“But they’re the ones who canceled?” Sam’s puzzlement creases his brow so deeply that he can almost hear his mother telling him it’ll stick that way.
“I know!” Jake cries. “I know! But they say a cancellation fee if in caseanyonehas to cancel.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous.”
“That’s what I said! But they say we’ll have to pay, and we’ll have to pay someone else extra to do it last minute, and?—”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Sam says, waving a hand. “I’ll do it. Or, rather, we will.”
Jake’s mouth snaps closed; his eyes widen. “What? No you won’t; it’s in three days! You need at least a week’s notice?—”
“I mean, wesaythat.” Sam offers Jake a slightly sheepish smile. “But exceptions are kind of the rule there. We do a lot of funerals and stuff like that, and there isn’t usually a ton of lead time. Besides, a dance recital is, what, fifty people? Seventy-five?”
Jake bites his lip. “Around that, yeah, between students and parents.”
Sam shrugs. “Right, so: no big deal. A couple of deli trays, a veggie platter or two, and—hold on.” Raising his voice so she’llhear him from her alcove of the kitchen, where the mixer and deck oven live, Sam calls, “Eileen!”
“Yeah?” As expected, she doesn’t bother coming into the main kitchen, just hollers back unseen.
“You think you could muster the will to do a couple of dessert trays for Friday? The nice ones, with the lemon squares and brownies? Maybe the mini coconut bars?”
“ThisFriday? Go fuck yourself.”
Jake’s eyes go wide with horror. He waves his hands frantically at Sam, making an entreating face, but Sam grins at him and shakes his head, mouthing, “Relax, she’s fine.” To Eileen, he calls back, “What if I told you it was for a dance recital at Jake’s studio? Little kids and their parents? Also, their normal guy screwed them last minute, so if you don’t do it, there’ll be no dessert for anyone.”
There’s a weighted pause, during which Jake looks like he’s considering the fastest exit strategy, but every visible member of staff starts to snicker or smirk. Then Eileen calls, “Okay, Sammy, you can eighty-six my last request. I’ll even do the mini cupcakes; kids always like those.”
Sam rolls his eyes, but cheerfully enough. “Thanks, Eileen. You’re a peach.”
“Don’t make me hurt you,” Eileen warns him, and then immediately turns on the mixer, its loud thunking and thwacking both unmistakable and impossible to shout over.
“Sam,” Jake says, his eyes still wide, “you can’t just… I need a quote, for one thing, to make sure we can even?—”
“Nope, stop, it’s on the house,” Sam says. “Obviously. Least I can do for all the free labor you’ve given me.”
“It wasn’t free! You’ve already paid me in food!”
“Not what I owe you,” Sam says firmly. “Not by half. Anyway, seriously, do you really want to argue with the easiest solve for this problem?” He waggles his eyebrows suggestively, loweringhis voice. “Think of all the better things we could do with the time you’d spend hunting down another last-minute caterer.”
Jake meets his eyes, flushing slightly, and hesitates. But then, slowly, he nods. “If you’re…sure?”
“Very sure,” Sam says. He reaches out and squeezes Jake’s shoulder, his interest and his pulse both spiking when Jake sighs and leans into the touch. “I can start the prep tonight, and do most of the work myself. You can even help, if you want to. It’ll be fun.”
“Sometimes I wonder if you’ve ever understood what fun means,” Jake says. “Like, even one time, in your whole life.” Then, lower and more sincere, he adds, “Thankyou, Sam.”
“It’s nothing,” Sam says, and he means it, at the time.
But, as it turns out, it’s not nothing.
That’s not to say that doing the work is a problem; far from it. Everything comes together, and Sam enjoys preparing it immensely. It just…isn’t a couple of deli trays and a veggie platter, and ends up meaning more to Sam than all of his previous catering jobs combined.
Jake does help him prep that first night, which is really the deciding factor, the one variable that changes all the others. Because when Jake once again starts talking about how Sam should do hisownthing, should make whathewants to make, the kind of food he makes for family meal, Sam finds, for the first time, that he has no excuse not to. It’s not a paid or contracted job; it’s not like he’s changing the catering menu, or the deli’s menu. It’s a one-off. Why not?
They end up blowing off dinner at Johnny’s that night. Instead, Sam makes a variety of test dishes for the recital after the deli closes, which they eat in lieu of a proper meal. Jake’s delighted by every bite, at one point bursting into actualapplause, and this time when Sam pulls him back to the office, nothing interrupts them.
The next two days are much the same: Jake slipping over to his own apartment in the morning to change for work and then ending up at Sam’s again that night, flush against Sam’s chest, saying filthy things against the shell of Sam’s ear. Sam thinks he could get used to it, this languid, relaxed new cast to his movements, his mood. Being Jake’s friend was wonderful, but beingwithJake is so much better that Sam laughs whenever he thinks about it. It blows everything else—even the time he spent with Jake in high school—out of the water.
Jake insists they reschedule their Johnny’s date for as soon as things calm down, the night after the recital. Sam agrees readily enough. He assumes Jake wants to discuss what they’re doing here, what they are to one another, to avoid making the same mistake they did when they were teenagers. He’s fine with that. If anything, he’s looking forward to it. He’s never felt so entirely on the same page with anyone.
