Romance Impossible

by Melanie Marchande

  Chef was breathing hard, but his eyes softened as he said this. I swallowed hard, my hands clenched into fists by my sides.

  "No offense, Chef," I said, holding my venom back as much as I could. "But I've worked in plenty of kitchens. I've been put through the ringer so many times, you don't even begin to scare me. If you want to try and break me, like one of your students on TV, go ahead. But I won't roll over for it. Not like you're used to."

  He just stared at me. For the first few seconds, I was sure it was simply the calm before the storm. But then, all he did was slowly raise his hand to his mouth, resting the side of his thumb against his lips.

  For another few minutes, he just stared, and I stared back. My heart was thumping like it might leap out of my chest, but my gaze didn't waver.

  And then, he just went back to his cooking.

  What the hell just happened?

  ***

  The following week, I made the mistake of mentioning to Shelly that I was going to be running through the menu alone, a few hours before Chef Dylan got in. She immediately insisted on stopping by, and wouldn't take "no" for an answer.

  After everything that had happened between us recently, the last thing I wanted was for Chef to see me palling around with my best friend in his kitchen. But as long as I could push her out the door in plenty of time, it seemed like a minimal risk. And having someone to talk to would make the prep work a lot less tedious.

  "So," she said, leaning on the prep table with a conspiratorial smile on her face. "Are the rumors true?"

  I sighed. "Which ones?"

  "You know. Chef Dylan, the heartbreaker. Didn't he once have a fight with the hostess that he was fucking, in front of the customers? And it was so bad the restaurant eventually closed?"

  "That was a coincidence," I insisted. "The restaurant closing, I mean. If anything, a scene like that would make people more likely to come."

  "True," Shelley conceded. "I'd basically go there every night just hoping for a repeat performance. But really, I'm curious! You must have picked up something, working right next to the guy."

  "We don't exactly discuss his love life," I said. "And if you're asking me about right now, well, no - he seems pretty single to me. But maybe he's just private about it."

  She was pouting. "You're no fun. I want you to find out some juicy stuff for me, okay? That's an order."

  "Sure, I'll get right on that." I rolled my eyes. "You want to hand me that bowl?"

  "I thought I wasn't supposed to be here."

  "You're not, but if you're going to hang out, I'm putting you to work."

  "Fair enough." She did as I asked. "But seriously, come on - you see his appeal, right?"

  I shrugged. There was no sense in getting into a whole thing about it. What use was there in confessing that the smell of his cologne made my mouth water, or that I sometimes stalled around his office in hopes of seeing him changing into his coat? He never wore a shirt underneath, and he was completely unselfconscious about it. Not that he had anything to be self-conscious about.

  "I mean, just on paper," Shelly went on, "he's a celebrity, he's a chef, he's rich as hell, and he's an athlete in his spare time. Have you seen the pictures of him at the triathlon? Holy shit, I almost died."

  "No," I lied. "I don't really go looking for that kind of stuff."

  I mean, who on earth would want to see pictures of a guy like that, wearing tight athletic gear, all his muscles straining, covered in sweat and mud? Basically just doing the manliest things on the planet?

  How silly.

  "I don't buy it," said Shelly, with a dismissive gesture. "You're just in denial. I mean, isn't there any part of you, like deep, deep down inside, buried under all the hate, where you just wanna sit on his f-"

  "Hello, Chef," I blurted out, as Chef Dylan burst into the room at the worst possible moment. Shelly turned beet red.

  "Everyone who doesn't work here, get out of my kitchen." Chef Dylan grabbed one of his favorite knives and started sharpening it with quick, vicious movements. Shelly was gone before I had a chance to turn around.

  "I'm sorry, Chef," I said, hurrying to my station. "We were just catching up before I started my shift."

  "Don't apologize, just get to work." He glanced at me, then looked back down to his chopping. His expression was unreadable. At least he didn't look angry.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket. Most likely a mortified, apologetic text from Shelly. I had no idea how much Chef Dylan might have heard, but I certainly wasn't going to bring it up.

