“Alright, well…” Drake shrugged and turned to Luca. “Do you fuck guys?”
Luca blinked up at him with extremely wide eyes. “What?”
“Do you fuck guys?” Drake repeated with patience. “Do you suck cock? Do you take big dicks up your ass? Or, maybe you put your di-”
“Chef Warwick,” I ground out. “That’s enough.”
“Yes,” Luca said in a very small voice.
“There you go,” Drake said, clapping his hand on Luca’s shoulder. “Sounds like he’s legit to me.”
I sighed. Just because the kid fitted with Grey’s hiring policy – or at least, knew enough to pretend that he did – had no real bearing on whether he was actually a new hire. But we did need a dishwasher, and he was here, and if Grey was lax enough to leave us in this situation then it was his problem. Not mine.
“Right,” I said. “Let me show you where everything is.”
Ainslie and Beau joined us before I was done giving Luca more or less the same tour I had given Drake the day before, minus the unnecessary addition of the menu. Ainslie looked him up and down and, before I’d had a chance to say a word, he broke out into a broad grin.
“Grey got us a dishwasher?”
“Looks that way,” I nodded soberly, but Ainslie was already throwing his arms up in victory and dancing around the kitchen.
I shook my head as he attempted – and failed – to get Beau to dance with him, eliciting laughter from the others in the kitchen. We had serious work to get on with, and poor Luca looked absolutely bewildered. He was hugging an arm across himself, clearly unsure of what to do with all this silliness.
“What’s the matter?” Drake asked, leaning close to me. “Not a dancer yourself?”
I shot him a scowl. “This is a professional kitchen,” I said. A clang announced Ainslie’s bump into one of the cast-iron pans, rattling it on the stove where it had been placed in preparation for the day, and I raised my eyebrows to indicate that my point had been made.
“Yeah,” Drake said, looking me up and down with narrowed eyes. He folded his arms across his chest. “Figures.”
“What figures?” I asked, frowning at him and wishing he would shut up and let me get on with my job already.
“You’re not a dancer,” he said and snorted. “I bet you’ve never even been to the club next door.”
I rolled my eyes and brushed past him. “If that’s your way of asking, rest assured, I will never be going there withyou.” I gestured impatiently to Luca. “Come on, I’ll get you set up with the leftover stuff we didn’t manage to wash last night.”
I could feel Drake’s eyes burning into my back as I walked away from him – and hear his mocking laughter echoing in my ears.
So what if he was right?
I didn’t have time to godancing. I was a chef. The prime dancing hours were when I was busy in the kitchen.
Besides, there were more things to life thandancing.
I opened a drawer under the sink, finding the shelves where we stacked dishes when there wasn’t time to get through them all, and groaned inwardly. We’d left a lot for Luca to tackle. It was a good thing he was here, or we wouldn’t have had enough dishes to get through service.
“Start with these,” I said. I thought for a second and tempered my instructions. “Start with the plates, glasses, and knives and forks. Not the kitchen knives, just the customer knives. Call meback over when you’ve done with those. I’ll show you where to put them away.”
The day seemed to pass in a blur. I cooked family dinner – alone, this time, while Drake started on menu prep for his first night of actually cooking – and we ate before I’d even managed to catch my breath. Grey showed up to eat and confirmed that Luca was actually a new hire and not just a stray from the street, and then we were back in the thick of it, the chaos of the kitchen taking over.
Every time I thought I was getting somewhere with the list of tasks on my plate, Luca shouted me over and asked for more instructions. I had to show him exactly how to polish the silverware so that it would pass Nikolai’s inspection, how to look after the cast iron pots and pans, and what products to use on our beautiful and beloved knife sets. It seemed every time I turned around from helping Luca, Drake was laughing and showing off in front of Grey, who had inexplicably remained in the kitchen – tossing up a whole bunch of chopped greens into the air and catching them into the same pan to continue searing them, leaning close to Grey to pick up something on the other side of him instead of asking him to pass it, plating up the first orders with an unnecessary flourish.
But worst of all was the way that Grey didn’t even seem to recognize how cynical this all was, and instead oohed and aahed and evenclappedlike he’d never seen a chef before.
“Where do these go?” Luca asked, holding up a few tools that he’d washed together – spatulas, whisks, and tongs.
“See the colored tape on the handle?” I said, tapping it on one of the items – a green spatula. “That tells you which station it’s from.”
Luca raised the green spatula, glanced around the kitchen, and frowned. “But there’s a mix of stuff at the green station.”
