by Kendall Duke
“I’m sure you’re spoiled for choice,” I said, rolling my eyes at him. “Being handsome and really rich must work out well if you don’t even care about who you’re grabbing and kissing and—” I stopped just short of saying it: spanking.
“Perhaps,” he said mildly, not having missed my hesitation in the slightest. He only acknowledged it with the barest curve of a smile. “But I cannot indulge myself very often, for exactly the reason we are in such a strange position—I do not trust partners enough to talk to them about who I am or what I might need, emotionally. I cannot afford to be vulnerable in any context, Miss March. Not with the few women I agree to meet in order to indulge my appetites, nor those I work with on my show. My job, per se, is to find the very best fit for each necessary position: sex partner, sous-chef, assistant, pastry chef, saucier. The list goes on. My life has a distinct order. It must, because I also employ over five hundred people, and I have no interest in costing them their livelihoods through some preventable scandal—I do lose my temper. At this point, I am expected to; even the applicants for my shows expect me to. The producers certainly do. But I do not disrespect women deliberately, Miss March, and I certainly did not create the scene this morning as a means of… Persuasion.”
“Then… You really thought I was just some… Some lady from your sex app?”
“A woman I had screened for three months, in order to have a ten minute encounter. No sex, just… That. Yes.”
“Ten minutes?” I scrunched up my nose. “That’s not much.”
He laughed out loud. “It’s plenty for what we had planned.”
“Which was…?”
“Her orgasm, Miss March. Her pleasure. Mine is in the giving.” I couldn’t help my curiosity, and he gave me a devilish grin before it abruptly faded.
“Miss March… I sense a sort of candidness about you that I like very much. But now you must match me in truthfulness, I’m afraid; our conversation has been far more revealing than any I’ve had in at least a year.” I blinked. “Yes,” he said, correctly reading my expression, “I would never ordinarily say such things. And although I am not manipulating you, I am very much trying to convince you to… To spend some time with me. To perhaps even enjoy spending time with me.”
“Tall order,” I sniffed, but he raised an eyebrow.
“Is that so?” Mr. Grant leaned forward and tilted his head, watching me. “Then you didn’t kiss me back? I just imagined your tongue slipping into my mouth?”
My mouth popped open, and I audibly gasped, just to really max out my embarrassment. “It’s impossible not to kiss someone back when they—when you—”
“Ah,” he said, settling against the back of the chair again.
“No, I’m sorry,” I said, immediately feeling like an asshole. “That was a shitty thing to say. Spending time with you is a little too enjoyable,” I confessed, sitting up straight and squaring my shoulders the same way I had when I walked into his office for the first time that morning. “I want to write a good article, and a part of me knows I should use what happened this morning—but that also honestly disgusts me. You’re right; I’ve never found anything in all the research I did that indicated you mistreated women. I have no reason to trust you, but I don’t have any reason not to believe what you’ve told me, either. Maybe,” I said, watching something soften in those dark eyes, “it’s possible this was just a really unlucky coincidence.”
“Unlucky?”
“Well,” I said, shrugging, “I would have liked to have one of those simple, unnuanced conversations you described earlier. Then I could write my article, and we could… Go on with our lives.”
“Is that what you want? To go on as if we didn’t know each other quite so intimately?” And then it occurred to me, suddenly, that he might have his own reasons for pursuing this—reasons that had nothing at all to do with hiding something, or driving me towards a more flattering article.
“I’m not sure,” I said, and he settled back in his chair, his expression inscrutable. “I have no interest in hanging around somebody that treats the people he works with like crap. And I don’t want to wonder if I’m being manipulated all the time—I feel… Outmatched.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not a multi-millionaire bad-boy chef, you are,” I pointed out. “And on a more personal level, your read on me was very correct—I’m candid. I do vulnerable. I like connecting with people; I empathize.”
“I cannot change the course of my career in the span of a day,” he said softly, still watching me closely.
“Well, I don’t think I want to… To invest my time with you, and then have you turn around and treat me like one of your—”
“I would never,” he said, cutting me off. He sat up straighter in his chair, too, which brought his head considerably higher than mine; from across the coffee table between us, though, I could still look him in the eye. “What you’re describing is… New to me, Miss March. I would never treat you like one of the people I engage with professionally, if we were…” He swallowed, and the gesture was so painfully human, so out of place with everything else about him. “If we were engaging in a more personal relationship, I would never treat you the way I treat my colleagues.”
“Is that what we’re discussing here?” I was confused. I’d just wanted an interview, right?
No. No I didn’t. No use lying to myself about it.
“I think so,” he said. “I think… You needed to come here for an interview, which was serendipitous in one sense—I am… I enjoy even the sight of you, let alone what it feels like to engage in a discussion with you. So the professional boundary was crossed immediately, although I didn’t know it. I was excited by the idea—” He actually loosened his tie— “of a personal interaction with you.”
“Right,” I said, managing to stop myself from rolling my eyes. “A ten minute spank session with Rosie Bottoms.”
