Addicted: A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance (34 page)

Around seven o'clock though, things got busy, and I ran into trouble. Tickets started to pour in, and I was falling behind. It was the little things that were getting me in trouble, and I knew it. I wasn't coordinating my tickets so that if a table ordered a steak and two lamb chops, all of them came off at the same time so they'd hit the customer's table at the perfect temperature. I was leaving one side down a bit too long, turning caramelization into scorching. By eight, I already had four plates come back to me from Shannon for redoing. She was getting on my ass, nothing I didn't deserve, but I couldn't take it anymore.

The straw that broke the camel's back was double thick pork chops. You have to understand, cooking pork chops is different from cooking steak or lamb. Pork has to be cooked through, or else the risk of food poisoning is a lot higher. You can't have rare pork chops, in fact in the United States there are very strict laws on it. However, because the chops are double thick, you can't have your fire too hot, or else you end up with a chop that is cooked in the middle and a hockey puck on the outside, or perfect on the outside and dangerously raw in the middle.

It was this second sin that I was guilty of. I'd put the pork chops on the section of the grill reserved for beef and lamb, not even thinking about it. Going by instinct, I flipped it to a beautiful golden brown crust, and then finished off the other side. Instead of checking the interior temperature, I plated the chops and sent them off with the rest of the order, already forgetting about it to focus on the next ticket.

Shannon came by herself a minute later. "What the hell are you doing?" she asked me, quietly seething. "Sending me underdone chops? Are you trying to get us shut down by the health department, or are you really that fucking stupid?"

Before you think that Shannon was out of place for cursing and yelling the way she was, remember where I worked. Alinea is a fine dining restaurant, and high class chefs have always been tin pot dictators. While Gordon Ramsay might garner ratings and shock value with his rants on his shows, the fact is, he's nowhere near the worst. I've seen hardened chefs reduced to tears by some of the masters, and in fact had been reduced to tears myself. The most frustrating of all was when I did two weeks of summer internship in college at a camp run by Marco Pierre White. He's Ramsay's mentor, and in fact made Ramsay cry when he was a young chef. The thing about Marco is that he doesn't yell at you, he's grown beyond that. He just keeps up the pressure, and won't accept less than perfection. He's unrelenting, uncompromising, and has a way of looking at you that leaves you shattered on the inside. The thing was, after the cook, he'd be your biggest supporter, and show you how to gain strength from the shattering.

Shannon though wasn't trying to get me to become stronger. She was pissed off, I was pissed off, and I was not in the place to get cursed at. "Fuck off Shannon, I'm sorry about the chops. I'll get another one ready for you."

I saw the change in Shannon's face as soon as the first sentence left my lips. She was the executive chef of a Michelin starred restaurant, one of the few women to do so. She was brought up in the old school, where the executive chef was never, and I mean
never
referred to by their first name while at work. As for telling her to fuck off? You can imagine how I'd crossed the line with that one. "No, you won't," she said, reaching over and snapping down the lever that controlled the gas to my grill. The flames went out, and the whole kitchen went momentarily silent. "You think your problems matter? No. Get out. You're fired."

I had a set of tongs in my hand, and I wanted to grab Shannon by her nose with the hot grease covered metal and twist. I wanted to scream at her I didn't need her job or her patronage to become a great chef. I wanted to cry. I wanted to run away. What I did, however, was set my tongs down, take my apron off, and set it in her hands. While I made my way towards the tiny changing area where our bags were kept, I worked at the buttons on my top, to the point that by the time I reached my locker, I was standing in just my pants and my white undershirt. I opened my locker and pulled on the light jacket I'd worn for covering up, and grabbed my bag. There was nothing else inside.

Turning around, I saw Horst looking at me, his face a blend of compassion and disappointment. "I'm sorry," he said, holding his hand out. "Chef wants me to get your top."

I handed it over silently, my eyes brimming with tightly held back tears. "I'm sorry too Horst."

"I shouldn't have put you on the meat station after seeing the way you were walking in. Do you want to talk about it?"

