by Anna Martin
“Not a problem,” Joe said smoothly. He wiped his damp palms on his pants under the table and hoped the others didn’t notice. “I’ll jump straight into it, shall I?”
Tom nodded. Remy stared daggers and said nothing.
“Okay. So, you know I’m here as a representative of Pineapple Joe’s, who would like to put in a bid to buy this building.”
“Why?” Remy snapped, the first words he’d spoken since that husky good night as he’d slipped out of Joe’s apartment the night before.
“Why?” Joe echoed. He closed the file and folded his hands atop it on the table. “The location, for one,” he started. “Let’s not kid ourselves here. This is prime real estate, especially for the restaurant trade. The French Quarter is a tourist area that also has a thriving local community. It’s the perfect location for a young, hip venue like Pineapple Joe’s.”
“Did you seriously just say ‘hip’?” Remy asked, radiating disdain.
“Remy,” Tom hissed.
“You’re a shark,” Remy said, leaning forward in his seat. “You go around the country hunting for struggling local businesses, and as soon as you smell blood, as soon as you figure out they’re in trouble, you swoop in and steal their lives out from under them. I’m not letting you do that here. Lumiere has been in my family for generations, and I have no intention of selling it to you. Or anyone, for that matter.”
“Our business model,” Joe said calmly, “is to find locations which have potential but aren’t realizing it. Lumiere is a relic, Mr. Babineaux. Your café is beautiful, there’s no doubt about that. But it’s not a financially viable business. The building is rotting, your clientele is patchy, and the crowds you should be attracting are going to the bar down the street where they can get good cocktails and cheap food in a thriving atmosphere.”
He’d given this speech—or variants of it—many times before.
With his business degree from UCLA in hand, he’d gone straight from college into Roberts, Green, and West, a mergers and acquisitions firm that focused mainly on boutique chains and real estate deals and operated out of a waterfront Newport Beach office. It was cutthroat, brutal, and the pace was insane—his recent graduate status had stood for nothing, and the company had demanded he learn to swim fast, because if he started to sink, he’d be out on his ass.
Joe had loved every minute of it.
If he was cutthroat and brutal, it was because of what Howard Green had taught him at RGW. Howard was a fatherly sort of man, eye-bogglingly rich, who had seen potential in Fitz, as he’d called Joe for most of the time Joe had worked for him. Before he’d known what was happening, Joe had found himself under Howard’s wing, working alongside one of the founders of the company, buying up struggling insurance companies and merging them all together to cut costs and improve efficiencies.
Life as Howard’s protégé was good. It meant weekends at the golf club—he’d learned to play golf fast—black-tie evening dinners with the Newport Socialites, charity events, learning how to charm and network and get his own way.
He’d dated Howard’s granddaughter, Emma, for two and a half years. She was a nice young woman, shrewd and intelligent enough to know that a relationship with Joe would be mutually beneficial. They were genuine friends, had fun together, and looked good side by side. Emma, with her long honey-blonde hair, gray eyes, and delicate features; her full lips that could snap acidic responses to inane questions and snark under her breath about every social climber her mother dragged her around to talk to. Joe, tall, broad-shouldered, blue eyes and light brown hair, whose broad hands fit neatly on her waist. Emma, who liked to rebel against her snooty, country-club upbringing and had a particular but secret taste for dark-skinned men with tattoos and illegal firearms. Joe, who had a secret but particular taste for cock.
Their relationship had come to a natural conclusion when Joe took a promotion to work out of the larger Los Angeles offices and head a campaign within the restaurant division, of all things. He knew nearly nothing about the restaurant industry, not that that mattered. Apparently he'd been perfect for the job. Howard had sent him off with a wave and a golden handshake that was worth almost three times Joe’s salary.
Pineapple Joe’s was predictable, for lack of a better word. The restaurants had a tropical cabana theme, served cheap drinks in souvenir cups, and made money on overpriced buffalo wings. They were fun, tacky, and worked well in tourist areas where familiarity often won out over local flavor. The business model was successful, and Joe had been rolling it out in cities from Cape Cod down to Florida. They were finally moving westward, with New Orleans next on the list.