A delighted grin cut across his face. “Now you’re getting the idea.”
“Anyway,” I said, “I still need to have a professional interaction with you. I have an article due, and just because we accidentally made out before you knew who I really was, I still have a deadline, and a job I want, and money to make. So we still have a professional relationship.”
“Are you planning on using the incident from this morning to further your career?”
“No,” I said, knowing it was true. I wouldn’t. I believed too much of what he said. I couldn’t stomach doing that to him. “I just need that interview.”
“And this morning won’t suffice?”
“Well, I still have some follow-up questions—”
“I will answer them all,” he said. “And then, I would like you to be with me in a strictly non-professional way for the rest of the day.”
“Don’t you have things to do? Meetings? People to yell at because they didn’t let their pastries rise enough?”
“Yes,” he said, glancing at that expensive watch. “But I’ve already cancelled my meetings. I have to go down and judge the bake, but after that… Would you be interested…Perhaps, in spending some time with me?” And Marshall Grant, he of the Michelin star at the age of twenty three back at his old restaurant in London, he of the rockstar scandal parentage and the multi-millionaire status, he with the British accent and Manhattan look… He looked genuinely hopeful, with a dash of actual anxiety.
Like I might say no.
And I might, I realized. I wasn’t beholden to him—he was right, I had enough for a passable article. Not enough to guarantee my position with Blue, but enough to ensure I’d be published. And he was a jerk to a lot of people. Just because I was his random exception didn’t actually mean he wouldn’t suddenly be a giant jerk to me too.
But I really, really liked that kiss.
And I liked the way he talked to me. I liked how blunt he was, when he wasn’t playing Machiavelli downstairs. I liked his compliments and his lovely eyes and yes, it was true; I kissed him back.
&nbs
p; “Okay,” I said, and he gave me a smile so bright it made my heart sing.
Marshall
I hadn’t enjoyed talking to a woman this much since my mother died.
I liked women very much. Always had. But I realized extremely early that my strange set of circumstances—a naive groupie’s son with a married rockstar—made people think of me in terms usually reserved for circus animals or garbage. I was either an entertaining oddity, or not worth dirt. I always thought it strange that in the 21st century, conventional ideals about morality, and bastards, more specifically, still held so much sway over my world. My mother got me into good schools in Britain; she moved to France. We went back to the US regularly because she was very close with her family, and she would visit me while I was enrolled, a completely strange idea for all of my classmates. But my mother was, at heart, wholesome. She’d picked the wrong adventure, although she swore she never regretted it. I believe her, even now, because no one can imitate the level of devotion she showed to me. It could only be sincere.
She died last year. She saw me get my Michelin star—it’s not mine, of course, Chef Grey would insist, because the team that worked under him, with his name and his guidance, won the star. But the world knows I provided the kick. I changed things as sous-chef just enough, I altered what didn’t work. I got us the star, so fuck him and his pretenses.
So I learned more valuable things, from that: no one is your friend. No one does anything from free. There is no goodness in anyone’s heart, if that person is working in the kitchen.
Words to live by: everyone in a professional kitchen is a bastard. Everyone. From line cooks in a diner to the maître’s, everyone is insufferably picky with everyone else’s work, sloppy with their own or fastidious to the point of diagnosable disorder, judgmental, cruel, manipulative, vindictive, and deceptive. As the great Anthony Bourdain pointed out, kitchens the world over are the one place known felons will always be welcome to work. There are no background requirements in a kitchen. If you are a serial killer who knows the secret to baking a perfect puff, you’re welcome to join in the fun. I have no interest in hurting people and neither do most of the professional chefs I know… But the kitchen, for all intents and purposes, will always be an untamed landscape, a place where the tenets of civilization are shoved aside in the name of appetite.
And commerce, of course; the food industry is the world’s largest industry. It is the heart of agricultural commerce, of shipping, of trade and even construction and urban design; it is a cultural language as well, a way of speaking in several tongues, of understanding a place you have never visited. Food, in short—real food, good food, food that is made in a sweaty sterile room by screaming savants who would do just as well picking their way to the top of the pecking order in prison—is everything.
I do not pretend to understand many of the values people profess to have about life—I have never found people particularly endearing since that first rude awakening, back when my poor mother was a whipping boy in the post. I find human nature to be grasping, ravenous and fickle. But, thanks to my mother, I have faith that the better walk among us. There are those who tell the truth, even when it works against their self-interest; my mother was one, and she paid for her choice her entire life. There are those who will do the right thing, when it works against their self-interest; Miss March was one of these. Generally, I like reporters even less than I like the people that populate professional kitchens; I can think of several that would have creamed themselves with joy at the opportunity to blast my mistake across every paper in the English speaking world. But she had already decided she wasn’t going to use this against me. She didn’t want to, once she understood I wasn’t some kind of serial aggressor against women.
Although, in perfect honesty, there were some terrifically untoward things I wanted to do to her. Specifically her, she of the round ass and thighs and the smooth skin and the wanton mouth and beautiful eyes, she who blushed so beautifully at even the mention of sex. Sex-adjacent words and ideas colored her red. Sex itself might make her burst into flame.