I shook my head, the first tear falling down my cheek. "What is there to talk about? Just, thank you. You were good to work with, and I'm sorry I let you down."

"You didn't. You didn't know, but your performance tonight was not the only reason Shannon fired you."

"Oh?" I asked hollowly. Like it really mattered.

"Since you came back to Chicago, and she saw you and your brother . . . Julian is it? Either way, since she saw that, she's become more critical of you. You were on an invisible tightrope, and you didn't know it."

I nodded, and looked up at him. "I guess it doesn't matter anyway. Now not only am I out of a job, but I lost him too." I looked up at the ceiling, and blinked, promising myself I wasn't going to cry in front of Horst. "And he isn't my brother."

The ride home on the bus felt longer than normal. Coming into the apartment, there were so many things that reminded me of Julian. There, on the sofa, was a t-shirt of his that I'd been wearing to bed the few weeks I'd acknowledged to myself that I was in love with him. In the kitchen I saw the five-pound tub of protein powder he'd bought, sitting bright red on the counter like a shining reminder of him.

I went into my bedroom and could see the shape of his head still on the pillow he'd used, and the noticeable fact that the last time the bed had been slept in, two people were using it. I looked at the rumpled sheets for a minute, and couldn't stomach the idea of sleeping there that night. Instead, I headed for the third bedroom of my place, the smallest room that I'd sworn over and over again I was going to convert into a home office or study, and never got around to doing. The original bed was still there, the mattress covered by a fitted sheet but nothing else. The empty white space was a good metaphor for how I felt, empty and bare. I collapsed onto the mattress, and let the tears I'd been holding back since Horst said he was sorry come out. They were bitter, and burned my cheeks as they soaked into the sheet beneath me.

T
he waves crashed
onto the sand before retreating, wiping away the footprints of the people who were walking below the wave line, leaving the sand smooth and pure within seconds. I wanted to join the waves, to join the sand and be washed away, to be numb and forgotten. Instead, I could feel every second of the past three days come crashing down on my mind, starting with talking with Yuki and ending with getting off the plane in Miami.

I hadn't planned on going to Miami. It was just the first plane that was flying out of Logan Airport when I got there. I'd already left the manor, my bag slung into the back of one of the gardener's trucks. The trucks belonged to the manor, so I wasn't technically stealing it, but my license was suspended. If a cop had pulled me over, I most likely would be spending the night in jail. As it was, I got all the way to the long term lot without incident, parked the truck and put the keys in my pocket. Yuki kept extras of all the vehicles, and she could pick it up. I sent her a text message about the truck in case she didn't know, along with the lot and space number, then paid for three days parking with the cash I had in my wallet. I might have been a bastard, but I wasn't going to cause any more problems that I had already done.

Getting off the flight in Miami, I wasn't too sure where to go. It was already late at night, and I didn't want to go through the hassle of finding a hotel room. Instead, I slung my bag over my shoulder and walked into the night, heading towards the beach. Something in the idea of the waves and the timelessness of the ocean was speaking to me.

As I walked through the warm Miami darkness, I thought of all the mess I'd caused. I deserved every bit of pain I got from fucking Gina and not telling Krystal, even if I had done it before she and I fell in love. That I'd gotten Gina pregnant, and was now going to have a baby was beside the point. The baby was innocent, but I'd hurt Krystal, who was just as innocent. She didn't know about my original plan, how she'd started off as a pawn in a grand game of revenge against my father. She didn't know how something about her had stopped me, and had changed me into becoming a better man. She didn't know how I'd abandoned my plan after realizing I was falling in love with her, and how she'd become a role model for me, and how she'd given me the courage to confront the truth about my relationship with my father, and to repair a relationship that had been broken for almost twenty years.

I was lucky that I didn't get robbed or killed. Miami International is not exactly in the best neighborhood of Miami, and I walked through even worst neighborhoods on my way to the beach. A white boy who looked like me walking through some of those neighborhoods after midnight was asking for it, but maybe it was something in my face or the way I was moving, nobody messed with me. Maybe it was just dumb luck, I wasn't really paying attention nor did I care.

