The Saturday Night Supper Club

by Carla Laureano

  “Wait. I’m not press. Not really. My name is Alex Kanin.”

  Kanin. She stared at him for a moment, wondering why that sounded familiar, sure that she would have remembered him if she’d met him before. No matter how busy, she wouldn’t have forgotten that face. Then it dawned on her. The article in the New Yorker. Alexander Kanin. She straightened and sent her best glare his direction, the one that made her cooks cower in apprehension. “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “Please.” He seemed to be gathering himself, his expression pained. “You don’t have to say anything. Just listen.” When she still didn’t relent, he pleaded, “I’ll only take a couple of minutes. I promise.”

  Rachel looked for her friends in the crowd, but they were still standing at the outdoor bar, waiting for their drinks. The crowds had piled in even thicker now, and if she gave up their table, there was no telling when they might nab another one. She clenched her jaw while she considered. “Fine.” She pulled her phone out of her pocket, set the timer, and plunked it on the table between them. “You have exactly two minutes. Go.”

  Alex looked startled, but he lowered himself onto the bench opposite and leaned forward over his folded hands. “I owe you an apology. I never thought when I wrote the article that anyone would make the connection to you, least of all that it would turn into this. You have to believe me. . . . Denver isn’t exactly New York. Who would have thought anyone would take such an interest in a review written by a third-tier journalist like Espy?”

  Rachel stared at him. He had sought her out to apologize, but that didn’t change what he had done, what his actions had set in motion. Never mind the fact that he was even better-looking up close, that she got a delicious waft of a clean-smelling cologne when the breeze briefly changed directions.

  “I think the way that everyone has taken after you is unfair and uncalled for, and a five-year-old could tell that you were set up on that interview. I feel completely responsible for this, even if I had no idea it would turn out this way.”

  Why did he have to seem so sincere? It was much easier to hate him when he was a callous, anonymous opportunist only interested in the advancement of his own career. She pressed her lips together to keep from responding. This was his two minutes. She’d promised to hear him out.

  “I’m here to ask for your forgiveness and let you know this was never my intent. If there’s anything I can do, I’ll do it. Just tell me what it is.”

  “You may be sorry, but that doesn’t change the fact that my career as a chef may well be over now. I’ve had to close all my social media accounts to stop the harassment. I don’t want anything from you—”

  The timer beeped, and she reached to turn it off. But he swooped it out of her grasp, his thumbs flying across the virtual keyboard. Then he set it back down between them.

  “In case you change your mind.” He rose from the table as Ana and Melody returned, holding three tall glasses between them, then gave them each a nod. He paused before he turned away. “For what it’s worth, Rachel, I’m really sorry. If I could go back and do it differently, I would.”

  Her friends took their seats again, even though they craned their necks to watch him walk away. “What did he say?” Melody asked, sliding a glass of soda across the table.

  “He—wait. Shouldn’t you be asking who that was?” Rachel narrowed her eyes. “Unless you already knew . . . You did. You set this up!”

  Melody looked sheepish. “He came into the restaurant looking for you, and he looked so pathetic I told him we’d be here tonight. He apologized, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he apologized, but somehow I don’t think him looking pathetic was what swayed you.” Despite herself, she scanned the crowd to catch a parting look. Then she shook herself sternly. “It’s not like he can do anything about what happened.”

  “But he writes for the New Yorker and, from what I can tell, a bunch of other places too. He probably has connections.”

  “And you think I should play on his guilt? That’s not how I work.”

  “Why not?” Ana asked. “It’s the least he could do.”

  Rachel shoved her phone toward them. “He put his number in my phone.”

  Ana and Melody exchanged a look.

  “What? He said if there’s anything he could do, he’d do it.”

  “That sounds like volunteering his connections to me,” Melody said.

  “To do what? I’m two days past losing my restaurant. Even if I knew what I wanted to do next, who’s going to invest in a project with me after all this?”

  “If there’s one thing I’ve learned working in publicity,” Ana said, “it’s that everything blows over eventually. Especially when it comes to something like this. We need to work some damage control, repair your reputation. You know very well most of your guests don’t care about this stuff. It’s the industry and the pundits and the social media trolls. And they’ll lose interest in you as soon as someone else does something stupid.”

  “Thanks,” Rachel said.

  “You know I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “The problem is, I have no idea how I would win over anyone. What am I going to do, invite every influential person in Denver over for dinner and show them that I’m really not a terrible person?”

  Melody and Ana exchanged that look again, the one that made her feel like she’d been the subject of conversation. “What?”

  Ana pulled out her tablet from her oversize bag and tapped in a few letters on the keyboard. Then she swiveled it around. “Read this.”

  It was an article from some magazine talking about the rise of nontraditional venues and vehicles for gourmet food. Seriously, how did Ana have time to keep up with this stuff? The woman was a walking encyclopedia of pop culture. Rachel flicked the screen with her finger, skimming the text. Food trucks, which she’d already ruled out. Upscale food courts, a trend that Denver had already embraced and presented the same problem for Rachel as the coaches—lack of control of the overall guest experience. Then she came to the last paragraph and stopped.

