by Cassia Leo
“Sorry.”
I sit up straighter, my body feeling lighter. “Remember when he called me punctilious? And I had to look it up to find out he hadn’t insulted me. He was just saying I had great attention to detail.”
She rolls her eyes. “God, he was so pretentious.”
“Yeah, pretentious but still inferior to his twin bro. He needed me. He needed my attention to detail.”
Why had I never thought of this before?
We sit in silence for the rest of the ride, Minka’s words echoing in my mind as I question every moment of my eight-month-long relationship with Edward. Was it all a sham? Was I really just his ticket to that second Michelin star?
By the time Minka has made her daily Lyft income goal for the day, four hours have passed. I’m so fired up with this new knowledge about Edward, I decline the offer to share dinner with her and Eric.
“I have some research to do,” I say as she pulls up in front of my parent’s house in Brooklyn.
“He’s only making spaghetti. Kinda hard to get that wrong.”
I laugh as I reach for the car door handle. “It’s not an excuse. I really have some stuff I need to take care of before tomorrow.”
I don’t bother telling her how easy it is to make bad spaghetti, or how I once saw Eric dump an undrained can of cream corn into a pot of store-bought Alfredo sauce.
She eyes me warily. “No cyberstalking Ethan’s socials, okay?”
“Pfft. Not my style.”
“You did break your no-googling rule today.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “That’s only for significant others. Ethan is not a significant other. I google prospective employers all the time.”
She purses her lips like she’s holding back saying something. “So, you are accepting the offer?”
I take my time as I consider my predicament.
I still can’t figure out why my father claimed he’d gotten me an interview with Ethan when—according to Ethan—he was the one who approached my father with the idea, not the other way around. I also had no idea why Ethan would want to work with me after what Edward has been telling everyone, even if ninety percent of the words that come out of Edward’s mouth are lies.
There are so many things I don’t know about Ethan right now, but there are many more things I do know about his twin. And if I play my cards right, I may be able to use that knowledge to my advantage.
I smile as I push the car door open. “Put it this way: I’m not accepting the job offer. I am accepting the offer to make Edward wish he had never crossed me.”
Chapter 4
ALICE
“I didn’t think you’d come back,” Ethan says without looking away from the computer screen in his office at Forked.
A paunchy technician in a uniform stands behind him, pointing at the screen as he explains to Ethan how to adjust the carbonation in the soft drink dispensers from a computer program. The screen is facing away from where I stand in the doorway, which makes me feel as if I’m intruding.
But I quickly push the thought away. I have to walk in with confidence and presence of mind if I want to pull this off.
“I wasn’t so sure I’d come back,” I reply honestly, straightening my shoulders as I take a step inside. “But you were right. I need this job. And I should be grateful you’ve offered me a chance to get back on my feet.”
Confidently submissive.
I repeat these words in my mind a few times to remind myself not to explode the way I did yesterday. Ethan obviously got a kick out of my feistiness. But I’m certain that, more than anything else, he wanted me to submit to his authority. His superiority.
I can play that game.
For now.
He looks away from the computer screen, and his expression seems skeptical. “So, you’re here to accept the job? Not here to tell me to shove it up my arse?”
I swallow a scathing reply and force a demure smile. “I know I’ve made mistakes,” I begin, ignoring the duh expression on his face. “But I’ve done my homework and I’m so impressed by what you’ve built. Not just with this restaurant, but your entire career.” I pause to let the sickly sweet compliment sink in. “I’m not here to punish you for what happened…what happened between your brother and me. I’m here to work.”
Ethan has to understand from the get-go that this is all business. I’m not here to get back at Edward. And I’m definitely not here to become another notch on his bedpost. I’m here for the promotion and the raise and nothing else.
His face is serious as he turns back to his computer screen. “Good. You can find Ollie. She’ll give you a uniform and intake forms and show you around. You’ll start next Friday.”
“Opening night?” I reply, trying to hide my disappointment that Ethan won’t be giving me the tour of the restaurant himself.
He glances at me with a tinge of annoyance. “No, we open the following Friday. You’ll have a weeklong orientation before opening night. I need to make sure you know how to do things my way.”
Confidently submissive. Don’t take the bait.
I force my smile even wider, to the point of maniacal. “Great!”
I stare at my phone screen, turning my head from side to side as I examine my skin using the front-facing camera. “Did I put on too much makeup today?” I ask my mom as she folds a pile of freshly laundered towels on the sofa.
She rolls her eyes as she tucks a lock of light-brown hair behind her ear. “You care too much what people think about your appearance, Alícia,” she says in her lilting South Carolina accent.
She still refuses to call me Alice despite my father and brother adopting my preferred name when I was in high school, which was when I first started idolizing world-renowned chef Alice Waters. While my friends had posters of the Jonas brothers on their walls, I had sticky notes scribbled with ingredient lists and cooking tips I’d found in Waters’ cookbooks. My obsession has hushed to a gentle admiration over the years, but I still think I might die if I ever actually met her in person.
“That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to work for your ex-boyfriend’s twin brother,” I reply, exiting the camera app on my phone and opening my browser to look at the picture I found of Edward at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new restaurant in Midtown last month.