* * *
“Mr. Fitzgerald,” Tom said softly. “Would you mind going over the figures with us?”
“I don’t want to listen to the fucking figures,” Remy fumed. “I want this guy to get the fuck out of my restaurant and not look back.”
“Remy,” Tom said again, and there was the fire in his eyes Joe had been waiting for. “If you cannot behave yourself, you can leave.”
Watching Remy slump back in his seat and fold his arms over his chest like some petulant child gave Joe more satisfaction than it should.
He spent the better part of an hour going over the packet with Tom, occasionally trying to include Remy. He got no response. Remy made no move to open his own pack or even look at the numbers Joe was showing them.
If Howard had taught him one thing, it was how to amend a pitch depending on the type of person he was delivering it to. Some people he could boggle with numbers, talk costs and overheads and synergies and efficiencies, while he watched their eyes grow wider and wider. With others he went with the friendly, soft approach—customers and ambiance and feelings.
Tom was more the scrambled type, which Joe didn’t really know how to work with. He doubted any businessperson would know what to do with Tom, other than put him out of his misery. The man didn’t seem to know how to run a restaurant successfully to save his damn life, no matter how much the locals loved him. From what Joe had seen, Remy had taken over day-to-day operations a few years back and things had gotten better, but he hadn’t been able to bring Lumiere back up to any financially successful level. The place was still falling apart at the seams. If they were doing well, the outside would’ve been painted more recently, the floors would’ve been replaced or at least refinished, and the glimpse Joe had gotten of the kitchen made his little takeover heart pitter-patter. Lumiere was in trouble. It was more than obvious.
Joe had been in New Orleans for just over a week already, scoping the place out. Most of his research into the area had been finished months before, while he was looking for just the right place in just the right location. Of course he’d done the initial work in his air-conditioned office in Los Angeles, but as Howard had taught him, there’s nothing like on-the-ground recon to lay good foundations. Joe had already known Lumiere had been founded generations ago and had passed from father to son, or grandfather to grandson, over and over. It had been struggling financially for ten years or more, especially since the aftermath of Katrina. It hadn’t turned a profit in fifteen years, and the family matriarch was pouring money into keeping the place running.
The building was charming, but it was in a serious state of disrepair. The look worked, to an extent, in the middle of blocks of historical charm, though the broken gutters and plumbing issues were harder to hide. Nobody wanted crumbling plaster around their food, and by the looks of the place, Joe figured Remy did everything he could to follow the letter of the law, but that wasn’t good enough. Not even close.
In the past week, Joe had eaten at Lumiere three times, experiencing brunch, lunch, and dinner, in a range of different guises. Once he’d worn a ball cap, T-shirt, and shorts and carried a bunch of notebooks to make him look like a student. Another time he’d brought a female colleague and made it look like a date. He was good at blending in, making sure the servers didn’t recognize him from previous visits.
He talked to people
too, both restaurant owners in other parts of town and the guests, donning a brightly colored T-shirt this time and holding a clipboard, pretending to work for the tourist board. The opinions were fairly consistent—delicious food, classic atmosphere. Sadly the numbers didn’t reflect that. They weren’t bad, but they weren’t fulfilling the potential the building had with the entire second floor that was currently not being used, as far as Joe could tell. He knew without asking that Remy wanted to keep everything the way it was. Joe had run into more versions of Remy than he could count.
They always ended up doing exactly what he wanted. It just took time.
“Would you like to see the plans for the renovation?” Joe asked, flipping through his folder until he found the blueprints.
“Okay,” Tom said.
Remy muttered no. Joe and Tom ignored him.
“So,” Joe said brightly, “we’d completely renovate the front of the building, adhering to historical codes, of course. Smooth out the cracks, so to speak, but preserve the current charm. The ground floor—see here—would be a dining area, and we’d install a dedicated cocktail bar upstairs.”
