by KD Fisher
Nina huffed out a small laugh. “No. Pretty much the opposite to be honest. They were so fucking cute and nice and perfect and I’m just not ready for...” She gestured wildly at me.
“Ready for what?” I chuckled.
Now it was time for the dramatic eye roll. “Oh you know. The whole stupid in love, settled down, it’s destiny thing you and Miss Hot Butch Adah have going on. I could tell that’s what Jay wanted too. You know, a capital R relationship: making breakfast together, camping trips, and all that shit. After I slept with them I started thinking about what I really wanted and I realized I’ve never really gone after it, you know?”
Nina’s words ignited the spark in my chest I’d spent the last week trying to extinguish. I needed to try. I was done running. I wanted stay here. With Adah. I owed it to both of us to try to salvage this relationship from the burning wreck I’d turned it into. Moving on instinct alone, I spun on my heel and darted to the tiny closet I’d turned into an office and grabbed my jacket off the coatrack. When I returned to the kitchen, digging around in my coat pocket for my car keys, Nina’s eyebrows had shot to her hairline and confusion had eclipsed worry on her face.
“I love you and I’m proud of you and I know you’re going to kick ass in Bordeaux. But right now I have to take care of something, okay? Can you get Grace to finish this?” I waved my hand at the pile of quince and mess of spices I’d pulled from the pantry.
“Wait what? Where are you going? Beth—”
The click of the door behind me cut off Nina’s words. Heart in my throat, blood rushing hard and fast in my veins, I trudged through the knee-deep snow to my car. It was time to make things right with Adah.
* * *
The adrenaline rush wore off just as I stepped into the warm, dry air of Bella Vista’s dining room. I’d only been in for the one lunch, but even a cursory glance revealed just how much money was being lavished on the restaurant. A large floral arrangement of chrysanthemums and twigs dominated the entryway. A bowl of matchbooks with the restaurant’s name on them sat on the host stand. The bottles of top-shelf liquor behind the bar gleamed, softly lit in shades of blue from below. The place was dead empty.
“Good afternoon, table for one?” A pretty young woman offered me a practiced smile. I realized I probably looked like a disaster: staring into space at the restaurant entrance, hair coated with snow and escaping from its braid, coat buttoned up all wrong. I needed to focus on Adah. On making things right between us. My mind felt blurry and sluggish though, every doubt that had been plaguing me for weeks returning in full force.
“Ma’am, can I help you?” The hostess sounded unsure now.
“Oh.” I gave myself a little shake and patted my hair self-consciously. “I’m so sorry. I kinda zoned out there for a second. I’m a, um, friend of Chef Campbell’s. Is she in?”
The woman laughed. “Of course she is. Chef Campbell practically lives here.” She seemed to catch herself then, and ran another assessing gaze over me. I probably should have changed out of my flour-dusted jeans and kitchen clogs. “She might be busy though. Let me just check with our manager...”
“No need.” An overly hearty voice called from behind her as Sean came into view. I hadn’t gotten a good feeling from him the first time we’d met and Adah’s stories about the general manager further soured his energy. “Miss Summers! To what do we owe the pleasure? I must congratulate you on the big award. You should be thrilled. We were certainly disappointed by the snub, but who gets into this business for the critics anyway?” His smile was a little forced, like he’d practiced the act of smiling dozens of times but never experienced actual joy. Yeah, bad energy for sure. Poor Adah, having to put up with this creep day in and out.
“It’s definitely exciting, but like you said, critics aren’t why I’m in business. I’d like to talk to Ad—Chef Campbell please.”
Sean’s whole demeanor changed then, the smile shifting from obsequious to slimy. His gaze slithered down my body then back to meet my eyes. “Ah, you ladies are pretty close, then? Hey, no judgement from me.” He held up his hands.