He didn’t tell me he was working on a new project. Apparently, this restaurant venture was in the works for nine months, which means he knew about it for months before we broke up. What else was he hiding from me?
“But your new boss is not your ex-boyfriend,” my mom reminds me tenderly, placing another folded towel on top of the neat stack. “Just remember he’s your boss and everything will be okay.”
I laugh at her oversimplification of my predicament, and the gentle reminder to keep my hands off Ethan’s utensil. “That’s nowhere in the vicinity of the truth. Edward used me, Mom. Doesn’t that piss you off?”
She shoots me an angry look. “Don’t say that word.”
We stare at each other for a moment as she waits for me to test her. “Piss. Piss. Piss,” I say as if I’m twelve years old.
She sighs. “Of course it makes me angry, dear,” she replies, placing the folded towels in the now-empty laundry basket, so she can carry them upstairs to the linen closet. “Your father and me wanted to choke him to death.”
My mother’s gentle manner and soft voice make her sometimes crude—but very rarely profane—language even more jarring.
“That’s a little too graphic, Mom. And it’s ‘dad and I.’”
“You know what I mean,” she says, waving off my attempt to correct her grammar. “You need this job. Your father spent so much on Paulo’s—”
“I know,” I say, cutting her off before she can remind me how my father lost his entire life savings on a bad business venture his best friend had roped him into. Well, ex-best friend.
Something my father and I have in common: we’ve both been royally screwed by our exes.
As a daddy’s girl, I don’t li
ke remembering the dark time when my father had to close the family restaurant due to overwhelming debt. It was two years ago, but it feels like yesterday. He was forced to take a mid-level job at Greenwood Capital, the venture capital firm Ethan is using for his restaurant funding. My older brother Adrian, who had worked with my father since graduating high school, moved to Long Island to manage a Dunkin’ Donuts. I’d never seen my father so depressed.
And I never want to see him like that again, which is precisely why I have to take this job.
I don’t want my dad to see all my hard work and education go down the toilet the way the family restaurant did. I have to swallow my pride and use every bit of cunning in my plump little body to earn that promotion and raise. And once I’m back in that sous chef position, I’ll contact the journalist who wrote the profile on Edward in Food & Beverage magazine to tell my side of the story.
You know, the truth.
My mom gets up from the sofa and heads upstairs to put away the towels without another word. As much as I adore my father, I sometimes feel as if my mother squandered some of her potential when she decided to be a housewife.
I’ve never even asked her what her dream job was when she was a child. I’ve always been too afraid to ask; afraid to find out she didn’t want to spend all day cooking and cleaning in between shuttling Adrian to soccer games and trumpet classes, and me to piano lessons and cooking courses. But what if she didn’t want to be a housewife?
Would that mean my entire childhood is a lie, like my relationship with Edward was?
I open up my messages app to send Minka a text.
Me: I start working with Satan’s twin next Friday.
Minka: We should celebrate. You can come over and make me some mangonadas. We can hit delete on your OF profile together.
I smile despite the uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.
In a fit of desperation, I created an OnlyFans page a few weeks ago. I was seriously considering stripping for strangers on webcam if I didn’t get a job. Not that there’s anything wrong with stripping or sex work, but I’ve never been particularly comfortable with the shape my body.
The fit-spiration and thin-spiration movements never appealed to me. I love butter and sugar too much. In fact, butter and sugar are how I met Minka.
Minka’s day job is human resources manager at the first restaurant group I worked for after graduating from Le Cordon Bleu. Blue Ribbon Foods owns a bunch of local fast-food restaurants and low-brow dine-in establishments. I worked as a line cook for one of their dine-in Tex-Mex restaurants. My half-Mexican father cringed at the food they served, but it wasn’t bad for my first job out of college.
One day, I brought in homemade polvorones—Mexican style sugar cookies—for the staff. I was immediately sent to Minka’s office to be reprimanded for bringing outside food into the restaurant. But Minka’s assurance that she wasn’t actually going to write me up endeared her to me. And my insistence that she take the forbidden cookies home to her family won me an invitation to happy hour with her and some coworkers. We’d been best friends ever since.
And we still referred to all sugar cookies as forbidden.
Me: 8pm Saturday?
Minka: I’ll pick you up. Pack your jammies.
In the six days since I accepted the hostess position at Forked, construction of the dining room and bar has been completed. Blue masking tape Xs dot the taupe walls, where paint touchups are needed. Potted plants are strewn about the room, waiting to be placed in the boxy, modern planters near the windows and behind the reception desk. Stacks of liquor cases behind the bar sit ready to be unpacked, the bottles to be arranged on floating wooden shelves.
Ollie waves at me from behind the bar, then resumes chatting with a bearded, tattooed fellow who appears to be unpacking a box of shot glasses. They’re both wearing the same black T-shirt and dark jeans as I am.
Having never worked in the front of the house, I’m used to wearing a chef’s coat over whatever outfit I grabbed that morning. The fact our uniforms don’t really look like uniforms only makes wearing the same jeans and T-shirt as everyone else more awkward. Though I know it isn’t, the outfit feels personal; like a subtle reminder of my loss of autonomy.
