“Wow. You know, maybe you aren’t cut out for the restaurant business. You really don’t see the problem there? Telling cooks who’ve worked for me for over five years that I’m letting the girl who’s been here ten minutes put something on the menu? The last thing you need is to make enemies here. And it’s not just petty jealousy or your life getting harder in the kitchen—there’d be other complications. Gossip about what’s going on between us.”
I take a breath, trying not to let Cole’s firmness sway me.
“Still…” I say, searching for words to articulate the sense of injustice. “To just take it like that…let everyone think that you…you know, you should have given me something.”
“Given you what?” Cole says, the chuckle gone now, replaced with the voice of a boss.
“I don’t know,” I say. “But you literally took the words out of my mouth and passed them off as your own. You don’t have to tell them the dish is mine, but at least pass on some of that credit in my direction.”
“Listen,” Cole says, serious now, “credit goes both ways. What if your burgers are a disaster? What if the guy who orders it feels short-changed when he tries his wife’s buckwheat galettes? Who takes the hit then? Me. It’s my reputation attached to this restaurant, and to the food it serves—not yours.”
I sigh and look down, struggling to maintain my frustration in the face of Cole’s logic.
“Still,” I say, shaking my head at his leather shoes. “I just didn’t like the way you presented it.”
After a second’s pause, I look up and see Cole smiling at me, a little too much like the way he smiled last night…
“Look: Your dish is about to be served in one of the busiest restaurants in L.A., to some of the most discerning eaters, and in some of the best surroundings. Credit or not—most chefs would take that.”
Michelle calls out to Cole, and he looks back to see Chloe waiting eagerly for him to come back. He raises a finger then looks back at me briefly to say, “Just hope that they like it,” before walking away to lead the Young Chef outside, the two of them waving at the others like departing family members.
I think about what he said for a moment, standing in the corner of the restaurant as the others reset the tables and the sound of prep starts cranking up in the kitchen. The sense of something not quite right about what my boss did still stirring, unresolved, in my stomach.
Irritated and confused, I try not to consider that giving him the recipe isn’t what I’m actually most bothered by—it’s what we did afterward, and the fact that it seems he’s completely forgotten about it.
7
Cole
I suppose I should be grateful to Chloe for keeping my mind off Willow. After leaving Knife I take the nine-year-old to a friend’s seafood restaurant a few blocks away where we watch them handle the fish, descaling and gutting, marinating and fileting. I had regretted letting Martin talk me into the Young Chefs program the second after I had dismissively agreed to it; the last thing I needed was a babysitting job, especially with the opening of the second restaurant in Vegas. But after seeing how Willow handled the kid—and perhaps having her show me what not to do as well—I started to figure out how to get a conversation going.
Ice breaks between us as we watch the food prep, and soon, I start to realize that Chloe’s nothing like the thumb-sucking brat I’d expected. She handles the sight of fish guts like it’s nothing, and the smell only seems to intrigue her further. When she asks to try an oyster, and she slurps one down with a giant grin rather than squirming in disgust at the texture, I finally realize that we might just get along after all.
After a while, the shift dies down and the owner lends us a corner of the kitchen so I can work Chloe through different prep techniques. How to chop evenly and efficiently, how to slice and dice so that nothing on a vegetable is wasted. The different flavors from herbs and produce that can emerge even at the prep stage.
“This is boring,” she sighs after I correct her handle on the knife for the fifth time. “Do I have to do it again? I know how to cut things.”
“Sure. And most people know how to cook—but we still get paid for being the best at it,” I reply.
Reluctantly, she draws the knife a couple more times across the onion, then pouts again.
“I don’t know…” she says, musing with all the deepness of thought a philosopher might use. “I kinda like it better when it’s all uneven. It looks less like a robot cut it.”
I open my mouth, milliseconds away from delivering an expletive-ridden rant about the value of precision, about the need for perfection—the kind of rant that earned me a primetime slot on premium cable TV and millions of views online. Chloe’s been a little too professional and mature, and I’m this close to forgetting she’s just a nine year old kid and not a convict who’s used to taking orders.
But then I remember Willow, the soft way she managed to bring Chloe to her way of thinking, how she would use humor and gentleness to teach Chloe about the ingredients we browsed at the market, and instead I suppress the hotness of my blood.
I take a clove of garlic and put it in front of her.
“Chop that just like I told you, as best as you can, and then we can leave.”
Chloe stiffens and looks at the garlic with the determination of purpose.
“Do you want it crushed or sliced?” she says, and I can’t resist smiling. Maybe some of my lecturing stuck.
“What if I said I wanted it as strong as possible, without any bite or tartness?”
Chloe nods.
“Crushed,” she says, already squeezing it under the flat side of the blade.
Maybe the soft way does work sometimes.
Once our time is up and I’ve dropped Chloe back off with her supervisor, I start making a few moves around town, chasing down a few distributors, going to a meeting with my accountant that lasts way beyond the point at which it can be called torture, and then a sit-down with the new Vegas spot’s interior designer to talk color schemes and textures for the fiftieth time.
Unfortunately, none of these activities are as compelling as Chloe’s ideas about loving shellfish because she gets to keep the shells, so my mind ends up slipping back to Willow. Maybe I was a little harsh on her during that hurried conversation at Knife, but I had to put my foot down and reaffirm the boss-employee relationship again, rather than the girl-on-top one we’d established the night before. Not just for her sake, but for mine.
I could run wild with a girl like her. Spend an entire week in bed together and still feel like we’re just getting our appetites wet. Her body like a map that I’ve only just set foot on, that still has so many places to explore, so many secrets to unfold. If she wasn’t one of my chefs I’d already be planning the how, where, and when—but since she is, I still have to ask myself ‘if.’ It’s clearly not a smart move. But then again, I’m not known for my smarts. I’m known for getting exactly what I want, and doing things my way.
Memories of her in that tight dress stick themselves into my mind throughout the day with the incessant force of a catchy song, so that even as I’m listening to my accountant reel off numbers, I close my eyes and try to relive the taste of her lips.
By the time I’m done for the day my suit feels like a straitjacket, muscles tensing and skin hot with the aggression of a caged bull. I make the car roar like a beast through the cool evening, yanking it through the winding roads that lead up to my place in the Hollywood hills. I bring the car to a slide-stop at the front door, too impatient to even park it properly, and step through the long building of glass and white walls as if there’s something waiting for me. Tearing off clothes the way I’d like to do to hers, until I’m down to my boxer briefs, picking out a bottle of Pinot Blanc and opening it roughly. Wine in one hand, phone in the other, I go out to the deck and sit back on a lounger, letting the breeze off the swimming pool take the heat off my body. Slow sips from the bottle as I contemplate the L.A. skyline between my feet.
I’m barely below the neck on the bottle before I start thinking about Willow again, looking over to where Knife might be in the skyline and imagining what she’s doing right now. Working a knife with focused delicacy, sipping soup through those lips, dancing between the other chefs on those long legs, skin alive with the warmth of the grills, eyes narrowed with the determination of purpose.