But this time? This time, I didn’t see it coming. It was a shock to find him in the kitchen when I first got there and an even bigger shock when he offered to help. I just didn’t know how it turned from surprise to essentially telling him to leave to clothes coming off.
It was so fast and intense it left me feeling dizzy and almost disoriented. But it was the way Noah acted afterward that really got my head spinning. He was almost accusatory, like he was blaming me for this happening between us. Like it was my fault and I had led him astray.
That left me angry and a bit confused. Noah had drifted almost close to admitting he felt something for me but didn’t get close enough for me to quite understand what that something might be. Instead, he demanded nothing happened between us again and left me alone to unravel it myself.
I got to work Thursday morning trying to come up with how to explain to Derek that I hadn’t gotten through all the dishes the day before and why several of them had been ruined. I didn’t even know what to do with how much of a disaster the day had been. Even in my early days of cooking, I didn’t have days where I burned, undercooked, over-seasoned, or otherwise just decimated as many dishes as I had on Wednesday. My focus was always too sharp, my dedication to my craft too honed to let things get to me enough to interfere with my cooking.
That day though, it seemed the universe was coming back around to me, and all the mistakes or issues I somehow avoided experiencing throughout my career had come for me.
But when I walked into the kitchen that morning, Derek still wasn’t there. I went to work finishing up the dishes I didn’t test the day before and fixing the ones I demolished. By the middle of the afternoon, Derek had messaged me to apologize for not being able to come in and asking for pictures of my progress. Fortunately, I had just finished up some of the more complicated dishes and was able to send him beauty shots that could have ended up on the menu.
He told me they looked good and warned he might not be able to come in the next day either. After reiterating I had a weekend off again, the messages stopped. I could only imagine he was either feeling too sick to continue or had fallen asleep.
The next day when I arrived and he wasn’t there, I was relieved. I felt bad for not wanting to see him, but the truth was, I had no idea what to say to him. I had no idea how I felt or what I wanted to do. Part of me wanted to tell Derek I’d made a mistake. I wanted to tell him I really appreciated him thinking about me when it came to filling the sous chef position and for the opportunity, but that I couldn’t work at the vineyard with him.
I didn’t have to get into any details about it, but I could tell him I couldn’t work there when Noah was there, always around to make me act like a person I didn’t recognize.
But a bigger part of me resisted that. The thing was, I wanted this job. I was sure I could fulfill the position exactly the way Derek thought I could, and that together we could make the restaurant great. I didn’t want to let Noah win, to let him scare me away.
So, I left the restaurant Friday night with a stack of leftovers, no idea what was going to come next, and a new resolve to get my brain back under control. I spent another weekend alone at my place, just soaking up the peace and relaxation it offered me. This was a luxury I wasn’t going to get a chance to enjoy much in the near future.
Once the restaurant opened up and the vineyard started having guests, I wasn’t going to have weekends free anymore. I might be able to snag a weekday evening every couple of weeks, but there would be no way I would get out of the kitchen on the weekends.
A weekend to myself was also the perfect opportunity for pampering. Bubble baths, face masks, and watching all those shows and movies I had on my list but never actually thought I’d get to, was a chance to focus on myself. That was what I needed to do: think about myself and not Noah or how the two of us kept ending up naked.
I didn’t want to do too much of a deep dive into the situation. That would only get my head wrapped up in it even more. Instead, I resolved to chalk it up to a case of “it is what it is” and think about it as little as humanly possible.