"Yep. Just started." I stir the pot and try to look casual. I'm failing. I can feel my face doing the puppy thing.
Lu looks between us with narrowed eyes. She's not stupid. "You want to come in, you wear a hair net. Those are the rules."
I turn around so fast I almost knock the ladle off the pot. "You should! Come in. I'll show you around. I mean. Lu, can I show him around?" I'm way too eager. I need to calm down. I can't calm down.
“If he behaves,” she says.
“He’s the best ever at behaving! I pinky promise!” I exclaim. Lu chuckles.
“Then, sure,” she says. I grab a hair net from the box by the door and hold it out to him.
He takes the hair net and stretches it over his head. His brown hair pokes through the elastic in weird tufts, and he looks so ridiculous, so un-Ethan, that I try not to laugh but immediately fail.
"Don't," he warns.
"I'm not saying anything."
"You're thinking it."
"You look great. Very professional. Very sexy."
"I'm leaving."
"No, stay! Come on." I grab his arm and pull him toward my station. "Lu, Margarete, Dora, this is Ethan. He's my... leader. And we sleep together. I mean! We room together!"
"The famous Ethan," Lu says, looking him up and down. "Liam talks about you all the time."
"He does?" Ethan glances at me.
"No, I don't," I say immediately. "She's exaggerating. I mentioned you once. Maybe twice."
"Every single shift," Margarete whispers to Ethan from behind her hand. "So you're the one keeping this one out of trouble."
"Trying to," Ethan says. "It's hard. A full-time job."
"Tell me about it," Lu says. "This boy burns everything. He set a towel on fire. And his own hand!"
"The towel was near the burner! It wasn't my fault!"
"It was on the burner because you put it there, even if I told you a million times not to do that," Lu says and hits me with a dish towel.
“Sorry, Lu,” I say, in my best puppy voice. She rolls her eyes but she’s smiling.
Ethan is smiling too.
"Can he cook?" Ethan asks Lu about me, like I'm not standing right here.
Lu smiles. "Of course. He’s learning with us, after all. He's good with a knife. Terrible with heat. No patience. But he learns."
"That sounds about right," Ethan says.
"Hey!"
"Come, come," Lu says, waving Ethan toward her station. "You want to try? I'm making chili."
I watch Ethan step up to Lu's station. He picks up a knife, and Lu adjusts his grip.
"No, like this, you're not stabbing it, you're guiding it," and he listens with that intense focus he gives everything, and it’s very fucking sexy. Within a minute, he's dicing peppers with a precision that makes my dicing look like a baby tried to do it.