I ended up on the beach about an hour before sunrise, just as the first of the few swimmers who wanted to use the Miami beaches were staking out their spots. The Florida coast is terrible for swimming, with waves that lap the beach like a puppy dog rather than crash, so it wasn't like much was going to happen there. I was staggering by that point, exhausted, and fell asleep or passed out in the shade of an overturned row boat on the beach, I couldn't be sure which.

That had been a day prior. Now, with three days growth of beard, a pretty wicked sunburn and having not eaten too much, I felt hollowed out. It reminded me of the stories I'd heard when I was a kid, and I'd gone to church with a friend for a few months. The Old Testament was full of prophets who just went off into the desert, usually for forty days and forty nights, coming back with some message from heaven, and a raging case of insanity as well. I could understand how they felt, and I'd only been on the beach for two days.

I was watching the waves and wondering how painful it would be to just walk into the waves and not stop, when I heard someone call my name. "Julian? Julian Castelbon?"

I turned my head, my neck creaking and my eyes blinking. It took me a few seconds to recognize the fit, well dressed man coming towards me across the early evening sand. "Dwayne?"

Dwayne Forrester came jogging up and squatted in front of me, looking intently into my face. "Yeah, it's me. Julian, how long have you been out here?"

I waved my hand airily, it was all the strength I had left. "I dunno. Two days? Three?"

Dwayne's face changed in expression, and he took my hands. "Come with me, man. I'm getting you off this beach and taking you to my place."

Part of me wanted to tell him just to leave me there, it didn't really matter if I died or not. But Dwayne had been an old friend, and I didn't want to disappoint anyone else. Besides, at that point I really didn't care. I tried to stand up, and was shocked to find out that I couldn't stand up at all. Falling back on my ass in the sand, I looked at him stupidly, my butt hurting from the thump and my pride hurting even more. Dwayne took a knee next to me and threw my arm around his shoulder. "Okay. On three. You might be dehydrated and heat exhausted, but you're still a big guy. Ready? One, two, three!"

Somehow, he got me to my feet, and the two of us made our way away from the waves to a parking lot, where Dwayne bundled me into a BMW SUV. I watched him start to go around to the driver's side, but before he opened his door, the world swam for me, and I passed out.

I woke up and it was still dark. I was on a white leather couch, and I'd been stripped out of the filthy clothes I'd been wearing and covered with a light cotton sheet to cover my nudity. My skin was bright red from my shoulders to my fingertips, and my face still felt like it was about five inches from a heater vent. My torso on the other hand, was goose bumped from the air conditioning, and I shivered under the sheet. I tried to speak, but only a dry rasp came out of my throat. Trying to move wasn't much more successful, and I had to just lay there in the darkness like a helpless baby.

Thankfully I didn't have to wait long, as the door to the room opened and Dwayne came in. He looked at me and knelt next to me, holding a cup in his hand. "Slow now. If you'd been out much longer I was going to call 911, regardless of if you'd ended up in the society pages again or not."

He wet my lips with a damp sponge, and I sucked water from it like a baby. It was glorious, the best thing I'd ever drunk in my life, and I nodded gratefully once he took it away. "How long?" I finally asked once the moisture hit my throat and I could form words again. "It's still dark, I can't have been out too long."

"It's dark because you've been out twenty-seven hours," Dwayne said quietly. "Just be glad Erica and Liz aren't around, you'd have woken up in the hospital either way. Now rest, have some more water, and we'll talk in the morning."

He gave me the cup, with a flexible straw sticking out of the top, and raised my head to put a cushion more comfortably underneath it. "Thank you Dwayne. But why?"

"Tomorrow, man. Relax, go back to sleep, and we'll talk then. Don't worry, I'll check on you during the night, you'll have plenty of water and anything else you need."

Considering I'd been unconscious for over a whole day, there should have been no reason I'd go back to sleep. But as soon as I finished the cup of water and closed my eyes, I slipped back to sleep, and although my dreams were of heartbreak and sadness, I still slept until the next morning.