I brushed past him without another word, happy that I was probably tracking snow and salt all over his stupid fancy black floors. The kitchen was a gleaming, silent spaceship, all spotless stainless steel and white tile. I found Adah immediately, her quiet confidence palpable even from across the room. She was beautiful. The overwhelmed feeling came back and like egg whites and sugar suddenly transforming into a perfect meringue, I knew what it was. Love. I was wildly in love with Chef Adah Campbell.
Her head flicked up from the prep work in front of her and our eyes locked. My whole body flushed hot and cold, prickling with awareness. I wanted to pull her into my arms, wrap her up tight, and leech away all of her sorrow. The first flicker of surprise over her features settled into a mask of stony indifference. Adah turned, murmured something to Jay, and crossed the kitchen toward me.
“Hi. Sorry for showing up randomly like this. I guess thinking things through really isn’t my strong suit. I realize that it’s probably kind of weird of me to show up at your workplace like this. If you want me to go I totally can. I’ll respect your space. I’m just so sorry about the other day and I really care about you a lot.” The words I’d rehearsed on my drive over tangled together as they rushed out of me in a jumbled mess. My hands were trembling.
Adah sighed and gestured to the walk-in. “Let’s talk in here.” The flatness of her voice worried me. She closed the metal door softly behind us and the clatter of pans in the kitchen dulled. I glanced around at the orderly rows of produce and neatly labeled fish tubs and smiled to myself. My girl ran a tight ship.
“You saw the list, huh? Guess congratulations are in order.” A tiny glimmer of hurt shone through her apathetic mask.
The urge to touch Adah boiled over. I knew, though, that I needed to follow her lead, that pushing any harder might break us irrevocably. I clasped my hands behind my back and willed myself to radiate empathy and care. “Honey, you know I don’t care about that stuff. I’m so sorry. I know you were really eager to get some good press. And Marcus did mention one of your dishes, that counts for something, right? Anyway, regardless you have to know you’re an amazing chef, no matter what some random dude says.”
Adah crossed her arms over her chest. A long, taut band of silence stretched between us. My stomach clenched. I’d done it again. Said the wrong thing. I wanted to slap myself across the face. How did I always manage to fuck up? I needed to think things through for once, not just cannonball into problems and expect things to align themselves in the wake of my chaos.
“Well,” she bit out, “I don’t expect you to understand why this ‘stuff’ matters to me.” She looked past me then, staring hard at the walk-in door like the only thing she wanted was to get back to work.
I looked at Adah for a long moment. Her chef whites perfectly starched, her hair pushed back with a rolled-up red bandanna, her posture so tense she looked spring-loaded. Maybe I’d been fooling myself this whole time. Maybe what I’d thought was the blossom of a relationship had only been a distraction for Adah. I’d been falling in love while she’d wanted out all along. My throat tightened and my nose fizzed with unshed tears.
“You could tell me, you know,” I whispered, my voice dangerously close to breaking. “I get that it’s hard for you to talk about how you feel. I really do. But I want to listen. I want to help you. I love feelings talk. It’s, like, my specialty. Seriously, I understand that I’ll never be able to change all the horrible shit that happened to you and I can’t even imagine how hard everything has been in your life. Don’t you think it might help to talk though? To me or to Jay or to a therapist. To someone. You can’t keep working yourself into the ground and pretending that’s going to make all your feelings disappear.” My voice had gotten loud, filling the small space. I drew in a centering breath and closed my eyes. “Look, I really lo—care
about you a lot. And now I feel crazy because it kind of seems like the whole time I thought we were...something, and you didn’t. What do I even mean to you?”
The silence was unbearable. Blood roared in my ears as I waited and waited for Adah’s response. She stared blankly at the door behind me, through me like I didn’t even exist. When she opened her mouth to speak my heart pounded hard in my chest and my legs felt like they might give out under me.
“I really need to get back to work.”
Chapter Eighteen
Adah
Turns out ten days without more than a few hours of sleep a night will catch up to you. Jay had been talking goodness knew how long, pacing my tiny kitchen, but I hadn’t heard a word they’d said. It was like I was underwater trying to listen to distant words on dry land. Every night had been the same: working myself to the point of exhaustion, collapsing into bed, and spending the next few hours in the dark missing Beth and feeling sorry for myself. But I’d been awful. If I’d thought I messed up before, there was no going back now.
