Until Cece

by KD Robichaux

  He pulls the dish towel off his shoulder and wipes his hands, replacing it where it was before holding his right hand out to me, a smile pulling the corners of his lips up, showing me his straight white teeth. My gaze moves up to his sparkling eyes, eyes the lightest milk-chocolate brown I’ve ever seen before.

  I haven’t moved, too stunned stupid for any of my body’s natural responses to react. I’m not even aware of what my facial expression might be conveying. The only thing I know is this is the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen in my life standing before me, and I’m pretty sure I’m not breathing.

  I don’t know if I’m grateful or completely mortified when it’s Stephanie who actually takes hold of my arm and lifts it, physically placing my hand in the man’s still outstretched one. But as soon as his rough fingers wrap around the back of my hand, a jolt of electricity shocks me back to life and I gasp for breath.

  “So there’s that,” Steph says beside me, and I turn my head toward her but not my eyes, which are still glued to the gorgeous man’s face. It’s not until she cackles that my stare finally slingshots to the direction where my head is facing, and I see her wicked grin. “Cece, meet our head honcho, Chef Winston Schmidt, aka Bossman, aka, Schmidty, aka—”

  “Or just Winston’s good,” he rumbles, that voice vibrating through me right to my nipples that I feel suddenly stand at attention inside my lightly lined bra. Thank God my T-shirt is dark or everyone in the room would be able to see just those simple four words turned my high-beams on as if he’d stroked these calloused fingers—still holding mine—across them beneath my top. It pulls my eyes back to his, and I marvel at the little lines in the outer corners as his smile grows.

  When I still don’t form a single word, he prompts, “And your name is…?”

  I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that question. My lips part, but no sound comes out, and my panicked wide eyes jet over to Stephanie’s pretty smirking face for help.

  “Cece,” she stage-whispers to me behind her hand, and I look at my new boss once more.

  “Cece,” I murmur like an idiot, as if he didn’t just hear his manager.

  His face softens as he squeezes my fingers a little before letting go. “It’s nice to meet you, Cece. And I can’t thank you enough for agreeing to start on such short notice. We can really use the help around here.”

  He’s thanking me? They’re saving my life by giving me this job, and he’s thanking me for working for him? But my brain is malfunctioning, so all I manage to squeak out is a pitiful, “You’re welcome.”

  “Oookay,” Steph inserts, taking hold of my arm and tugging me back a little. “We have a couple more things to go over before people start coming in for dinner, so on that note….” She leaves it at that as my feet finally start working on their own and I detach my eyes from my new boss’s warm expression. She tugs me back the way we came, and we pass by the two men on the other side of the workstation, one I have absolutely no recollection of, if I even got introduced to him or not while my brain was busy malfunctioning while in the presence of… Winston. Chef Winston Schmidt, I somehow recall. Who ducks beneath the unit in order to smile at me once more. And if it weren’t for Stephanie leading the way and pushing the door open ahead of us, I would’ve ran into it like some silly Looney Toons character.

  “Well, that was… different,” Steph says as we step behind the bar.

  I just eye her, not knowing what the hell to say. I have never in my life reacted to a man like that before. Not even when I met Mike back in the day and he was a senior in college while I was just an eighteen-year-old high school student. It’s like I was star stuck or something, but I’m pretty sure the man in the kitchen isn’t some celebrity.

  “I’m pretty sure that was the first time my boss has ever drooled over a female in his entire life,” she continues, and I startle, turning to face her.

  “Excuse me?”

  Her brows furrow as she smiles confusedly. “Girl. Did you not see the googly eyes he was making at you? And he literally shook your hand for a solid minute until I finally had to pull you away from him. He was totally smitten.”

  “I….” I don’t know what to say to that. Surely she’s mistaken. He was just super nice, meeting his new employee. “I… I’m sure that was no different than any other time he’s been introduced to a new server who’s been hired on.”

