Kitchen Gods Box Set

by Beth Bolden

  It wouldn’t be easy, but they could build something with a lot of hard work and dedication.

  They, Xander realized. He was still thinking about the Barrel House as a joint effort, something he and Damon shared together. To know that for sure going forward, he was going to have to leave the safety of his kitchen and go find him.

  He was nervous and apprehensive about it. What if Damon’s apology wasn’t as kick-ass as he’d promised? What if after hearing it, Xander still felt angry and betrayed? How were they supposed to move forward if he couldn’t forgive?

  And Xander wanted to move forward and put these two days of hell behind them so badly he could nearly taste it. The only problem was he couldn’t do that if he didn’t let Damon make his apology first. Besides, there was another apology that Xander still felt honor bound to make.

  Whether Damon’s reaction was deserved or not, Xander still hadn’t had the faith in him that he should have. He’d been selfish and callous, and he needed to make that right.

  He walked into the dining room, the lights turned down low, and when he didn’t see Damon anywhere, ventured outside. There were lights on in the distance, where Damon’s house sat, so he wandered that direction.

  When he crested the slight ridge that hid the house from the restaurant parking lot, Xander froze.

  There were candles on the table sitting on Damon’s patio, the same setup that he’d had the first night Xander had ever cooked for him. The night that Xander had long believed was their first date. But it wasn’t just the candles that stopped him, it was the wine bottle sitting on the table, a single empty glass next to it, glittering in the candlelight.

  “What are you doing?” Xander nearly yelled, panic overtaking him as he raced down the ridge toward the patio. “You can’t drink. Not like this. Not for me. God, please don’t do this.”

  But Damon just smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said as Xander skidded to a stop next to the table. “I’m not drinking. The wine isn’t for me. It’s for you.”

  Xander sat down opposite him with a huff. He looked at the label, recognizing it as one of the most prized Hess vintages. One of the vintages that had helped Nathan Hess rule Napa.

  “Where did you even get this?” Xander said, picking it up and reading the label carefully.

  “My dad’s vault,” Damon said casually.

  Xander looked up suspiciously. “Is this your really good apology? A thousand-dollar bottle of wine?”

  “It’s part of it,” Damon said. “I know you haven’t been drinking around me. I know you enjoy wine, and I want you to know that while what you said probably could have used better delivery, it was all true. I don’t really want to drink anymore, not really. I don’t want to be that man anymore. I want to be better; you make me want to be better. The last thing I want to do is hold you back from things you like doing.”

  “I never said I enjoyed drinking wine,” Xander said. Which was technically true.

  Damon laughed. “You never had to, sweetheart. I knew. I saw your face at Michael Mina, when they took the wine list away, and I realized then that I was the one holding you back. Then you tried to convince me, with a very logical argument, by the way, that we should serve alcohol at the Barrel House. And that’s when everything I believed, deep down, came back in spades. I never believed that as an alcoholic I deserved happiness and hope and all that. I thought I’d fucked up my life, and nobody should get dragged down with me. Nobody else deserved it.”

  Xander opened his mouth to say that was complete and total bullshit, but Damon beat him to it.

  “I know, that’s such asinine crap,” Damon said wryly. “I can’t believe I took that to heart for so damn long. But I did, and I’m still fighting against it. I also want you to know that it’s not going to change overnight, no matter how much I want it to. But I’m going to start seeing a therapist, who’s going to work with me on this stuff. I’m going to be better. I want to be better.”

  “Wow,” Xander said softly. “This is a pretty good apology. Except that you haven’t really apologized yet.” He shot a quick grin at Damon. “But maybe I can have some wine first?”

  Damon poured it without a single tremble in his fingers. Maybe Xander shouldn’t have believed him, but he did. He understood how it was so easy to believe that you were worthless and didn’t deserve someone to love who loved you back. He’d believed that too, for a long time, and instead of figuring out he was wrong, he’d gotten angry and bitter. That’s when Damon had found him—or he’d found Damon.