“Upstairs?” Remy interjected. “Where the apartment is now?”
“Yes,” Joe said. So it was an apartment. At least they were getting some revenue from it. Better than he’d anticipated.
“You couldn’t do that. There are people living there,” Remy said.
“The deal would be to purchase the entire building,” Joe said. “The apartment included.”
“Well, you can’t,” Remy repeated. “Magnolia lives there. Doesn’t matter because we’re not selling anyway, but no.”
“Magnolia?” Joe asked, almost not wanting to know.
Tom looked pained, as though that was a detail he was hung up on as well. “She’s a family friend.”
“She’s a single mother who lives there with her daughter. If you kick her out, they’ll have nowhere to go,” Remy added. He looked hostile. Shocking turn of events. Joe missed the Remy from the night before. It would’ve been easier to stomach the hostility had he never met that version.
“We’ll help her relocate to another apartment,” Joe said. He decided if that was what it took to close the damn deal and get him out of the sticky, sweaty south, then so be it.
Tom and Remy shared a look.
“It’s not as simple as that,” Tom said.
Joe’s heart sank. Of course it wasn’t. “You’re not charging her rent, are you?” he asked. He knew he was overstepping, and he also knew the answer before he even asked. Some things were so predictable it made his teeth ache.
“We are,” Remy said. His face flushed. He muttered, “A hundred bucks a month.”
“Jesus Christ,” Joe muttered. “No wonder you’re going down the pan.”
“Fuck you,” Remy snapped.
“Okay, okay,” Tom said, holding up his hands. “I think we’ve got a better understanding of your offer, Mr. Fitzgerald. Thank you for your time.”
It was a clear dismissal; Joe recognized that much.
“No, thank you, Mr. Babineaux. I’ll leave the packets with you and let you look them over in your own time. Shall we schedule a follow up meeting now? Maybe for next week?”
“We’ll be in touch,” Tom said.
We’ll be in touch. Right. That always turns into “see you never.”
Joe wasn’t about to put up with that. Howard had always told him not to leave a meeting without a guarantee of a follow-up, but he knew it wasn’t the time to press the Babineaux men. Joe could sense that much. He nodded, shook Tom’s hand, didn’t bother to offer his hand to Remy, knowing it wouldn’t be taken, then left.
Out on the street, it felt like the humidity had been cranked up even higher than it had been that morning. Joe shuddered in disgust and started in the direction of his apartment.
Remy was still in shock that he’d managed to hold his shit together during that awful meeting. Well, almost. At least he hadn’t smacked the bastard in his smug mouth. Remy couldn’t fucking believe he’d slept with that asshole. The churning sickness of realization and regret had lasted throughout the whole morning, then while they had set up for the day, only waning in the frenzied rush of the dinner shift.
In the near silence of his room, with the fans in his room pushing sweaty, heavy air over his skin, the sickness was back.
He’d slept for a few hours, then woken up to a thunderstorm that had lasted only a few minutes, but it had been enough to break his sleep. He’d been trying to get it back ever since. He stared at the cracks in the ceiling, sprawled on sheets that were printed with pink and red primroses. He hadn’t picked them. Obviously. He never brought men home, so it didn’t really matter to him what his room looked like. In a few excruciatingly short hours he’d need to get up and head over to the restaurant to prep for brunch—-they were only open from ten ’til two on Sundays, but the regulars came anyway, and the tourists too. Then he’d have to cut out and come home. Sunday dinners were a Babineaux tradition that ran so deep even the excuse of a business to run wouldn’t get them out of it.
Remy turned his head, looked at the clock on the nightstand, and sighed heavily. He hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in days, and it looked as though that wasn’t going to change any time soon.
