I gasp. My eyes shut, but it’s already over and he walks away. I turn my head and look at him, just as he gets to the door.
Eli looks at me. He winks.
Then he’s gone.
I think I’m in for a very long day.Chapter Twenty-TwoEliThis wedding is the wedding from hell.
It’s not just because I stayed up all night drinking espresso and folding cranes with Violet. It’s not just because my mind wanders back to the conference room every ten seconds, to the way she grabbed my shirt and pulled me in, the way she rolled her hips against my dick.
None of those things make the day feel any shorter, but it’s just a bad wedding.
At nine that morning, I learn that the groom wants to make an eleventh-hour menu change. At eleven, after scrambling for two hours to try and make this fool happy, I learn that the bride has forbidden the menu change and the original item is back on, only now we have two fewer hours to make it.
Other reports trickle into the kitchen, ones that have nothing to do with me: the mother of the bride is furious that the rose gold aisle runner is too rose and not enough gold. The mother of the groom insists on moving the entire ceremony last-minute, for fear that the glare of the sun will give her a migraine.
Time flies. I run the kitchen. Violet darts in and out, here and there, and every single time I catch her eye I wink at her and she looks away instantly, turning pink.
Then I watch her walk away in a pair of pinstriped pants that I guess she had in her office. Wherever they came from, her ass looks spectacular.
The ceremony starts. The kitchen kicks into high gear. There are reports that the bride’s grandmother threw a fit about where she was seated and the rows at the ceremony had to be rearranged; the groom got his vows wrong; someone’s cousin was sobbing so dramatically that she had to be escorted out.
We cook halloumi bites with mango chutney, crispy duck mini-tacos, and coconut shrimp skewers. We make a gallon of salad dressing. Zane sets out hundreds of salad plates and Naomi meticulously arranges organic microgreens on them.
They can’t find the groom for pictures. The bride is crying. When he turns up, he’s in his brother’s suite in the lodge with all his groomsmen, and they’re smoking cigars in the strictly-no-smoking building.
Salads go out. This development seems miraculously drama-free, but then again, it’s just salad. We start searing scallops and plating them, ready for the next course.
The word comes out: we have to wait, the groom’s father is making a toast. It’s not when he was supposed to make a toast, but we wait any way.
And we wait. The scallops get cold.
His toast lasts half an hour. We try to send the scallops out while he’s toasting and the groom’s mother is so angry that a server comes back pale and visibly shaken. When he’s finally finished, we re-sear so they’re not cold, but now they’re overdone.
Plenty of people send their scallops back. I don’t bother hearing why. Violet comes into the kitchen again, nods at me, asks Janice something about the cake. I wink at her.
She winks back. I burn a filet mignon and have to throw it away.
I swear that wink gets me through the rest of the night. I’m still thinking about it an hour later when we’re cleaning up, service finished, and she comes in again. She looks at me. I wink. She raises one eyebrow, heads back toward the walk-in freezer.
I follow her.
When I close the door behind us she turns around, surprised.
I cross the tiny, cold space toward her. I take her face in my hands, her eyes widen.
Before she can say a word, I kiss the hell out of her. Violet’s arms go around me. I kiss her harder. I kiss her like I’ve been to war. I kiss her like I haven’t seen her in years, her soft warmth flooding through me, bright against the cold room.
I kiss her like I won’t be sleeping much tonight, either.
Finally, I break the kiss, step away. She looks bewildered for a moment, her lips parted and slightly puffy, and then she smiles.
I head for the door again, open it, wink at her, and leave.Chapter Twenty-ThreeVioletI stare at Re: Re: Re: Fwd: de la Rosa wedding requests. It’s ten o’clock on Saturday night. I’ve been at work since eight o’clock yesterday morning, and yet I’m blankly staring at an email about a wedding that’s not happening for two more weeks like it’s important.
It’s got nothing to do with the fact that ten minutes ago, when I popped my head into the kitchen “just to check on everything,” Eli winked at me and mouthed the words five minutes.