  Xander took a long sip. The aroma was glorious, the flavor unmatched as it slid across his tongue. “This is really good wine,” he said. “Is your dad going to kill you?”

  Shrugging, Damon didn’t seem particularly concerned. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe more in myself, and that I didn’t believe more in you,” he said seriously. “If you give me another chance, I swear you won’t regret it.”

  “I believe you. I believe in you,” Xander said, either the emotion or the wine making his voice hoarse. “I love you.”

  “I know,” Damon said, and his smirk made Xander’s heart soar. “Now come over here so I can kiss you.”

  Xander wanted to and even got up from his chair because damnit, he wanted to kiss Damon too. It had only been two days but it had felt like an eternity. But then he looked over at his glass. He’d been drinking. He didn’t know what Damon’s tolerances were or what the rules really were.

  “Oh, get over here,” Damon said with the brightest laugh. “I poured it for you, didn’t I? Do you trust me?”

  “Forever,” Xander said, coming over and settling on Damon’s broad thighs. He linked his hands around his neck, pulled him close and kissed him.

  Epilogue

  Twelve months later

  “How are you feeling?”

  Damon leaned back on his therapist’s couch and discarded the initial, defensive response because that wasn’t going to get him anywhere. He’d learned from his weekly sessions that the sarcasm he was picking up from Xander did him zero favors with Amy.

  “I’m good,” Damon said.

  Amy’s eyes narrowed. He liked her because she didn’t take any of his bullshit, and always said exactly what she meant. “Tell me more,” she said, tapping her pen insistently on the yellow pad resting on her lap.

  It was one of his therapist’s favorite sayings, and Damon narrowly avoided gritting his teeth together. “Well,” he said, “tonight is the big celebration dinner. We’ve been open a year, and haven’t managed to kill each other yet.”

  “And?” Amy asked.

  “And my father is coming because I invited him.” Damon frowned at a stain on the rug in front of him. “I’m trying to figure out if I regret that yet.”

  “Why don’t you tell me why you invited him?” she suggested. If he didn’t know better, he’d think she enjoyed watching him squirm a little under her microscope of honesty.

  “You know why I invited him,” Damon retorted. “We discussed it for weeks.”

  “Tell me like I don’t already know. Tell me like I’m a stranger.”

  “I want him to see what Xander and I have built together, and I want him to meet my boyfriend.”

  “If he doesn’t appreciate what you built, and doesn’t like Xander, will the evening be a disaster?” she asked.

  Damon’s mouth twisted into a wry smile. “I try not to let him ruin anything anymore. I guess if he comes and is his normal asshole self, I won’t be very surprised, but I also won’t be disappointed.”

  Amy smiled. Damon still found it a little terrifying, but he’d learned to trust it over the last year. Learned to trust her. “Does that help answer your question?”

  He was never sure whether he loved or hated that every time he wasn’t sure about something, she’d ask a handful of questions and his answers would always guide him to his own conclusion.

  Damon shook his head. “How do you do that?”

  “Practice. Now what else is going on?”<
br />
  “Xander and I are still talking about selling alcohol,” Damon admitted. “Neither of us can make a decision that sticks. Every time I bring it up, saying I’m good with it, he tells me that we don’t need it. And vice versa.”

  “It actually sounds like you’ve found your decision,” Amy said.

  “I . . . I . . . guess so?” He hesitated. Considering how long they’d been discussing it, it seemed like the final answer to the question would have been more obvious, but this was a subject filled with a lot of personal baggage, and they were both wary of that baggage. But then, if a year had gone by and they still weren’t serving alcohol, Amy was probably right. That was the answer.

  “I know so,” Damon finally said with a lot more certainty.

  Amy nodded approvingly. “You’ve come a long way from the first time we met.”

  The first time they’d met, Damon had been a tsunami of guilt and low self-esteem, endlessly grateful that Xander still loved him and was willing to accept his apology, but not entirely sure how to move forward with that, and to be better for both of them.