  “Pop-up restaurants?”

  Ana took the tablet back, practically vibrating with excitement. “Once a month, even once a week. Fixed menu, unusual locations. Heavy emphasis on experience and hospitality.”

  “I know what they are.” They’d been popular in Europe for many years now. Some of them were spectacular productions closer to a circus, like Gingerline in London. Others were immersive experiences in the same place using rotating themes. A few farm-to-table chefs in Colorado already hosted pop-ups at their farms for a select guest list. Tickets were as coveted in the food world as white truffles and twice as hard to acquire.

  “Think about it.” Melody’s voice held the same sort of anticipation. “You would have complete control of every aspect, from menu to location to decor. It would be an opportunity to really show what you can do to a handpicked group of influencers.”

  “Like a supper club,” Rachel murmured to herself. “An alternative to the usual weekend dining experience.”

  “Good food, good conversation. And exclusivity would pretty much guarantee that it was the most talked-about event in town, especially since you’re notorious at the moment.”

  Rachel cracked a bare smile. She would have never thought she would do anything to make herself notorious, but maybe it could be put to good use. And so far Denver had very few options of this sort. Given the right spin, it could be wildly successful.

  It came to her in a flash. “The Saturday Night Supper Club.” They stared at each other, a hush falling over the table, a cocoon of silence amid the pounding beat of music and the laughter of other diners. “We’ve got something, haven’t we?”

  Melody nodded slowly, and even Ana looked a little stunned. “Oh yeah, we’ve got something.”

  Rachel looked between her two friends and for the first time in days, a feeling that was not terror or grief built in her. “So. Where do we begin?”

  Chapter Eight

 
; THAT COULD HAVE GONE BETTER.

  Of course, it could have gone much, much worse, and Alex had been steeling himself for reactions ranging from a drink in his face to a full-on screaming match.

  Instead, Rachel Bishop had looked at him with this closed-off, hurt expression and set her cell phone timer for two minutes. Two minutes in which he had poured out his regrets about his part in the situation and then been summarily dismissed.

  He wound his way from the food truck court toward his dark-blue Subaru parked down the street. Fine. Perfect, actually. He’d done what he’d come to do, apologize and offer his assistance, and she’d refused. He was off the hook.

  Except he was still thinking about her. That was about as far from off the hook as he could get.

  He opened his car door with his key fob and threw himself into the front seat. He’d made an error coming here tonight. He’d prepared himself for all the possible ways she might react and how he would handle it. He’d just been thinking of her in terms of a wronged chef whose career had been damaged.

  It hadn’t even occurred to him that she might be an extremely attractive woman.

  He’d looked her up online, of course. Her only photos on her restaurant’s website and her Facebook page had been the run-of-the-mill head-shot variety: hair in a knot, white chef’s jacket, arms crossed over her chest while she gazed seriously at the camera. If she’d been wearing makeup, it was the kind devised to make her look natural and no-nonsense.

  He hadn’t expected a dark-haired beauty with a killer figure and long, wavy hair that begged a man to bury his fingers in it. So no, he might not have given his apology the full attention it deserved.

  He really was a jerk. Wasn’t that the very thing he’d been trying to call Espy on, the tendency to judge a woman who had done extraordinary things solely on her looks and sex appeal? Of course, he wasn’t actually judging her on her looks; they were an unexpected bonus.

  That was some hard-core justification if he’d ever heard any.

  Alex pulled away from the curb into the waning evening traffic and made his way southeast through the city to his condo in Cheesman Park. Denver’s neighborhoods ebbed and flowed into each other much more smoothly than a city map might suggest, pockets of distinct architecture separated by commercial space of every vintage and dotted with contemporary homes that had sprung up in place of historic ones that were too old to be saved—or where the demand was too high to justify leaving an 800-square-foot foursquare intact.

  His building was a 1970s high-rise, built on the site of a former 1930s mansion, long since torn down to accommodate the city’s population growth. It had been updated several times over the decades, the last time while he was living there. He’d written his first—and possibly only—book in the middle of a construction zone, the hammering and sawing so relentless that it had invaded his dreams. Now, however, he found himself with prime Denver real estate, equity in the bank, and a rental unit next door that brought in enough income to keep him there.

  It was the one truly good thing he’d gotten out of his last relationship. There were advantages to dating a real estate agent, after all.

  Alex turned onto his street as one of his neighbors pulled out of a spot, and he navigated the wagon into the empty space. He grabbed the plastic bag holding his food—from the amazing French truck at Rhino Crash—and made his way into the lobby and up the elevator. Silently, the metal box slid upward to one of four penthouses on the top floor. Yes, he’d gotten lucky for sure. Thirty-one-year-old self-employed writers typically didn’t get penthouse apartments in the city.

  The new lock turned smoothly and he pushed through to his loft space, dropping his keys on the table by the front door and striding through to the open renovated kitchen. Good for resale, Victoria had said, picking out high-end appliances and finishes that made it the perfect bachelor pad for the man who liked to entertain.

  He’d never even turned on the oven.

