“Nothing! Hell, I’m doing the same, though with way less flash cards.”
“You know about the flash cards?” Farzan asked.
“Oh, yeah, I used to help him study for his advanced somm back in Chicago. The only time he’d hang out. Not to go out for a drink or help a friend move apartments or even go to Pride.”
“I’ve gotten better about that,” David said into his wine. If he’d known he was going to get roasted, he would never have brought Rhett and Farzan into each other’s orbits. “I mean, I played kickball with Farzan’s team just a couple weeks ago.”
David caught Farzan blushing, no doubt remembering the postgame.
“I’m just saying,” Rhett said. “I don’t think I know a single person in the world more driven than you. When you want something, you go for it, and you don’t let anything stop you. That’s why I called you, man. Shyla wants this restaurant to be something special. She only wants the best. People who are gonna give two hundred percent to make it happen. And that’s you.”
Rhett raised his glass. “To the hardest-working guy I know.”
David clinked with Rhett and with Farzan, who said, “To David.”
“Okay, but seriously,” David said, once they’d all drank. “Enough about me. What’s new with you? What’s LA like?”
Rhett launched into an epic about his struggles finding an apartment, which led to a story about discovering the wrong tables had arrived at the restaurant, and then to a passive-aggressive fight with an independent contractor about gas lines for the kitchen.
Farzan laughed at all the right spots—Rhett was an impeccable storyteller—but there was a tightness around his eyes, too, and he clenched the stem of his wineglass so hard David was worried it might snap.
When Rhett excused himself to visit the bathroom, David leaned in, rubbed his thumb against the back of Farzan’s hand.
“You okay, babe?”
Farzan nodded, but his face was like a cork about to crumble.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Farzan cleared his throat and straightened in his chair, though his shoulders still hovered by his ears. “Sorry. I guess all this talk about your new restaurant is making me think about all I’ve still got to do at the bistro.”
David pursed his lips. Yeah, maybe it was, but he could tell it was more than that.
“It’s starting to feel real, huh?” he said. “Expanding the place?”
“Still need to get a loan,” Farzan said. “But yeah, I guess. You?”
“Me what?”
“Your test. Your move. Is it feeling real too?”
“I don’t even know.” David rubbed his jaw. “Yesterday marked seven weeks out. So I feel like it should be feeling real, but it’s still not. I’ve been preparing for so long, I don’t know if it’ll feel real until I’m in front of the judges.”
“You’ll do great.” Farzan gave him a real smile then, squeezing his hand.
“Most people don’t pass their first time,” David muttered.
It wouldn’t be the worst thing, either, if he didn’t pass. If he spent another year at Aspire. Another year with Farzan.
Except Rhett said he pretty much had the job either way. He couldn’t give that up. It was everything he’d been working for.
“You’re not most people,” Farzan told him. “You’re David Fucking Curtis. You got this.”
David laughed, pulling Farzan’s hand close to kiss his palm, as joy warmed his belly and chest.
“You two are too adorable,” Rhett said, flopping into his seat again and fixing Farzan with a look. “You must really be something special if you got this guy to abandon his too-busy-for-a-relationship ways.”
David kept a grip on Farzan’s hand. Farzan was sweet, and kind, and hardworking, and fucking sexy. He came alive when he met Farzan. Wasn’t there some way to have both—to chase his dreams and keep his man?