  “I’ve been here for over six years, and I’ve never once seen him look at another person like that before. I’m just sayin’.” The bell dings above the door, and we both turn and look to see a family of five step inside the restaurant. “Showtime, Cece, my girl. Remember, you’re just shadowing me tonight, so you can wipe that look of absolute panic off your face.” She leans closer. “Fake it till you make it, bitch,” she whispers, leaning closer to me, and I look at her, my eyes coming to meet her pretty blue ones up super close as they twinkle confidently at me.

  A small smile takes over my face, and I nod. “I can do this.”

  “You can totally do this. For your girls. Remember, we don’t need no man.” She purses her lips sassily and nods.

  “We don’t need no man,” I parrot, and when she strides around me, grabbing two regular menus and three folded up kid menus wrapped around small packs of crayons, a follow behind her, acting like I know what I’m doing.

  And somehow, just pretending I’ve done this for years makes the next few hours pass smoothly. I even manage to not have an anxiety attack when Steph tells me to take over one of the five tables by myself. Until then, I had just been following her back to the kitchen and hanging back while she loaded up her tray and served the food. But now that it’s all on me to do it for this one couple at table 16, it means I’ll be seeing my boss for the first time since our awkward meeting earlier.

  I take deep breaths, telling myself quietly, “He’s just a guy, Cece. Don’t be an idiot,” as I grab one of the large round trays and head to the kitchen to pick up the order.

  I clear my throat, stepping up to the workstation, and say in as confident a tone as I can muster, “Table 16.”

  And I see his hands pause a moment while the rest of him is still hidden from my view. I set the tray on the stainless top and wait for him to move the correct plates toward me so I can load them on, feeling my heart pound in my chest.

  And then I’m looking into those milk-chocolatey eyes as he bends to peek at me from under the giant range, a smile on his obscenely handsome face.

  “How’s your first shift going, naekkeo?” he asks.

  “Umm… good. And it’s Cece. Sorry, I uh… I was really nervous earlier, so you probably misunderstood me,” I tell him, unable to look away from his beautiful eyes.

  “No, I heard you,” he replies, and then nothing else. He just watches me, making me feel all jumpy beneath my skin, uncomfortable in a not-unpleasant way.

  “Oh… um… okay. Well. Table 16? The register… computer thing said it was ready? It’s my first table by myself, sooo… yeah.”

  His smile widens and he stays stooped as he pushes the two plates toward me. “Here you go, naekkeo. You must be doing really good if Steph is assigning you your own table on your first night. I’m proud of you,” he says, and a flush steals over my entire body as if he just lit the cooktop next to us. My face feels like it’s probably tomato-red, and my belly feels suddenly warm and full, like I just ate a platter full of comfort food.

  Such a weird reaction to this practical stranger telling me I’m doing a good job. Or was it that he’s proud of me?

  When was the last time anyone told me either of those things?

  Maybe my sister, when we brought Ruby home from the hospital. “So proud of you sis. Look how beautiful she is.”

  Or maybe my mom, when I showed her one of the holiday wreaths I made for my front door. “Oh, good job, honey. So creative!”

  A sense of pride washes over me, probably over the fact that Winston said Steph giving me my own table on my first night is a sign of me getting t
he hang of it quickly.

  “Thank you,” I finally reply, picking up the plates with surprisingly steady hands, when before I’d been slightly trembling.

  “You’re welcome,” he says, and with one last warm smile and a sexy wink that sends a wave of awareness to places that haven’t been awake in me in ages, he stands back up, taking away that hypnotic gaze and snapping me into action.

  I pick up the tray, balancing it on my shoulder easily, and make my way out of the kitchen and back into the restaurant. I grab one of the tray stands with my free hand and whip it open next to table 16 and place the tray on top of it, smiling at the couple with more confidence flowing through my system than I’ve felt since Mike dropped that bomb on me.

