Ledi, I know you’re busy but—”
She whipped around and glared at Dan, also affectionately known as “fuck-my-life Dan” and “Shit-I-have-a-shift-with-that-asshole-Dan Dan” to her and her coworkers at the Institute’s dining hall. Ledi was regretting having agreed to work in the weeks leading up to finals, and his presence wasn’t helping.
When she’d walked into the Institute’s kitchen, he’d been dramatically scribbling in his Moleskine with his shiny Montblanc. Of course, he’d had to share the profound spoken word poem he’d written, entitled “Macchiato Mama.” And now he wanted more of her attention.
“I. Am. Busy.”
Her words came out sharp as the steak knives on the plates she balanced on her forearms.
She was already covering four tables to his one. The group of astrophysicists was keeping her on her toes with their requests for detailed explanations of every dish on next week’s special tasting menu. The mathematicians lingering across the dining room kept forgetting to eat their food as they debated some theorem or another—Ledi had already been chewed out by Yves, the Swiss chef, for bringing their meals back to be reheated twice. As if she wanted to destroy the textural integrity of his precious swordfish.
Even better, all of the guests had to be out of the dining room within the next half hour so she could finish prepping for a VIP event that night. A new employee was supposed to come in and shadow her, which would have been great if she had been working with someone besides Dan. Dan, who couldn’t manage the simplest task without having to come back for reinstruction several times.
“I was setting up for the event and I think I’m having a quarter-life crisis,” he said. She thought he was joking until she saw his expression. He was completely earnest and also looking at her as if she was his therapist instead of his coworker.
Fuck my life.
“Dan.” She exhaled slowly and tried to think of a response to this bullshit. “The life expectancy of the average American male is seventy-eight, and you’re thirty something, so this would be closer to a midlife crisis.”
“Shit.” Dan’s eyes went wide. “You’re absolutely right.”
Ledi’s forearms were strong, but the large cuts of fish and fine dining ware were heavy. She hadn’t dropped a plate since she’d first started waitressing in high school, and if Dan made her break her streak she’d significantly reduce his life span.
“Is there anything else?” she asked, voice strained. Her arms were beginning to feel shaky.
“It’s just . . . I didn’t think this would be so hard,” he said, plucking at the wrinkled tuxedo shirt that all servers at the Institute dining hall had to wear. “Unfolding tables, carrying trays of dishes, cleaning up after these people. I mean, aren’t they supposed to be geniuses? They’re slobs. I thought this job would be easy.”
This motherfucker, she thought.
“This job is easy, actually,” she said, trying to not to let her frustration show. She needed to manage whatever meltdown he was having and get through the rest of the night. “It’s physically demanding, and sometimes emotionally, but unlike the work they’re doing out there, it’s not rocket science.”
Dan’s mouth sagged into a grimace. “I thought this gig would really help me get into the mindset of the hero of my novel. You know, getting my hands dirty. But everyone is always expecting me to do something for them.” He glanced at her, as if he pitied her. “I know you wouldn’t understand anything about creativity, but this place is killing my muse.”
Only the knowledge that Yves would fillet her if she asked him to make another swordfish steak prevented her from flinging one of her plates into his face. She was used to people thinking she wasn’t capable of comprehending things, but it was the pity in Dan’s voice that grated on her. She didn’t need anyone’s pity. And the patrons could be a bit odd, but they were actually changing the world, while Dan scribbled lines about “eyes like spots of caramel.”
Yves peeked out from his office. “If I have to reheat that fish one more time,” he growled, and made a slitting motion across his neck. Ledi wondered how people had ever mistaken the Swiss for a peace-loving people. They had invented those knives and they knew how to use them.
She took a deep breath and remembered that this was a job that paid her well and provided insurance to part-time workers. Dan wasn’t worth losing her access to low co-pays.
“Just give me a minute and we can talk this through, okay?”
He nodded but his gaze was past her, as if he was still mulling his napkin-folding-induced crisis.