To make matters worse, since losing out on the award, things had gone south at Bella Vista. Sean hadn’t exactly been a ray of sunshine to work with before, but now he was openly hostile to me in the kitchen. He was convinced that I’d messed up the menu dishes on purpose to make my special look good, and in doing so, lost us the spot we deserved. I didn’t even have the energy to argue. All I could do was show up, cook the food I didn’t care about, collect my paycheck, and take the few moments of joy I could find with my son.
I jolted back to the present at the soft touch of Jay’s hand on my shoulder. My vision had blurred as I stared into space and I rubbed my eyes roughly. “Sorry,” I muttered, “what were you saying?”
Jay shook their head and slid into the kitchen chair across from me. Worry filled their face and my heart dropped. I was in for yet another big talk I didn’t know how to handle.
“You have to tell me what’s wrong. I know this is about more than the award. Maybe about more than Beth, even?” Their voice was pitched low, more serious than I’d heard them speak in a long time.
Unbidden, my mama’s words echoed through my head: you always have the choice, darlin, and you need to find the strength to do what’s right. I shook my head. I didn’t know what right meant anymore. It wasn’t the rigid moral code I’d grown up with. And clearly wasn’t what I’d been doing, pushing problems down and assuming they would decompose once I’d buried them deep enough.
“I don’t think Beth is ever gonna talk to me again. And I know it’s my dang fault.” Saying the words wasn’t easy. But the minute I said them out loud, something in me felt the tiniest bit lighter. Maybe Beth was right that talking would help me feel better. I had, after a particularly rough night tossing and turning on the pull-out bed, even looked up the names of a few counselors in town and bookmarked their contact information on my laptop. But the thought of calling them up, of admitting something was wrong, of talking about everything, made me honest to goodness nauseous. Where would I even start? Too much in my life was a tangled mess for me to even think about pulling the first thread.
“Can you tell me what happened? What did she say when she came to the restaurant the other day?” Jay put their hands over mine on the table and the warmth of their skin seeped into me.
“I don’t even know. I’m no good.”
“Well, we both know that’s not true so maybe you could give me a little more to work with here. She looked pretty shaken up when she left.”
I pulled my hand out from under Jay’s to take a long sip of my coffee. It had gone tepid but I could hardly taste it anyway. “Yeah. I never apologized in the first place after losing it on her with the whole pizza thing. Never responded to her texts because I didn’t know what to say. Then when she showed up I was, I don’t know, real mad about the award. I know she deserves the win. She works darn hard at what she does. But I had thought, maybe, just this one time we’d get a little recognition too.”
“Okay.” Jay drew out the word. “But what did you say to her?”
I shrugged, resigned. “Nothing. She was real sweet, apologized for things she hadn’t even done wrong and I basically told her to get out. Haven’t heard a peep from her since. Not that I should. I wouldn’t want to talk to me either.”
Jay shook their head with a pitying expression that would have aggravated me if I didn’t like them so much. “Do you want to see her again?”
“Of course. I love her.” The words tumbled out before I could stop them, before my brain would even process what I’d been about to say. But the moment I said it, I knew it was true. I loved her. Thinking of seeing Beth again—hearing her soothing voice and the clatter of her bracelets and crystal necklaces, smelling the lavender and spicy incense on the warm undertone of her skin, feeling her body close to mine—I couldn’t help but grin. Even though the past few months had been hard, in some ways harder and scarier than anything I’d done before, she’d made me feel capable. With Beth by my side I really did feel like I could do anything I set my mind to.
“I’m pretty sure there’s a simple solution to your problem, bud. Pick that up—” Jay smirked and gestured to my phone on the table, “—and give her a call. Hell, text her if you don’t think you’re up to the whole talking on the phone thing. Ask her to meet for a coffee and... Talk. To. Her.”
