “Liar.”

  “Am not. I don’t work here for fun.”

  “No?” Sam dragged his tongue slowly over his bottom lip. “What if I told you I’d pay you until the end of the night. Would you go home then?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Eddie sucked in a breath and stretched up to meet Sam as he grew ever closer. His kiss was a hairsbreadth away. Her pulse raced so fast that her entire body throbbed, but just as their lips brushed, the bell on the counte
r rang.

  Sam pulled away without looking at Eddie and strode out of the kitchen. She gazed at his retreating back, her heart in her mouth, her blood rushing in her ears, and her mind a whirling dervish of frustrated confusion. How had this happened? How had she gone from hating Sam Nowak to mourning the loss of a kiss she’d never dreamed of until now?

  And what on earth was she going to do when he came back to the kitchen?

  Eddie had no idea, and it turned out not to matter, because Sam never returned to the kitchen. He spent the next hour bidding good-bye to the old men as they filtered out and dumping the last of the dirty mugs on the counter for Eddie to collect and take to the dishwasher.

  It was close to midnight when he handed her a broom. “Sweep. I’ll mop, then I’ll walk you home.”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “You sleep on the kitchen counter then, ’cause you’re not wandering around out there on your own.”

  His tone left no room for argument, and as Eddie swept, she couldn’t help musing that his grouchy chivalry was a marked change from Ian who rarely gave a damn how she found her way to and from his Greenwich flat. Did Sam’s concern for her well-being mean anything? Or was her relationship with Ian simply a bigger waste of time than she suspected?

  Either way, Eddie finished her wine and watched—with a fascination that couldn’t be healthy—Sam mop the café floor. His lean biceps and strong forearms, his elegant hands as he gripped the mop. She couldn’t see his face, but in her mind she saw his concentrated frown, his bottom lip caught between his teeth the way it was when he manned the grill. She couldn’t deny that he was still an arsehole, but there was something about him—everything about him—that set her on fire.

  “You ready?”

  Eddie blinked. Sam was in front of her, his apron gone, revealing a heavy metal T-shirt that, in contrast with her cashmere V-neck and black high-waisted tube skirt, made him seem even more dangerous than usual. “Um, I s’pose so?”

  “You don’t sound so sure. What’s up? Forgot where you live?”

  “Very funny.” Eddie took off her own apron and retreated to the staffroom to fetch her bag. When she returned, Sam was at the door, apparently in a hurry to get going.

  Eddie joined him and they left, together, walking side by side so close that to a distant observer, they might’ve been holding hands.