She hurried the food to the mathematicians, making it to the table just as her arms were ready to give out, with a gentle reminder that they needed to actually eat it this time. They nodded and dug in without looking up at her, but as she headed back to the kitchen one of the astrophysicists flagged her down, asking her to bring him some more of the kale that had been used as garnish on his plate so he could demonstrate a wormhole theory.
“It’s in the curl of the leaf, you see,” Dr. Zietara began, and launched into a complex explanation of matter folding in on itself. Ledi couldn’t grasp everything he was saying, but it was still fascinating. It was moments like this that reminded her why she loved working at the Institute—great minds had to eat, and sometimes they shared some of their greatness within earshot. She appreciated that he made eye contact with her, including her in the conversation—researchers in her own field sometimes gazed past her when explaining things, as if assuming she wouldn’t understand—but then she remembered all the work looming ahead.
“The dining room is actually closing soon, sir,” she said when he finally took a breath.
“Excellent!” he replied, taking more paperwork out of his backpack and dropping it decisively on the table. “We can work in peace once those ridiculous mathematicians leave.”
He and his colleagues glared across the dining room.
Ledi groaned and hurried back to the kitchen. The kitchen that was much too quiet. There should have been the clang of metal as Dan moved tables out from the back storage room or at least the sound of the expensive Italian espresso machine as he freeloaded yet another cappuccino.
“Dan?”
The end of her question ended in a yelp as she stepped on something slippery and almost lost her footing. She looked down to see an abandoned tuxedo shirt beneath her sensible work shoe. Of course he couldn’t just quit like a normal human being, or wait until after his shift. He had to make an artistic statement. He was probably walking shirtless to freedom and planning to use that as the final triumphant scene of his novel.
Fuck.
Just like that, the calm she had been struggling to maintain began to crack. An unusual pressure beat at her sinuses as each individual task on her to-do list seemed to multiply before her eyes like a norovirus.
Dan had left her to set up and wait on a party of forty people–alone. She had hours of studying ahead of her when she got home or she’d fail her bench exams and her first year of grad school would be an expensive bust. Her thesis was floundering and her advisor was MIA and her awesome summer practicum was uncertain. And she just knew that the mathematicians were going to ask her to reheat their fish again.
“Fuuuuck,” she exhaled.
The doors leading from the dining room opened and Ledi tried to pull her features into a smile. It was probably Dr. Zietara coming to check in on his kale.
But instead of a peeved researcher standing in the doorway, there was the finest man Ledi had ever seen outside of a social media thirst trap pic. For a split second she was hit with the sensation of greeting an old friend after a long absence, but she was mistaken: she didn’t know this guy.
He was tall, with the broad-shouldered, well-defined V of a body that announced swimming was part of his workout regimen. He wore a forest green T-shirt and straight-legged black jeans that fit snugly, but not enough to advertise his eggplant emoji. She would have thought the pants were tailored, but who would waste money on tailored jeans?
His skin was a rich, dark brown, slightly darker than her own, with hair that was shaved on the sides and twisted into short, perfect dreads on the top. A well-maintained beard framed his lush lips and highlighted the sharp angles of his wide jaw instead of hiding them.
That beard made her fingers itch to stroke it, or to grab her smartphone and photograph it for posterity. She wasn’t as good at social media as Portia, but she’d rack up a million likes within the day, for sure, if not some kind of award for heroism on behalf of male-attracted humanity.
“Um,” she said. Her general reaction to men she met in her daily life was indifference or tolerance, at best, but something about this man sent her thoughts spinning far, far away from lab work or serving or studying. The only data she was currently interested in collecting was the exact tensile pressure of his beard against her inner thigh, and the shift in mass of his body on top of hers.
He cleared his throat and she realized she’d been crouching and staring up at him with an intensity that might have made him fear for his well-being. She doubted it was a new experience for him, but it was for her, and her face heated in embarrassment.