  ***

  "Jillian, can I speak to you, please?"

  Chef Dylan had popped out of his office just long enough to say this; a moment later, he'd disappeared again.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  This whole thing was turning into a comedy of errors. Getting a talking-to about the charity thing was bad enough, but now I was going to be held responsible for letting Shelly into the kitchen - not to mention the intensely embarrassing thing she'd chosen to say as soon as he walked into the room.

  I took a deep breath, wiped my hands, and went into his office. He didn't look up until I sat down.

  For a while, he just met my eyes without speaking. Why does always do this? Just to make me squirm? Because it's working.

  In more ways than one.

  His eyes could range from stormcloud-gray to a hard, glinting steel, but right now they were somewhere in-between. I didn't know what it meant, but my heart was fluttering and it wasn't just from nerves.

  "You don't have to like me, Jillian," he said, finally. "All I need is for you to respect me."

  "I do," I said, quickly. Too quickly. I could see that he didn't really believe me. But how could you not respect a man like that, at least a little? Ten Michelin stars. Bad attitude or no bad attitude, he was a force to be reckoned with.

  "That's not what I meant," he said. "I don't want you to respect me as some kind of culinary legend. I want you to respect me as a person. As your boss."

  My face was turning bright red, despite my best efforts to stay calm. What could I possibly say to convince him that I did, considering what he'd just walked into?

  "Can I speak freely, Chef?"

  His eyebrows raised a little. "I hope you always will," he said.

  "I've never really believed that your method of dealing with people is the most effective," I said. "Or the most fair. I won't pretend that we agree on that issue. But when it comes to you as a businessman, and as a chef - I couldn't possibly have more respect for you. And I'm willing to learn more about why you do the things you do, especially the things I don't understand."

  A slow smile crept across his face.

  "You're something else," he said. "You know that?"

  I couldn't help but smile back. My heart flip-flopped in my chest. "I don't know what that means," I said. "But, thank you."

  "You've really mastered the art of being both honest and diplomatic," he said. "You know, when most people say something like 'I disagree with you, but I respect your opinion' I know they're completely full of shit. But you're not like that, are you? You really do want to learn why I do what I do."

  "Well, yes," I said, my face flushing. "Is that...weird?"

  "It's wonderful," he said. "But it is...unusual, yes."

  If only he knew how strong my opinions of him really were. But I was being honest about learning his methods. I was curious, even if I could never be like that myself. I could certainly stand to be tougher from time to time. Growing up, I'd mastered the art of diplomacy to try and keep the peace between my parents. It never worked out, but the skills had carried me pretty well through my adult life.

  "I have a feeling we're going to get along just fine, you and I," Chef Dylan said. "Bumps in the road notwithstanding."

  I wished I could share his confidence. But still, I smiled, and there was a warm glow in my chest.

  "Thank you," I said. "I hope so too."

  I cleared my throat, considering this for a moment. I'd
been meaning to say something earlier. Nobody called me "Jillian" unless they didn't know me. It felt very, very strange for him to keep calling me by that name.

  "Chef?"

  He looked back up at me.

  "Would you..." I cleared my throat again. "Most people just call me Jill."

  "Of course," he said. "See you tomorrow, Jill."

  ***

  It was our last day of work before officially opening. I could feel the buzz before I even walked into the restaurant, and suddenly the place was crawling with activity - I'd grown so used to it being mostly empty, most of the time, as we prepared.

  There were a few people here that I hadn't met, including one who was standing in the corner - I had to look twice, to make sure I wasn't going insane.

  It wasn't quite like seeing double. He did look like Chef Dylan, but he was a little shorter, a little smoother around the edges - younger, I judged, though not by much. He was dressed in a well-pressed suit and basically looked like he belonged somewhere much fancier than a kitchen.