  “I can feel the confidence radiating out of you,” Amy pointed out. “It’s a whole different vibe. But the real question is, how do you feel?”

  “I don’t know that I feel all that different,” Damon admitted. “I feel less guilty. I feel less like I’m going to fuck Xander’s life up. I still look at him sometimes and think god, I’m lucky, but there isn’t that fear with it that someday he’ll figure out he’s too good for me.”

  Damon thought for a moment. “Now it just feels like we’re good for each other.”

  “The first time I met him, I thought that too,” Amy said. “And I think you knew it. You just had to discover it for yourself.”

  “You really like to do that, don’t you?” Damon asked with a long-suffering tone of voice, even though he would readily acknowledge to just about anybody else how amazing Amy was and how much of a difference she’d made in his life.

  She laughed. “You know it.”

  Their session length usually varied. Sometimes, if the subject was difficult or hard to talk about, they’d only talk for half an hour. Occasionally Damon couldn’t shut up, and they’d chat away for the full hour. Today was a shorter session, which despite discussing Nathan briefly, hadn’t been particularly difficult emotionally.

  As Amy walked him to the door, she put a hand on his shoulder. “I think you should consider going to every other week, despite how much I enjoy our weekly sessions,” she said.

  Damon glanced up in surprise. “Really?”

  “You’re doing great,” Amy said. “And don’t say you’re not fixed, because you know from rehab that fixed and better aren’t the same thing.”

  “I know,” Damon agreed seriously.

  She pulled him into a quick hug. “Come back in a few weeks.”

  Damon didn’t always leave therapy feeling like a load of crap, but today he felt light and happy and like over the last year, he’d finally found the road he needed to walk on—and the person he wanted to walk on it with.

  * * *

  “You’re smiling,” Xander said as soon as Damon walked into the Barrel House. “I thought you were seeing Amy this morning.” He walked down from where he was laying place settings at the gigantic table that ran the whole length of the dining room. Setting a table wasn’t normally something Xander’s staff let him do, but he’d forbidden anyone from coming into work today, insisting that this dinner—the Barrel House’s one-year anniversary and also a celebration of the restaurant’s unbelievable success—was something he wanted to do himself. Or at least with Damon’s help.

  The dinner was also a temporary goodbye as the staff went on a three-week paid sabbatical while David oversaw an expansion of the dining room and added a pizza kitchen which included an enormous wood-fired oven Damon had shipped from Italy.

  As for Xander, he had demanded a vacation, and he and Damon were headed to southern Italy for a heavy dose of sun and great food, with a lighter dose of work scoping out new suppliers.

  “I was,” Damon said, and grinned even harder.

  Xander raised an eyebrow. “Usually she makes you think too hard and I need to give you a wide berth.” That was one of the reasons he hadn’t liked the idea of Damon going to therapy today, because the truth was, Xander couldn’t do everything, and he needed Damon’s help to pull this dinner off. And Damon stuck in his own head was not usually a great helper.

  “Not today,” Damon said, pulling Xander into a tight embrace, his hands smoothing down the shoulders of his white chef’s jacket. “Today was different. She even thinks I can go to every other week instead of every week.”

  “Really?” Xander couldn’t help the surprise in his voice. Some weeks, Damon made it sound like he was still slogging through the worst of his low self-worth and family-inherited baggage. He’d been seeming lighter, and the fact that he’d wanted Nathan to come to this dinner had definitely signaled important change. But Amy thinking he could reduce his therapy sessions was huge.

  “You sound happy.”

  Xander smiled. “I’m so happy that you’re happy.”

  "I was never not happy,” Damon said seriously. “You’ve always made me happy. But now when I’m just standing still, even lost in my own head, I’m content.”

  “Your gray is lighter,” Xander pointed out.

  “Together we’re sort of a light taupe,” Damon teased, pulling him even closer. “Now kiss me before I change my mind and we throw everyone out and celebrate just the two of us.”