Not to mention, the jeans fit too loosely on my waist while also being way too tight on my ass and hips. The seam keeps riding up my butt-crack. Whoever designed them did not take into consideration those of us with juicy booties.
“Hey!” Ollie says, pulling me in for a quick hug. “Alice, this is Sandro,” she says, turning to the attractive, bearded gentleman. “He’s one of our bartenders.”
Sandro and I shake hands. “Nice to meet you, Alice,” he says in a thick Italian accent, which only makes him more attractive.
“The pleasure’s all mine,” I reply, then silently curse myself for sounding creepy.
Ollie appears to be holding back laughter as she nods toward the double doors behind her. “The waitstaff are dying to meet you.”
Her words make my body tense as I anticipate my coworkers’ wild-eyed stares and whispered musings about my sanity; all speculation based on lies told by Edward. But as we push through the doors into the pastry kitchen, I find four people absorbed in a discussion about whether they should use tempered chocolate shavings or cacao powder as a garnish.
They pay us absolutely no attention as we pass through, but I can’t help but notice the chef standing in the center of the group: Judith Benson.
Judith—or Mrs. Benson, as I knew her before today—taught a culinary course at Monroe College, the state college I attended before transferring to Le Cordon Bleu. She instilled in me a true appreciation of chocolate work, from the history of cacao beans to the artistry of confectionery. She attended pastry school in France and America, and studied chocolate in Mexico, becoming the associate dean of the Culinary Institute of America after she left Monroe College.
Most pastry chefs probably don’t make half as much as a dean of students. Ethan must have offered her a lot of money to get her to leave her position at CIA. I’m beginning to understand the secret behind his success.
I consider approaching Judith, but Ollie clears her throat as she holds the door to the main kitchen open. I follow right behind her, feeling disappointed at not being able to connect with one of my favorite professors, but also relieved I’ll have something to look forward to after facing the gauntlet beyond the double doors.
I straighten my back as we pass the kitchen line on our left—the place where servers will pick up food after the plate has been finished by the expeditor. Beyond that is the fry station with three deep-fryers. A stainless steel prep station in the center of the room spans the length of the enormous space. On the other side of the prep table, a group of between fifteen and twenty people are crowded around Ethan as he speaks to them while standing in front of a large wood-fire brick oven in the back corner of the kitchen.
Ollie and I have only taken a few steps inside when a breeze tickles the back of my neck as the double doors behind us fly open. I turn around to see Judith rushing in with a delighted expression on her face.
“Alice?” she asks, her mocha-brown skin glowing with excitement. “I thought that was you.”
“Mrs. Benson,” I reply, closing the distance between us and holding out my hand for a shake.
She glances at my hand then pulls me in for a hug. “You can call me Judy.” She steps back and assesses me for a moment. “You look great. How have you been?”
My composure falters as I realize she hasn’t heard the rumors about what happened between Edward and me.
Quickly slapping a smile back on my face, I blurt out, “Great! I’m doing really…well!”
She looks puzzled by my delivery, but she seems to decide she shouldn’t pry. “Are you working here?” she asks, a proud glint in her eyes. “I always knew you’d be a great chef.”
Her words are like a butcher knife in the chest. “Actually, I’m…I’m a hostess. Just…kind of rebooting after a
spat of unemployment.”
The pride in her eyes dims to concern. “I’m sorry to hear that. But if you have to start at the so-called bottom anywhere, this is really the best place to do it.”
I don’t understand what she means by this, but I nod in agreement to prevent myself from spilling any more embarrassing news about myself. “It’s so good to see you.”
“You too, dear. Maybe we can catch up later over a coffee, or your favorite opera cake, huh?”
My insides warm at the thought of someone I admire so greatly remembering such a small detail about me. “I’d love that.”
I feel light as air as I watch Judy head back to the pastry kitchen. I can do this. I can start all over again and still be the chef—or pastry chef—I imagine in my dreams.
Ollie nudges my shoulder. “You have stars in your eyes,” she teases me. “I’m happy for you, really, but we’d better hurry up or we’re going to miss the meeting.”
I nod as I shake off my reverie. Then, I discreetly pull the wedgie out of my butt as we head toward the group of people near the wood-fire oven.
We find a place behind a tall guy with pale forearms and too much cedar-scented cologne. The girl next to him with the dark, glossy hair is even shorter than I am and is busy scribbling notes on a small pad of paper as Ethan speaks. It’s difficult for me to understand everything he says because I can’t see his mouth, but he seems to be talking about the various wines that pair well with wood-fire smoked food.
The tall guy glances at me as I attempt to peek over his shoulder to see Ethan. “You want to stand in front of me?”
“Yes, please.”
I thank him as he steps back to make room for me.
The guy seems to be staring at my nose as he smiles at me, revealing a mouthful of metal braces with blue bands. “Any time,” he replies, not making any attempt to conceal how he repeatedly glances between my breasts and my nose. “I’m Warner.”
