“I’m good.” He grabbed a radish and a few tarragon leaves out of the sabzi bowl. “So how’s work going?”
Arya worked as an event planner at a production company called MME—Mitchell Murphy Events. It kept him challenged, on a weird schedule, and in constant supply of bizarre stories, which made for the perfect distraction.
Arya rolled his eyes. “Dude. Today I had a phone call with the densest client I think I’ve ever had. Like they did not understand the fundamental rules of physics.”
Farzan grinned, and Ramin asked, “Which rules?”
As Arya launched into the story—apparently the client believed it was possible to “project darkness”—Farzan relaxed and sipped his wine. Yeah, he was single, and underemployed, and a perpetual disappointment. But he had his friends.
thirteen
David
Everything was going wrong.
“Where are those fries?” Andi, one of their servers, called over the service counter.
“On it!” Brayan called.
David crouched next to Jeri, holding his phone up as a flashlight, while she looked behind the broken fryer.
Aspire was getting a reputation for its fries (pommes frites, technically), and they normally had two fryers going nonstop throughout service. But today, one of them refused to turn on.
Granted, of all the ways for a fryer to break,won’t turn onwas definitely the preferred one, since the rest of the ways generally involved flying hot oil and the risk of grievous bodily injury and/or fire.
But one fryer was not enough to keep up with their orders. They were falling way behind. And while David helped Jeri try to diagnose the problem, he was neglecting his own wine orders.
“I think we’ve just got to call the technician,” he finally told Jeri.
“I think you’re right. Damn.” Jeri wiped a hand over her sweating face.No matter the season, Jeri always seemed to be sweating. She claimed it was because she swam so much and always ran hot, but two weeks ago, when they’d accidentally gotten drunk off a tasting with a new distributor, Jeri had admitted to David that menopause hit her like a ton of bricks. Or a ton of wine bottles.
David wasn’t sure she remembered that conversation, so he’d kept quiet about it. Jerididswim a lot: she was short, but broad-shouldered, with a strong back and chest and short legs. She kept her mousy brown hair in a no-nonsense short pompadour, and wore a black button-up shirt and jeans to work every day.
David had met her when he was in college and a bartender at Missie B’s, Kansas City’s most famous gay bar. Jeri was the assistant bar manager at the time. She’d mentored him, gave him extra hours when he needed it, and when she eventually left to manage a fancy steakhouse on the Plaza, she’d asked him to come with.
She’d been the one to introduce David to Marcus, who he stayed with all through grad school. And she’d been the one to cheer David up when Marcus said he wouldn’t follow David to Chicago.
David had been so in love. That breakup had nearly destroyed him.
Even after he moved, Jeri checked in on him every couple months. When he’d burned out at JPMorgan, she was the one who gave him glowing referrals to some of Chicago’s finest restaurants.
So when she finally realized her dreams and opened Aspire, David had agreed to come on board as wine director and help her get it off the ground. She knew it wasn’t permanent, that she wouldn’t be able to keep him after he got his master somm and was in high demand, but she insisted it didn’t matter.
“You don’t mentor someone to keep them shackled to you,” she told him once. “You do it to see how far they can go.”
So David said goodbye to the few good friends he still had in Chicago and moved home. It wasn’t like he had a man keeping him there.
He wouldn’t let a man keep him here, either.
While Jeri disappeared into her cramped office to call the service tech, David ran down to the cellar to pull some bottles. They had a modest but well-curated selection of first-growth Bordeaux, and some rich white yuppie trying to impress his date had ordered a bottle of Chateau Margaux.
David could clock a finance bro a mile away. The guy was even dressed like David used to dress, in a sleek silver suit, dress shirt with three buttons undone, no tie, and a hint of gym-raised pecs peeking out through the gap. In his twenties David had worked out hard, skipped meals, lived on stress and adrenaline, and had a body like that. Now that he was nearing forty, he was stronger and healthier, but also softer in spots. Not that Farzan had seemed to mind his thicker thighs or lack of a six-pack.
Fuck. He needed to stop thinking about Farzan. About silky black curls, and citrus cologne, and bedroom eyes, and—
David shook himself. He still had a service to get through, and he couldn’t serve wine with an erection.
He poured the Chateau Margaux for the finance bro, who smacked his lips ostentatiously as he tasted. His date, a white girl in a slinky black number, flicked her gaze up for only a second before returning to her phone.
