I didn’t like being alone. It took me back to being a teenager and losing both of my parents and feeling like I was a tiny grain of sand in a vast expanse of beach, shifting and rootless. When I had been forced to move from suburban New Jersey to Manhattan to live with Gus and my grandmother, I’d had a rough couple of years. Then I’d met Savannah and finally felt that, aside from my grandfather, I had a friend who would always have my back.
Gus didn’t say anything for so long I turned and glanced over at him to see why he wasn’t talking. He was grinning. “What? Why are you laughing at me? Is my loneliness amusing to you?”
“You seem to be missing the obvious here.”
“What is that?”
“You could find a boyfriend yourself.”
I pulled a face. “Gross. I don’t think that’s in the cards for me.” It wasn’t like I objected to falling in love. Not exactly, anyway. It’s just that it terrified me if I were being honest. Being vulnerable. It made me shudder.
“A shrink would have a field day with you.”
That made me laugh. I pulled myself back into a sitting position. “Thanks. Why is that?”
“It’s obvious. You lost your parents and now you’re afraid to fall in love. I don’t need a degree to see that.”
He was right. That didn’t mean I liked hearing it. “They’d say the same thing to you, old man. Maybe you can put a ring on the widow Johnson’s finger.” Gus kept claiming Helen wasn’t his girlfriend, just a friend with benefits, but you only had to be around her for three minutes to see she was wildly in love with him.
“Mind your own business. We’re content with things the way they are.”
“Have you asked Helen that lately?” I asked, highly doubtful she was content with casual.
“Why would I ask her that?” he asked. “I might not like her answer.”
Apparently relationships at seventy were no easier than they were at twenty-eight.
“We’re two sides of the same coin, Gus. Which makes sense since you raised me.”
As always, he pulled no punches. “Don’t give me that bullshit. I didn’t get my hands on you until you were fifteen. Your parents raised you and they had a wonderful marriage.”
He was right. He was always right. “Can you just let me wallow for like two seconds?” I asked.
That made him let out a rough, rattling laugh. “You want to wallow in your feelings or act like a quitter, you’re not getting any sympathy from me. You know better than that.”
I did. And honestly, I loved him for it. He’d helped me drag myself back up when I could have gone deep down a dark road. “So what you’re saying is you're not going to marry Helen?” I asked.
“Not anytime soon. But this isn’t about me. I’ve already had the love of my life. Don’t deny yourself that joy, Isla.”
For some reason, that hit me like a brick wall. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I swallowed hard. “The love of my life is cooking.”
It was. I didn’t see that changing anytime soon.
Four
Isla had chosen to walk in a driving rain rather than accept a ride from me. I respected the stubbornness. But it was not going to be easy to work with her, obviously. We had tension thick between us. Sexual and otherwise.
But I had to make it work. Nico had texted me that if Isla quit, he was going to fire me. Just like that. How the hell was I supposed to control Isla? She had a fiery temper and a deep dislike for me. It pissed me off that my future at Bone was tied to her. It was totally unfair and I wasn’t sure what the fuck to do about it.
I found a parking spot in front of my friends Jasmine and Sidney’s apartment in Queens and jumped out of the car. I was running late to babysit their toddler, Kennedy, because I had lingered at the bar with Isla. Fortunately, they were going out to dinner and not an event that had a specific start time. Plus, they were generally forgiving of me being late considering I was free help every few months.
Sidney opened the door and stuck his hand out to shake mine. “Hey, what’s up, man? Thanks for coming over tonight.”
“No problem. You know I like hanging out with Kennedy.” I did. She was a perfect human specimen, all spiral curls and big brown eyes, with a confident grin and a round belly that just screamed for raspberries. I would strangle a bear with my bare hands to protect that kid.
“She’s been waiting all night for you, so you’ve been warned.” He stepped aside so I could enter the apartment.
Kennedy came barreling across the room yelling my name at the top of her lungs in her high-pitched three-year-old voice. She hit me like a cannonball and I picked her up and tossed her over my head. She shrieked in delight.
Jasmine, fastening the back of an earring, came into the living room and over to me. “Thank God you’re here. I thought she was going to spontaneously combust from all her energy and excitement.”
I set Kennedy back down, who promptly started to climb my leg. I leaned over and gave Jasmine a kiss on the cheek. “You look beautiful.” She did. Her gorgeous features had first caught my attention a dozen years earlier, but what had made me fall head over heels for Jasmine at twenty-three was how sweet and innocent and intelligent she was.
She had been a brand-new transplant to New York from Barbados, and I had been a restless New Yorker, not sure what I wanted to do with my life. Jasmine and her love had grounded me, given me a purpose. For years I’d thought of her as the one who had gotten away, but she’d done the right thing breaking up with me. She had a serious intention to stay a virgin until marriage, and while I had respected that, I hadn’t been ready for the commitment she needed. At all. I was years away from being that kind of guy. Eventually, she had told me she felt herself caving, and that she would hate herself if she compromised her values knowing there was no way I could offer her marriage.
So she had dumped me.
My one and only true heartbreak. I’d been devastated. I’d even gone and proposed to her in an eleventh-hour attempt to win her back, to which she had said no.
It was the smartest thing she could have ever done, and now we were great friends. I might even call her my best friend. Sidney was very cool with our friendship, and it probably didn’t hurt that while we had dated, I had never seen his wife naked. Tough to swallow at twenty-three, great for our friendship at thirty-five.
“Ever the charmer,” she said, pulling back and looking at me. “Are you okay? What’s going on?”
Jasmine was also damn near psychic. She always knew when I was turning around something in my head. “I’m fine. I start my new job Monday. The staff meeting didn’t exactly go as smoothly as I had hoped. One of the chefs quit.”
“That’s typical, right?” she asked, trying to pull Kennedy off of my leg.
Her daughter shrieked and flailed her arms. I took her from Jasmine and bounced her on my hip. “Yes. Pretty typical. But the other chef is someone I met at Michael’s engagement party and she can’t stand me.”
Jasmine raised her eyebrows. “Oh, God, you hit on her, didn’t you?”
“No,” I protested. “I wouldn’t say that.”