Try as he might, he couldn’t get the image of Joe between his legs, mouth full of Remy’s cock, out of his head. The guy was just so infuriatingly hot. All of his super-slick, uptight exterior had just melted away when they’d gotten naked, and underneath those well-cut suits was a lithe, lean body Remy wanted to put his hands and mouth on all over again. If he didn’t hate Joe to the tips of his fucking toes.
Remy sighed again.
The rain had returned, a light pattering on his window that was strangely comforting. He thought about jerking off, if only to make himself tired enough to sleep again, but gave up on the idea before it had fully formed. It probably wouldn’t work anyway.
* * *
Usually, only two chefs worked brunch since the dishes were a lot quicker and easier to make, so Remy had left Andre at home to sleep in and had taken the shift with Gerard. Unlike his brother, Gerard didn’t rant, question Remy’s choices, or ask questions about the menu, so the whole morning had gone quickly and smoothly, just as Remy liked it.
Another benefit was that Andre had been left at home to make dinner with Tom, and Andre was a fantastic chef. Remy would never accept anything less for his restaurant or his family. As a result, when Remy returned home from closing Lumiere down for the afternoon, he could already smell the steam from their cooking dinner, spicy, warm, and pungent, floating out the open front door.
“I’m home,” he called, letting the screen door slam shut behind him. There was typically so much noise in the house when they were all home that nobody would hear it anyway. True to form, the air was filled with music, shouting, and laughter.
His grandmother, Estelle, who always seemed to know somehow when a family member returned home, danced out from the kitchen at the back of the house. She was wearing a long pale skirt and an embroidered emerald green tunic, large gold hoops in her ears, and a shock of turquoise eye shadow smeared across her lids. Her hair was pure white and piled high on her head.
“Wash up before dinner,” she said, as if Remy didn’t know the rules.
“I’m going to take a shower. I smell like fish,” he told her, leaning down to kiss her cheek lightly.
“You’re a good boy, Remy. Use extra soap.”
He laughed at that and jogged up the stairs.
Living at home at thirty was probably most people’s idea of hell, but Remy couldn’t imagine it any other way. In his family you stayed at home until you married. Or sometimes, you married and moved your new spouse in, depending on the way of things. The only person who had left on his own was Sal, and he did everything his own way, whether it sucked or not, so he didn’t count as far as Remy was concerned.
Remy’s room was on the third floor of th
e house, in the attic. It had been a craft room, once, somewhere the ladies came to sit and chat and produce intricate paintings and needlework. The light was amazing. It fell through the windows in the sloping roof and illuminated the mint-green walls.
Remy had never felt the need to personalize the space, to make it speak of him rather than the house itself. He’d never spent much time in there beyond sleeping. The old house had character and personality to spare, just like so many houses did in his corner of the city. He felt the need to preserve that, rather than layering over it with posters or photographs from his past. He’d been in the room most of his life.
His bed was big, wrought iron, placed right underneath one of the windows. He had a desk next to the door and a chest of drawers under another window, and there wasn’t room for much else. Remy had bought a rug from a street-seller near Jackson Square that gave the room a burst of color, and that was it.
He stripped out of the chef’s whites that he’d walked home from work in, dumped them in the laundry hamper, then tied a towel around his waist. The bathroom he shared with Andre was on the next level down. Brunch hadn’t been too bad—sometimes he felt like he’d run a marathon by the time it was over. Even so, Remy liked to thoroughly scrub off all the oil and smells that accumulated on his skin, an unavoidable consequence of working in a kitchen. He washed his hair too, under the big showerhead that poured water like torrential rain over his skin. After his shower he dressed in shorts and a black T-shirt, left his feet bare, then pulled his damp hair back and secured it with a band.
Remy jogged lightly down the stairs, following the sound of his extended family. In the kitchen Andre was just putting the finishing touches on a fennel and spinach salad, something that often made it onto the menu at Lumiere. Remy stole a piece of fennel, kissed his brother on the cheek, then headed to the fridge for a beer before moving out onto the back deck.
“How was work this morning?” his father asked when Remy took one of the deck chairs and stretched out.