  "You must be Jillian," he said, extending his hand. "I'm Beckett. Chef Dylan's brother."

  "No kidding," I said, before I could stop myself. My face started going bright red, from my chest to the roots of my hair, but Beckett just smiled. "I'm sorry," I said. "I don't know what came over me. It's nice to meet you."

  "Don't worry about it," he said. "I guess it is pretty obvious, isn't it?"

  "Just a little bit." I held up my thumb and forefinger, a hair's width apart. "So, are you working here too?"

  "Sommelier." He jerked his head in the vague direction of the wine cellar.

  "It's funny," I said, pulling down a sauté pan. "I never heard about Chef having a brother."

  "I try to keep a low profile." Beckett grinned - the same infectious smile that his brother displayed from time to time. "But I'm guessing this job isn't going to help too much with that."

  "Just duck if you see any cameras. I'll help keep a lookout."

  "I appreciate that," said Beckett, just as his brother swung the door open.

  "Jill," said Chef Dylan, nodding at my prep work. "I see you've already met my brother. Good. Could you take him through the menu for me? I need to conduct a few more interviews today."

  "Don't make any hasty decisions," Beckett called after him, as his brother walked into the office. "You've got at least twenty-four hours to staff the rest of this place, you know."

  I grinned. I could already tell Beckett and I were going to get along famously.

  ***

  The day went by in a flurry of preparation. After I spent the first few hours with Beckett, I didn't see him again until it was time to leave. Just as I was reaching for my coat, I heard a soft muttering noise coming from the back hallway between the kitchen and the dining room. I went to investigate. Beckett was standing there, with a few large boxes and a pile of assorted furniture pieces, staring at a piece of paper with a frown.

  "What's this?" I nudged a box with my toe.

  He started a little. "Oh. Jillian. I didn't see you there. Just a wine rack, thought I'd put one here - easy to get to, customers will see it passing by, functional and attractive, you know? I might have made a huge mistake."

  "Having some trouble?" I smiled sympathetically. It had been a few years since the last time I moved, but I could remember the "putting furniture together" saga like it was yesterday. "I'll help. My train doesn't leave for another hour, anyway."

  "Are you sure?" Beckett looked up.

  "Course. This beats hanging out in South Station any day." I looked at the instructions, then down at the pile of parts, then back up again. "I...what the hell is going on here?"

  "If you figure it out, be sure to let me know."

  I had to give Beckett credit for handling this better than his brother would. I couldn't help but picture Chef Dylan trying to shout the furniture parts into submission, and I giggled a little.

  "What's so funny?" Beckett blinked at me.

  "Nothing," I said. "Nothing. I was just picturing your brother trying to put this together."

  "Yeah, there's a reason this job fell to me."

  "He'd probably just Hulk Smash it," I said, absently, picking up a piece and hefting it in my hand, as if estimating the weight would get me somewhere. "He's got a lot of frustration stored up from being so nice to Aiden. It's not really in his DNA to bite it back."

  "Hmm," Beckett agreed, still staring at the stupid little line drawings that revealed nothing.

  Something occurred to me. "Aiden's not - he's not your son, is he?"

  Beckett shook his head. "No, no." He looked like he was on the verge of saying something else, but he didn't.

  "Oh." I didn't know why, but I was suddenly deathly curious about Chef Dylan's upbringing. Until I'd met Beckett, I didn't even know he had any siblings. "So was it just the three of you, growing up?"

  He let out a little huff of laughter. "No, no, not even close. Seven of us, all told. Kids, I mean. Nine total in the family."

  "Wow," I said. Growing up an only child¸ I couldn't even imagine. Well, that wasn't true. I could. Constant chaos. Never a moment of silence, never any privacy. Frequently overlooked. Having to shout at the top of your lungs just to get noticed. I might not have grown up in a big family, but I knew enough of them.