She kicked Dan’s discarded shirt under the metal table and pulled herself up straight. “Can I help you, sir?”
It felt strange to address someone near her age so formally, but at the Institute you never knew who was a VIP. The most important researcher often came to the dining room in his bathrobe and nothing else. Besides, he had an air of authority about him.
“There’s a man outside who says he’s in need of kale? He’s quite insistent.”
Oh—he had an accent, too. Kind of British, but with something else just as charming layered over it.
“Kale?” Somewhere in the back of Ledi’s mind, a connection was sparking, but all pathways were currently occupied trying to process whatever was going on with the hot guy in front of her.
He smiled, the kind of smile that made little crinkles around the corner of his eyes, and Ledi felt it all throughout her body.
“Yes,” he said, in that deep, accented voice. “Kale. A leafy green, quite good in a moroko mash, but I imagine you don’t serve that here. Maybe you do, though? I haven’t had a chance to familiarize myself with the menu.”
Familiarize? Menu? Ledi’s scattered deductive reasoning skills slowly pulled the pieces together.
This was the new hire. She felt a brief pang of regret as her beard vs thighs fantasies collapsed like one of Yves’s soufflés. Now that she knew she’d be training him, he was firmly in the coworker zone.
“Oh, you’re already helping customers? That’s great, showing initiative,” she said. Her brain had registered that he fell into a group labeled “Nope,” but all of her cylinders still weren’t firing. She was trying to sound bright and in charge, but her vocabulary center was stuck on “Damn, he fine,” making forming sentences a bit difficult. “Um. Here.”
Ledi grabbed a fistful of kale from the chopping board on the counter and shoved it toward him. He looked from the greens to her face and back again, his brow furrowed in obvious judgment.
“You’re right, I should be wearing gloves,” she said. “I of all people should be enforcing that. Public Health! Germs are the enemy!”
She was fairly certain that the look he gave her as she dropped the kale onto the cutting board and snapped a latex glove onto her right hand was the same one she doled out to subway preachers with questionable knowledge of Biblical texts ranting about the apocalypse.
“No, that’s not it at all,” he said, shaking his head, and everything clicked into place for her. How had she made such a silly mistake?
“Oh, right!”
She turned and grabbed a small, round bread plate, slapped a thin paper doily on it, and then placed the kale on top, giving it a few gentle spruces before it went off to be used as an educational aid.
“Nice catch. Presentation is always important,” she said as she handed it over to him. “I’m usually more on the ball, but it’s been a long day. A long week. Month!” She reined herself in. “You seem to have some experience already, so you can take this over to the table, okay? Remind them that the dining room will be closed to members in twenty minutes and they have to leave. I’ll go get you a tuxedo shirt to change into, then we can start training.”
She made finger guns and a little tongue-clicking noise at him before she could stop herself.
What the hell. Where did that come from?
She turned and speed-walked away, seeking refuge in the walk-in fridge. She was sure steam was rising from her face—and that wasn’t the only thing that needed cooling.
You’re an adult, Ledi chided herself. Just because the finest, most lickable man you’ve ever seen in real life is going to be working next to you all night is no reason to start acting like some classic ’90s movie character.
The problem wasn’t just that he was attractive; hot guys were a dime a dozen in New York City. It was that she was attracted to him. And it wasn’t just physical; for a moment she’d had the ridiculous feeling that she knew him. Had felt a connection that was as improbable as it was impossible . . . It would be hard to forget a man like that.
She felt a brief surge of panic; it was just her luck that the new guy had some kind of viral effect on her—her social cell membrane had collapsed. Her defenses were down, and she still had the whole rest of the evening to get through.
She was in deep shit.
She dropped her chin to her chest and let out a loud groan of mortification.
The door to the walk-in opened and Yves stuck his head in, his silver eyebrows raised in curiosity.
“Everything all right?” His gaze darted suspiciously around the small space.
“Don’t ask,” she muttered, sliding out past him.
“I keep count of the zucchini!” he called after her.