Now.
Except I can’t. I’ve managed to put it off this long by telling myself I’m just ‘waiting for the right opportunity,’ but I’m starting to wonder if there’s ever a ‘right’ time to tell your boss and lover that you’re betraying them. That you’re repaying their faith in you as a chef by leaving to start your own restaurant, and perhaps even worse than that, responding to the trust they’ve put into you as their lover by doing the one thing that emotionally scarred them permanently. Plus, every time I’m with Cole it’s like nothing else exists. I fall for him deeper each time we talk, with every intimate touch, every look from those eyes another knot that bonds us together. How can you do the right thing when it means hurting someone you love? How do you follow your dreams when it means giving up what you’ve worked so hard to build? I’ve spent nights sighing myself to sleep over it, praying for some intervention that’ll somehow make it better, some other way for this to go that might make everybody happy.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he might not be upset, maybe he’ll appreciate that this is my dream, and that I couldn’t say no. Maybe being with him and working on my own place is absolutely fine. Except every time I think those things I remember the pain in his eyes when he told me about Jason betraying him, the vulnerability in them when he said he trusted me. That resolute defiance to never trust anybody ever again, to never open up to anybody—a defiance he gave up starting on our first night out, when he told me all his secrets.
I stand outside the closed office door, take a deep breath, and knock quickly.
“Come in,” Cole says through the door.
Here goes nothing.
“Hey,” I say, as I step into the office and Cole walks toward me, shoulders rolling, his body seeming even larger in the small room.
“Hey, babe,” he replies, shutting the door behind me and taking me in for a slow kiss, the kind he usually gives me first thing in the morning, as if thirsty for my lips. A kiss that makes time slow, turns my insides to warm honey. A drug that makes me lose my sense of place, struggle to catch my thoughts, as if they were passing birds.
He pulls back and smiles at me for a second, gazing at me as if I’m the most incredible thing on earth, so sincere I can almost believe it myself. Then he moves toward his desk.
I laugh nervously.
“We probably shouldn’t do that at work,” I say, just trying to shift the mood somewhere more pragmatic.
“Who cares? I’m the boss,” Cole says, leaning back to pull a bouquet from behind him. “I don’t like keeping secrets anyway.”
My stomach drops. I move closer to take the flowers from him and smell them.
“Flowers? Why…what are these for?”
“For being talented…smart…fascinating…and,” his hands wind around my hips, pulling me to him so that he almost crushes the flowers between us, “so incredibly sexy.”
I laugh and try not to make it obvious I’m pulling back, making as if I’m adjusting my whites.
“Also,” he continues, pulling a bottle of wine from nearby, wielding it the way he does when the wine is particularly good, “to celebrate.”
“Celebrate?”
Cole smiles even more broadly, and I can see the deep joy within him, the buildup of enthusiasm that led up to this moment. He doesn’t answer right away, as if savoring it, and instead scoots a chair beside me with his foot and leans back once again on the desk.
“You’re gonna wanna sit down for this,” he says, happily.
“Okay…” I say slowly, easing back into the chair, still clutching the flowers on my lap.
“You know Fork is on track to open in about five weeks, right?”
“Sure,” I nod.
“And that we were still looking for a head chef,” he goes on.
“Yeah. You found someone?”
“Better than that. I decided to move Michelle there. I just offered her the position about five minutes ago and she said yes. That does leave a spot open here, however…”
I experience the same kind of slow motion terror that I imagine car crash observers do. The rush of adrenaline, the prickle of fight-or-flight responses, the sensation of sheer, unavoidable helplessness that only exists in that moment after something has been set in irreversible motion, and the inevitable fate it’s going toward.
“Uh huh,” I mumble.
Cole pauses, drawing the moment out once again, his enjoyment of it—and his obliviousness to my discomfort—evident in the sparkle of those eyes.
“Willow. I want you to take the position. I want you to be the head chef here at Knife.”
After a long pause, I manage to unstick my vocal cords.
“Oh. Um. Wow.”
A crack in Cole’s smile appears when he sees my reaction, but it quickly repairs itself. He chuckles warmly.
“It’s a lot to take in, I get it. I didn’t really want to tell you at the start of a shift and give you no time to absorb it, but I couldn’t wait any longer.”
I drop my head in my hands, unable to look at him. “Cole…I just…”
“You deserve it though. You’ve been fantastic here since you started, you’ve got the raw talent and the drive, and to be honest, I should have thought of this ages ago. Would have saved myself a lot of trouble. Better late than never though.”
“Cole…wait…”
He kneels in front of me, and I look up into those darkly narrowed eyes, still sexy, as if he’s so unused to being happy he can’t quite smile without it seeming somewhat dark.
“You know, this could be the start of something incredible,” he says, his voice lower now that his face is so close to mine. “We could take this place to the next level. You were so right about those burgers—they brought the rest of the menu to life, balanced out all the serious dishes with something simple and low key. And your ideas about Fork… We work so well together. The way we challenge each other—”
“Cole, please…”
He takes my hands in his, too lost in the momentum of his own ideas to recognize the panicked look on my face for what it is.
“We could collaborate,” he says, eyes up now as if watching his dreams play out above my head. “I mean, Knife would still be a restaurant focused on French cuisine, but together we could put a twist on it, a stamp. Just think of what we could come up with together. My experience and your creativity.”
“No,” I manage to say, though I don’t say it forcefully.
Cole’s eyes look back at me, his smile dropping a little.
“Ok,” he says, standing up again and leaning back on the desk, “we don’t have to collaborate. Just an idea. You could just take the head chef position and carry it on as normal if you’re not comfortable doing more just yet. We can revisit—”
“No,” I say, this time with the heaviness it requires. “I mean, no to the job. I can’t be your head chef.”