  Xander did as requested, pressing his lips to Damon’s, and the electrical surge he felt every time they kissed hadn’t ever gone away. Even though it had been over a year since the very first time.

  “Wait,” Xander said wrenching away breathlessly as Damon tried to deepen the kiss while he stepped them backwards, back toward the bathroom. The same bathroom that they’d first told each other they were in love, all those months ago. Damon still had a real nostalgia for that particular bathroom.

  Xander had a feeling when he proposed, he was totally going to do it in that bathroom, and he wasn’t even going to be disappointed.

  “Wait what?” Damon asked innocently, even though the way his dick was poking Xander’s hip made it very clear that he had zero virtuous intentions for their trip to the bathroom.

  “Did you really want to celebrate with just the two of us?” Xander asked. From the moment a month ago that he’d concocted this plan to throw a celebration dinner, Damon had seemed a hundred and ten percent on board, but he was always partial to anything Xander suggested.

  It might be because he was crazy in love with him.

  “No way,” Damon said. “I fucking lugged in this table from the rental company and assembled it. This thing is happening, even if I have to pull people in off the street.”

  Xander laughed, and the tiny niggling doubt floated away like a cloud in a particularly blue sky. The same place all his doubts, the big ones and the small ones and the medium-sized ones, had all been going for the last year. Just when he thought he couldn’t trust or love or adore Damon more, he opened more of himself up to Xander, and he fell just a bit harder.

  It might have been annoying if Xander wasn’t so damn happy.

  “Then we’d better get this table set and then start on dinner,” Xander said, reluctantly disentangling himself from Damon’s arms before he could make do on all his unspoken promises and actually drag them into the bathroom.

  “I guess if we’re inviting people to dinner, they’re going to need plates and silverware and glasses, and something edible in those,” Damon said, definitely sounding disappointed.

  “We run a restaurant together. It’s been open a year,” Xander teased, “and I feel like you’re finally learning something about the food business.”

  “It’s only because I have the best teacher,” Damon retorted with a broad grin.

  * * *

  Damon surveyed the scene before h
im: employees and friends and even family—Xander’s parents and his own father, deep in discussion at the quieter side of the table—sparkling water bottles and wine bottles intermingled across the surface, and platters holding the remainder of the meal he and Xander had made together.

  Surrounded by people he loved—and people he had even learned to tolerate, like his father—he felt an inescapable swelling of rightness. However difficult the path had been to get here, he was here now, and the tougher parts of his life fell into place, giving the greater ones perspective.

  He stood, Xander catching his eye from where he was surrounded by Kian, Wyatt, and Miles. Ryan, Wyatt’s brand-new husband, was lounging next to them, half-lidded eyes following his lover wherever he went. Evan was there too, making notes on the back of a menu as he talked to Nate. Learning more about wine? Thinking about ideas to incorporate into their hit show, Pastry by Miles?

  Damon tapped his glass once, then again, gathering everyone’s attention.

  “The first thing I want to say is welcome, and thank you for coming,” he said. He hadn’t always loved public speaking—or even tolerated it—but a bonus side effect from his therapy sessions with Amy was that he felt more naturally confident in expressing how he felt and what he wanted.

  He definitely knew exactly what he wanted now, and just how he was going to get it.

  There was a smattering of applause and Xander kept giving him narrowed looks that all said what the fuck are you doing? No, they hadn’t planned on making any speeches, and Damon had initially been wanting to do this when they were in Italy, but sometimes the right moment came along. Wasn’t it worse if Damon just let it pass them by?

  “The second thing I want to say is that the Barrel House wouldn’t be what it is today if not for every single person in this room. Xander and I couldn’t have done this without you. Billy and everyone in the kitchen, I know you were skeptical at first. Fuck, we were both skeptical at first, too. But what I really wanted was to focus on Xander’s brilliance, and you guys made that possible. I can’t thank you enough for that.”