That makes a wide grin spread across his face. “You hate it.”
“I don’t hate it.” I laugh. “It’s just not what I envisioned for myself. It was a temporary job that’s become not-so-temporary. And I guess…” I pause. “I’m afraid working forThe New York Standardis taking up all my time to create the life I really want.”
“Fair enough. There’s only so much time in a day,” Leo says.
“Exactly!” I exclaim. “Now, what about you? Do you love what you do?”
“It has its moments,” he teases. “Like I said, it’s my passion, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t come without its challenges. It’s hard creating something and hoping other people love what you do enough to make money from it. Counting on others to be excited about your own passion is risky business.”
I nod my head, feeling the weight of those words in the rejection emails that have been in my inbox year after year.
“But people seem excited about what you are creating here,” I add.
He laughs. “They are now. It wasn’t always this way.”
“Well, how was it then?”
He glances down at his hands, thumbs brushing over each other. “Have you ever slept in your car behind a restaurant, just hoping someone calls in sick so you can pick up a shift?”
I shake my head. “No.”
He shrugs. “I have. More than once. I’ve chopped onions until my fingers and eyes went numb, worked double shifts for chefs who never remembered my name, and begged for jobs in kitchens that didn’t even look at my resume—just at my skin, or my scuffed shoes, or the fact I didn’t go to some fancy culinary school.”
There’s no bitterness in his voice as he tells me all of this. These are just facts to him…the journey he’s been on to get here.
He meets my eyes and his spark is there, but it’s a little gentler, like a star just beginning to appear in the sky. “Because this—cooking—it’s the only place I ever felt like I belonged. Even when it beat the crap out of me. Even when it broke my heart at times.”
I swallow hard because I can feel his words as much as hear them. Chasing dreams isn’t for the weak, and dreams—they aren’t guaranteed, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t strong for chasing them.
“But now you’re here. You made it,” I say with some grit in my tone.
He smiles, small and real. “I guess so. I at least own this place, and I get to create what I want. It came after years of no’s and trying to prove I deserved it. I guess I just finally got tired of waiting for someone else to say yes and decided to say yes for myself.”
For a moment, we just sit there. Silent, soaking in the hum of the kitchen in the background.
“So, who are you waiting on?” Leo asks me.
“Excuse me?”
“Who are you waiting on to tell you that you deserve your dreams? If writing forThe New York Standardisn’t it, is fanfiction your dream?” he asks.
I laugh.
“I take it that fanfiction is not your dream either,” he says with a smile.
“No, it’s not,” I say. “I want to be a published author. I want my own book with my name down the spine and my heart spilled out on the pages.”
I repeat the words I’ve said for years, the words Mal can repeat, too, and she does.
“So, what are you waiting for?” he asks.
“For a literary agent to say yes,” I admit. “I have hundreds of rejection emails from four different manuscripts.”
“What about saying yes to yourself?” he asks me.
“What do you mean?”
“Why wait for a literary agent? I have friends that self-publish their own books, and they are amazing. You don’t have to wait to be chosen, Rachel. You can chose yourself. I know it’s hard. There’s a lot more to it than just finishing a manuscript, but you seem like the kind of person that’s a go-getter,” he explains.