And I imagined such a sight, and sighed. She was an extraordinarily beautiful woman.
If I believed in luck, I would have thrown it in a long time ago. But luck is for chumps, to quote my Jersey roots. There’s no such thing. You create opportunities, and then you exploit them—that’s all there is. If you fail to use opportunities, then circumstance will use you. That’s all there was to this life. You enjoyed the best things humans managed to create: food. Sex. Some might say art, and on a very good day I might join them. You looked for a glimpse of the angels among us, and if you had the opportunity, you helped them. No one ever wanted to do an article on my charity work, and I didn’t blame them—no salacious headlines there, and my general temperament and worldview certainly provided plenty of entertainment elsewhere. But I liked angels.
I’d never met one I wanted to kiss before, though. That was entirely new.
And not exactly promising circumstances, for a man like me.
But as I said: I don’t believe in luck. I just wanted… I wanted to see if she would give me the opportunity to bask in that glow a bit longer. A bit more.
I was trying to create an opportunity, and she was going to let me, I could tell. And god help me, I wasn’t about to squander it here.
“Where would you like to go?”
“Excuse me?”
“After the bake,” I said, watching her. I tried not to sound too much like an excited child—that’s how she made me feel, in that moment, her eyebrows raised high on her head. “Where would you like to go? I’ll take you anywhere.”
“Anywhere?” She grinned suddenly, a child herself, and in that moment she cold have said Dubai and I would have chartered a plane. “Well… I’ve always loved lobster—”
“Maine, then,” I said immediately, then worried I’d ruined everything when she burst out laughing.
“No! No, I meant… I was just talking about one of your fancy restaurants.” Such a derogatory tone, I thought, and raised my eyebrow at her. She smiled indulgently. “But Maine would be pretty cool.”
“You are an independent contractor, correct?”
A twinkle of puzzlement in her eye. “Um, yes?”
“Would you like to go to Maine with me?”
“I—how would we—”
“Filming wraps for this week after the bake. I was going to go back to London—which has many delights, but if it’s lobster you want on this fine June day, I say we go to Maine.” I leaned forward, reaching for that opportunity as hard as I could. “It would please me greatly to have a vacation with you, Miss March. Not a professional visit, although I imagine on the drive we could easily cover any and all of your questions for the article. But I don’t have many friends, or have want of them, and you… You and I could be friends, I think.” More, I hoped. But I always pushed. Sometimes too hard. So I tried to make the offer less abrupt. “We could go another time, too, if you… If you’re busy.” I suddenly realized I didn’t know anything about her private life at all. I’d done all the talking—she could be married.
That thought was a swift dunk in cold water.
But no, she gave me a thoughtful look, and I could already tell she was considering my offer under a strict concession, and I knew what it was. “I’m not going to sleep with you,” she said, and I shrugged.
“That is sad, but hardly surprising, given the circumstances.”
“And if we go to Maine, I’ll have to split the cost of the—”
“No,” I said, frowning. “Don’t be absurd. I am well on my way to becoming a millionaire ten times over. But if you’re worried that I would somehow… Attempt to make you feel obligated, or coerced, perhaps we should post-pone. I have no desire to go if you would be uncomfortable.”
“Just like that? Off to Maine?”
“Portland is one of my favorite cities in the world,” I said truthfully. “You have merely provided me with an opportunity, Miss March.
”
And then she did surprise me. “Delilah,” she said softly, and our eyes met.
Oh, Delilah indeed.
“There is one more thing, which you may not approve of and may signal the end of these pleasant plans,” I told her, and she frowned. “I have done no research at all on you, I’m afraid. I forgot—perhaps ignored—our scheduled interview. I do not particularly like reporters, as I’m sure you know. I have to be sure, in spite of the… Impression you have made upon me, let’s say, that you are who and what I believe you to be.”
“You’re going to do a background check on me?”
“Yes,” I said, and she twisted her mouth, considering.
“Okay,” she said, and shrugged in an off-hand way, briefly raising one shoulder. “I don’t have anything to hide.”
“Very well,” I said, and smiled. “It will be lovely to learn more about you,” I told her, and meant it.
I prayed I wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t been, not in a very long time. But my mistakes cast long shadows. She smiled at me and we stood up, my plans set and the directions to Millicent already forming in my head.
Delilah
So. Apparently I was going to Maine today. I pulled out my phone and texted John down at Let Them Eat Bread and made sure all the shifts at the counter were covered for the next few days; I’d been planning to work on the article anyway, so I’d asked everybody to volunteer. It was lucky timing. I could work on the article from Maine, and because I lived in a box in New Jersey I didn’t have to have a room-mate, an unheard of situation for most people in the area. I could head off to Maine for a few days, hit a vintage store in Portland and come home on a whim; John would be happy to check in on Margot. It was a heady thought—without the incredible wealth of someone like Mr. Grant, I certainly couldn’t. But if he was covering the costs… And he had no expectations… Then why not? Really?