“I know,” I groaned. “But she doesn’t need someone like me. I’m a dang mess.”
“True,” Jay said through a laugh.
“Really though, Beth deserves someone better than me. Somebody who doesn’t lose their cool over every little thing.” The thought of the past few months with Beth being nothing more than a new line in my long list of failures made my stomach churn. The fear of losing her for good slammed into me hard, leaving me reeling. I couldn’t let her disappear from my life. And I really didn’t want her to disappear from Pete’s life either. Although he hadn’t said it, I knew he missed her. After all, unlike me, my son wasn’t used to running and hiding. He was used to people sticking around. Used to love.
Jay gripped my hands again, all traces of laughter gone from their face. “No. Don’t start with that. Yes, I think you need to do some work around letting your emotions in and talking about how you feel. But you went through some shit, Adah. It’s going to have an effect on you. And you’re lucky enough to have people in your life who care about you and want to help in any way we can.” They looked at me for a long moment, their gaze so intense I could almost feel it on my skin. “You deserve to be loved. You know that, right? Both of us do.”
Tears welled in my eyes, blurring my vision, but I blinked them back and willed them away. I knew Jay was right. I knew I should thank them. Instead, all I could do was nod.
Jay stood and shuffled over to my fridge, heavy wool socks sliding on the freshly scrubbed tile. If I thought I cleaned a lot when things were okay, it had nothing on the levels of sanitary my house could reach when I was miserable. The condiments neatly arranged in the fridge door rattled and a spill of yellow light fell on the gleaming floor as Jay tugged open the fridge. It was snowing outside again, heavy dark clouds churning over the water and casting the whole city in a gray gloom.
“Jesus Christ your fridge is more organized than the damn walk-in. I think you missed out on a career in the military. That’s a stereotype, right, that folks in the military are super neat? I mean, these are in alphabetical order.” They opened the lid of a container of leftover vegetable stew, contemplated it for a moment, then shoved it back into the refrigerator. “You need to eat something. It’s not good for your bones if you subsist on nothing but black coffee and self-loathing.”
I scoffed. “I had toast this morning. And Pete and I went out for pizza...a few days ago.”
“How about I make you an omelet and tell you about my date.” They waggled their perfectly groomed eyebrows at me and launched into a convoluted story abo
ut meeting up with a woman from a dating app at a coffee shop. It turned out the coffee shop had two locations, one in South Bay and one in Port Catherine, and they’d shown up at the same place in two different towns. Then the woman had been really intense about scheduling their second date before they’d even talked for twenty minutes. I tried hard to listen and laugh at the right times, but at the mere mention of her hometown, my mind kept drifting to Beth. What would she say if I called her? Would she even want to hear from me now, after the way I’d acted?
My phone buzzing on the table jarred me from my thoughts and a spark of hope ignited in my chest at the thought that maybe, somehow, Beth was calling me. Then I glanced at the screen and that spark extinguished real quick. It was Riccardo. The boss I hadn’t heard from directly since Sean changed up our menu and suppliers. My face felt frozen as I swiped to answer and lifted the phone to my ear. Getting fired was not going to make the mess of my life any dang easier.
“Adah, how are you, my dear? It’s been far too long. I’m so sorry for going missing on you. Clotilde and I were in St. Barth for a few weeks. Had to get out of this horrible weather. I bet you’re wishing for some sunshine now, too, no?” Riccardo’s breezy tone was a welcome relief. I sagged back in my chair.
Jay whipped around from the stove, whisper-screaming, “Who is it?”
I shook my head and cleared my throat. “Hi, Ric, nice to hear from you.” I ran through the pleasantries of asking about his trip and whether he had any big plans for the holidays. Jay, however, was not deterred by my efforts to focus on my conversation with my boss and waved a Post-it note in front of my face reading PUT HIM ON SPEAKER! I lightly batted them away and hunched in on my phone, trying to keep my voice even and the background of the call free of Jay’s antics.