  Instead, he found a chilled bottle of pop in the refrigerator, pulled out some utensils, and took his takeout to the drafting table in his bedroom. He could eat while he worked on his proposal. Now that he’d dispatched his duty to Rachel Bishop, the block he’d had against putting words on the page should evaporate and he could get both his agent and his publisher off his back.

  But the blinking cursor on the screen didn’t move, even as the pile of duck-fat fries and shredded confit shrank to nothing more than a smudge at the bottom of the paper container.

  He had nothing to say.

  “That can’t be true.” Alex tipped his chair back on two legs. He always had something to say about everything—according to Victoria, it was one of his greatest faults. A teenager walking through the botanic gardens with his eyes on his cell phone rather than the beauty around him would spawn an incisive essay on how technology had at once heightened society’s focus and damaged its ability to see the bigger picture. Fitness enthusiasts running the stairs at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in their designer exercise duds with perfectly coiffed hair might spark musings on the commercial intersection of fitness and beauty. The world around him was filled with details that other people missed. It was his job to draw attention to those things.

  And yet the only detail on which he could focus was the slightly uncomfortable way Rachel had sat at that table, looking lost and out of her depth. What was she doing right now? What was she going to do next? Was she like all the people who left corporate America—or prison—and realized that no matter how bad it was on the inside, it was better than a world of free choice?

  There was an essay there, all right, but unless he wanted to make matters worse, Rachel Bishop could never be the topic of his writing.

  Alex shoved back from the desk with a frustrated sigh and took his empty paper bowl to the trash can beneath the sink. He wasn’t going to get anywhere on the proposal tonight. He picked up his phone and texted a quick message to Bryan: Going to the gym. Meet me there if you’re free. Outdoor climbing was always his first choice to settle his thoughts, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

  Bryan texted back immediately. Be there in 30.

  At least Alex felt better about one thing: at the moment, Bryan had no more of a social life than he did.

  * * *

  The gym wasn’t exactly packed, but it still took Alex a few minutes to find Bryan in the expansive, warehouse-like space. This wasn’t a typical gym; it catered to Denver’s extreme-sports enthusiasts. It wasn’t unusual to see men and a few women training for things like American Ninja Warrior, taking advantage of all the unusual obstacles meant to build the skills necessary to hang from, vault over, and flip off the sides of cliffs and buildings. Every time he felt good about his level of fitness, all he had to do was show up and watch someone running the parkour course like it was a child’s inflatable obstacle bouncer. He was still recovering from his last attempt at the salmon ladder.

  When he finally located his friend, Bryan was climbing the twenty-foot bouldering wall, scaling the side with such rapidity that a couple members had stopped to watch him. Alex waited until he reached the top, then called up, “Are you done showing off?”

  “Not quite,” Bryan called without looking behind him, then began downclimbing with as much fluidity as he’d shown on the way up.

  “You can’t help yourself, can you?” Alex said when Bryan came back over to him.

  “What?”

  Alex followed his friend’s gaze and saw a pretty blonde give him a shy smile before she went back to talking to her friend. “You going to go talk to her?”

  Bryan shrugged. “I see her around here sometimes. Respectable climber, though she’s got some bad habits.”

  “Somehow I don’t think you were showing off for her because you’re interested in her climbing habits.”

  “How did the conversation with the chef go?”

  Alex shook his head with a wry smile. “Nice subject change.” He might have a good reason to be gun-shy about jumping into a
relationship again after Victoria, but Bryan should have no such qualms. Women practically fell at his feet, including nice ones that he could take home to his mother. Yet even if one did catch his attention long enough to date, she didn’t last past the first month.

  “I take it the fact you’re here means it didn’t go well?” Bryan started toward the room in the back where the parkour course was located, along with some separate apparatuses set up specifically for climbers.

  “She gave me two minutes and then basically told me to get lost.”

  “Then you’re off the hook.”

  “Yeah.”

  Bryan looked at him sideways. “Wow. She was that hot?”

  Alex blinked. “What? Who said anything about her looks?”

  “You’re a good guy, Alex, but even you don’t feel that guilty over a stranger unless you’ve got some personal interest in her. So what gives?”

  He almost felt embarrassed to voice it aloud. “She’s clearly not the type to skate by on her looks, but she could if she wanted to. No question.”

  Bryan whistled. “And she can cook? Marry her.”

  “She won’t even talk to me. I thought she was going to slap me when I put my number in her phone.”

  “Nice one. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

  “To help her out professionally.”

  “Sure. Keep telling yourself that.”

  Alex rolled his eyes and approached the ledge on the far side of the room. “Can we get to it here? I’m afraid you’re going to spring a 5.13 on me next time you call me out for an easy climb.”

  “Fine.” Bryan shrugged. “But you know you suck at multitasking. As long as she’s out there and she hates you, you’re not going to write a single word. You remember our senior year? You were going to fail AP Lit until I forced you to ask out Belinda Ashton. As soon as you had the date set up, you wrote your entire term paper in an evening.”

  “I wrote my entire term paper in an evening because I was afraid of not graduating.”

  “Right. So you’re welcome.”