Page 123 of Neap & Spring

By the time the truck is empty and the driver has pulled out of the alley with a wave and the look of a man who is glad to be going literally anywhere else, we are all standing in the dining room dripping onto the hardwood floors. Everyone’s breathing slightly hard, shirts and jackets plastered to bodies, hair askew. There’s a puddle forming around Wesley’s boots. Patrick’s wiping rain off his glasses with the hem of his shirt. Beckett is wringing out his sleeve with both hands like it’s a dishrag.

We’re all silently staring at the furniture we’ve just hauled in.

It is not arranged correctly.

I can see the realization striking everyone. Heads tilting, eyes narrowing, people taking small steps back to get a better view of the whole space. Frannie makes a small hmm sound.

Then everyone starts explaining how it should be arranged at the same time, voices overlapping, hands gesturing at different sections of the room. Nothing moves for two full minutes while the disarray happens, everyone trying to get their point across at maximum volume.

“Maybe we should put the tables against the window first.” Callum points at the wall of windows overlooking the water.

“If you put them all against the window, you lose the center flow,” Iris counters, stepping forward and tracing an invisible path through the middle of the room with her hand.

Callum’s eyes narrow. “The center flow is fine.”

“The center flow has a bottleneck at the pass-through.” Iris walks to the spot in question, plants her feet, and gestures around herself. “Right here. It’s too narrow.”

“It doesn’t have a bottleneck.”

“I was here last Saturday, and it definitely had a bottleneck. I watched three servers nearly collide.” She mimes the collision with her hands, making impact sounds with her mouth. “Boom. Right there.”

Callum opens his mouth then closes it. His hand comes up to run through his wet hair. “That was a staffing issue. Not a layout issue.”

“It was a flow issue, and you know it.” Iris crosses her arms, water dripping from her elbows.

Hayes has moved to stand next to one of the four-tops, his hand resting on the back of a chair. “What if we angle these instead of keeping them perpendicular to —”

“Angles create dead space,” Callum interrupts.

“But they improve sightlines.”

“We don’t need improved sightlines. We need capacity.”

“Capacity doesn’t matter if people can’t see the ocean.”

Frannie, who has been standing in the doorway this entire time in her wet shoes that are leaving small puddles with each shift of her weight, raises her hand like she’s in a classroom. Everyone stops talking.

“What if,” she projects, her voice perfectly calm, “we put the two-tops along the window and move the four-tops in toward the center?” She walks into the room now, weaving between the furniture, touching each table as she passes to indicate what goes where. “Better sightlines to the water for the window seats, and it opens up the center flow because you’re not forcing servers to navigate around the big tables in a narrow path.”

She stops and turns, looking at everyone expectantly with an eyebrow raised.

Callum stares at the layout, his head tilting as he visualizes it. His hand comes up, fingers moving like he’s mentally rearranging pieces. “That actually makes a lot of sense,” he says, and the admission appears to surprise him slightly.

Frannie looks at me, the corners of her mouth twitching as she fights to keep a straight face.

I try very, very hard not to make eye contact with her.

I fail completely.

A laugh bursts out of me before I can stop it. I slap my hand over my mouth but it’s too late, my shoulders shaking.

“I told you,” Frannie deadpans even as her own smile breaks through. “I do logistics.”

“Why are we laughing?” Callum huffs, and when I look at him, his face is concerned, but I see the small smile tugging at his mouth.

He’s just standing there in his soaked chef’s whites, his wet hair sticking up in every direction, smiling at me so brightly it reaches his eyes and makes them crinkle at the corners, transforming his whole face into something softer and younger.

For a moment, it’s just the two of us smiling at each other across the chaotic dining room while everyone else is dripping and discussing furniture placement. My brain takes that exact moment to remind me what his hands felt like on my bare skin, his mouth on mine, the way he’d looked up at me from his knees like he had absolutely nowhere else he’d rather be.