  "Me and Max, we were the middle kids." Beckett picked up a bolt, examined it, and then put it back down. It took me a full five seconds to realize who Max was. I'd never heard anyone call Chef Dylan by his diminutive name. "We had to fight for attention a lot of the time. If I were a psychologist, I'd speculate that's why Max is so shouty. But what do I know?"

  "Huh," I said, staring at the incomprehensible cartoon in the instructions that was supposed to tell us...something. The Ziggy-like figure was smiling in the first picture, but frowning in the second one. Why? What did he know that I didn't?

  "How about you?" Beckett fitted two pieces together, stared at them, and then shook his head. "Any brothers or sisters?"

  "Nope, just me. It turns out there's such a thing as too much attention." I grinned, as he struggled to pull the two pieces apart. They were stubbornly wedged in the way only two wrong pieces could be. "Would it kill them to put some words in here?" I waved the instruction booklet.

  "Might cut into the profit margin," Beckett grunted. "This way, they can package it the same for all of the eleventy-billion countries they sell this crap in, and they don't have to print a manual the size of The Stand."

  Eventually, through sheer luck and brute force, we got the thing together. It didn't immediately collapse, so I considered it a job well done. All the while, I couldn't stop the images in my head of young Max Dylan, a little towheaded boy trying to shout loud enough to drown out six other voices. Struggling to prove his worth. To be noticed.

  No wonder he was so driven. Like a shark, I thought. Stop moving forward for too long, and you just waste away.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Entrée

  The evolution of culinary terms is one of the more fascinating branches of language. In North America, an entrée is the main course. In the rest of the English and French-speaking world, it's what it sounds like: the first course, or appetizer. As eating habits changed, so did the terminology. Some bemoan this sort of change, but I've never felt that language should be static.

  - Excerpted from Dylan: A Lifetime of Recipes

  ***

  Max

  ***

  Opening night was chaos. And not in a good way.

  You expect a certain amount of things to go wrong, of course. That's just the way things are. A perfectly-executed restaurant opening is impossible. There are simply too many variables.

  One of my early mentors in the culinary business told me that the more disastrous the opening, the more prosperous the restaurant.

  I hoped he was right.

  I got there obscenely early, before Beckett, before Jill, before Liam, the surly prep cook who clearly thought this position beneath
him. But options were limited, even for someone with his experience, so I ignored his glowering and just appreciated the quality of his work. He'd be out the door as soon as a better job came along, but that was a worry for another day.

  For a while, I just walked around the dining room, closing my eyes for a moment and opening them again, trying to see this already-familiar place through fresh eyes. What message would it send? The contractors and decorators might hate me, but they didn't know what I knew. Every little piece of this place would speak to my patrons, even if they didn't know it. The shade of the paint, the color of the curtains, the shape of the light fixtures. People don't think they notice these things, but they do.

  Every little thing plants a thought, a feeling. Yes, I feel comfortable here. Yes, I want to eat here.

  On that front, things were as good as they were going to get.

  Then, the phone calls started coming in.

  Aiden was going to be late. Surprise, surprise - on the one day it really mattered. Then, almost as soon as I'd hung up, another call came in, this one from my seafood supplier.

  They had a problem. No oysters tonight. No scallops. Limited lobster...

  "I'm sorry," I said, over the ringing in my ears. "I'm having a bit of trouble hearing you."

  I hung up.

  Jill found me still sitting in my office, staring at the wall like I'd gone catatonic.

  "...Chef Dylan?" she said, hesitantly, poking her head in like she expected a bomb to go off.

  "No seafood," I said. It was the most explanation I could manage, at the moment.

  "I'm...I'm sorry?" She stepped in, her confusion turning to genuine concern.

  "The seafood supplier just called," I said, slowly, like I didn't quite believe my own statement. "They've got...basically nothing for us. Some kind of screw-up. I don't know. I stopped listening at some point." I shook my head, snapping back to reality. "Have to make some calls. See if there's anyone who can supply us on short notice..."