  Actually, probably longer than that. It’s like I’ve had a shot of adrenaline straight to my heart. I feel good about myself in a way I haven’t in forever, all because someone acknowledged my work ethic.

  “Chicken parmesan for you,” I tell the woman, who is dancing in her seat and squeezing her hands together in front of her heart like a prayer, a giddy look on her face.

  “My favorite! Winston makes the best chicken parm around,” she tells her companion.

  “And the meatloaf cupcakes and mashed potatoes for you,” I say, placing the delicious-smelling plate of food in front of the man. I’ll definitely have to try both of these dishes and soon. They look incredible, along with everything I’ve seen Steph serve tonight. “Is there anything else you might need?” I ask, eyeing their drinks and seeing they’re still mostly full.

  “I’ll take some ketchup, please,” the man requests, and I nod.

  “Be right back.” I take the stand back to the end of the booths and the tray back behind the bar, grabbing a bottle of ketchup from the shelf, and after I take it back to the table, I find Steph to continue shadowing her.

  By the end of the night, I’ve two more couples sat at my lone table, and I’ve interacted with my boss as many times. Both instances, he’s bent under the range to look me in the eye and ask how things are going, his sous chef, I assume, chuckling each time he did it. It led me to believe maybe Steph wasn’t just exaggerating when she said she’d never seen Winston act like that before, which gave me this funny feeling in my stomach.

  Which I quickly urged myself to brush off.

  The number one thing I definitely do not need to be entertaining are thoughts of another man, when I’m only a week separated from someone who is still my husband.

  6

  Winston

  Nothing could’ve prepared me for the whirlwind of feelings that coursed through my entire body the moment I looked up from chopping bell peppers and saw an actual goddess walking toward me.

  Sure, she was in disguise, dressed in a shirt with my name emblazoned across her perfect handful-sized breasts and a pair of jeans that fit her like a second skin, but she couldn’t fool me. The gods themselves had created her and placed her in my kitchen, and I couldn’t stop myself from touching her as quickly and for as long as I possibly could, even if it was just her hand. The longer I looked at her, with Winston’s in bold straight across her heart, the more I knew without a shadow of a doubt I wanted that to be true, and she’d barely said a word to me. Apparently as stunned, if not more, by our meeting as I was.

  If someone had asked me earlier today if I believed in love at first sight, I would’ve rudely barked out a laugh in their face. There were rumors in our town, ones about my friends, the Maysons, and their family… curse? Blessing? Something they call the “boom”—where they knew the moment their soul met their other half. I always rolled my eyes and called bullshit, one of the assholes who always razzed them for believing in that crap.

  But as my heart pounds rapidly behind my ribcage each time she comes into the kitchen to pick up another tray of food for my customers, I’m starting to sing a different tune. There is something about Cece that calls to my very soul, a connection unlike anything I’ve ever felt in my forty years on this earth. As I continue to run on autopilot, cooking then plating people’s dinner without actually thinking about what I’m doing, since all my braincells are focused on the woman currently out in my restaurant on her first shift as my employee, I try desperately to remember what Steph told me about her earlier this afternoon.

  Had I known I would be meeting the woman of my dreams mere hours later, I would’ve paid much closer attention to the details.

  No experience as a waitress… why? What was the “sob story” Steph couldn’t resist?

  Mom.

  She’s a single mom. Recently separated because… her husband cheated on her. The fucking bastard.

  I cut the extra fat off a steak a little more aggressively than necessary, but if the thought had made me shake my head in disgust before, then it royally pisses me the fuck off now at the thought of anyone hurting Cece in any way.

  But I remind myself Steph asked me to forget she said anything about that detail.

  What else? What else had she mentioned?

  She’d been… a stay-at-home mom, a homemaker up until recently, and this would be her first job since she was a teenager.

  I smile at that. She’s already doing a bomb-ass job if Steph gave her a table on her own. My manager may be sweet and funny and super friendly, but she’s a bulldog when it comes to professionalism and making sure the restaurant’s image and reputation are held to the highest standard. Which means she wouldn’t let Cece do anything on her own if she thought there was even a slight chance a customer might have a less than stellar experience and leave without rating us a full five stars on Yelp.

  By the end of the night, I’ve got the kitchen cleaned up and ready for tomorrow and am just opening the dishwasher to pull out the last of the silverware, when I hear Steph enter while chattering. And without looking up, I know she’s talking to Cece. Not because she’s still training her and it’s time to teach her about closing duties, but because this odd sense of calm comes over me the way it has every time Cece entered my domain. Before I would even know of her presence, I would somehow feel her closeness, almost like a buzzing static along the hairs covering my body.

  I look up as they come around the other end of the workstation, and I pull out the silverware rack to place it on the countertop. Steph stops at the dryer and pulls open the door, reaching in to pull out an armload of fabric napkins.

  I try to look busy, re-wiping down the cooktop as I listen in and stealthily observe Cece following Steph’s instructions on how to wrap up the silverware with the napkins and placing each set into one of the clear plastic bins we then store in the bar. She catches on quickly, wrapping them up with precision and speed like she’s been doing it for years. And sooner than I hoped, since I could continue doing fake busy work all night in order to just keep watching the beauty that is Cecilia Willimson—yes, like some fiend, I’d taken a break at one point in the evening and read over her resume in Steph’s office—she finishes the last set and places it in the bin.

  “And then we just scoot them right through here,” Steph says, sliding all the bins under the range, “and we go store them in the bar, except for one, which we put up by the hostess stand for her to grab sets out of as customers come in.”

  “Got it,” I hear Cece chirp, although I can no longer see anything but her chin to her waist—not unless I stoop low as I’d done each time she came into my kitchen to get her table’s orders, unable to resist looking at her when I could.

  While the timing is absolutely off…

  And while we have barely spoken even one conversation’s worth of words to each other…

  And while only hours ago I would’ve bet money I would die having never known what it’d be like to feel as if I was put on this planet to be with a woman…

  I know one thing for certain.

  “Girl, I’mma marry you,” I whisper, smiling to myself as I put the last mason jar of pickled onions up in the stainless-steel cabinet.

  7

  Cece

  Three week
s later

  “Bring them here, Mia. Have Mom put the dogs on a plane and bring them here, and they can just go home with you whenever you go back to Montana. You don’t fucking need him. Neither of us need a stupid man. Girl. Fucking. Power!” I yell drunkenly, and Mia shushes me through a giggle, even with tears streaming down her pretty face.

  “You’re gonna wake the girls up,” she scolds, wiping away her tears.

  “Well so be it. I’m sure they’d be thrilled to learn your two dogs are coming to stay with us for whatever length of time I can convince you to stay,” I tell her, refilling her wine glass and topping off mine.

  She takes a big gulp. “I can’t believe the motherfucker broke up with me in a text. A text! All because I told him I wasn’t going to be back next week as I originally planned. I mean, and it wasn’t even a planned plan. It was just a… a guestimate. Like ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be staying in Tennessee with my sister. A month? Two?’ That kind of plan. Not like a real solid plan, ya know? And I don’t even know why I’m crying or upset about it. I didn’t even love him. Hell, I don’t even really like the guy. It’s just the principle of it.”

  “Fuck him. If he doesn’t want to wait for you, then that means you weren’t meant to be together anyway. We’ve got each other.” I swallow a large mouthful of my bubbly wine, letting out a very unladylike burp. We’d started this bottle after we put the girls to bed when Mia could finally give me the details of what happened over texts a couple of hours ago. What started as a conversation with her boss at the assisted living facility she worked at—in which she told them she needed to go ahead and quit, because she’d be staying here longer than what their leave of absence policy allowed—then turned into her telling her now ex-boyfriend Shep that she wasn’t coming back yet. And then he broke up with her. In a text.