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‘He’s right though,’ Marty says, clinking the head of his bottle against mine. ‘We wouldn’t give up our lives for a nagging wife and kids.’
‘Marty, I can fucking hear you. I can say what I like about my wife, but you can keep your thoughts to yourself.’
Marty raises his arms from his sides in surrender. ‘I overstepped. Sorry, buddy.’ He speaks quietly this time when he says, ‘Doesn’t make it untrue though.’
We stand around the kitchen, eating pizza and drinking beers, waiting for Edmond to finish for the night at the restaurant. He usually takes off when all main courses are served and gets to us around ten thirty.
By the time I tell the concierge to send him up, the rest of us have worked our way through a box of beers and two pizzas. We’re limbered up and ready to play some cards.
Brooks answers the door while I’m taking a leak. When I come back into the room, Edmond is in the kitchen, flipping the top off a bottle of beer, talking to the others who are sitting around the poker table.
‘Drew, my friend,’ he says, his French lilt coming through his American-accented English, showing his years spent between his signature restaurants in London, Paris and New York. Since his family moved to New York, he’s spent more and more time here. ‘This is for you.’
I pick up a bottle and knock it against his in greeting. Then I contemplate the white cardboard box he slides along the counter toward me. ‘What is it? Aw, have you brought me food, Ed? You know how I love when you treat me.’
‘Not me. Open it.’
I do as he says and see what I know is Violet Passion. There’s a handwritten note.
I had a spare mediocre dessert.
BB x
BB. British Becky. I realize I’m grinning down at the box, and something flips in my stomach. Like when you drive too fast over a speed bump: an exhilarating kind of sickness.
‘What did you bring us, Ed?’ Kit asks, pulling me from the image in my mind of Becky and me, by a fire, feeding each other desserts and drinking wine. We’d be naked. The heat of the fire keeping us warm. And we’d touch, kiss, have our limbs wrapped around each other, just because we could.
Because we couldn’t get enough of each other. I would listen to her talk all night. That insanely gorgeous voice.
Holy hell!
I hold my fist to my mouth as I do something between coughing and choking. I take a step back from the box, as if it has a contagious disease.
‘Help yourselves,’ I manage through my dry throat. I drag a hand through my hair and nail half my bottle of beer in the next gulp. All the while, Edmond’s eyes are fixed on me.
Kit bounces like Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. He locates forks and takes the box to the poker table.
‘She’s a good person, Drew, and an even better patisserie chef.’ Edmond speaks for my ears only. ‘She’s been squeaky clean since she came to the city. By all means, if you like her… But please don’t make me lose my best chef.’
I don’t know what to say.
Don’t worry, I don’t do relationships, I want to say.You’ve got nothing to stress about, Edmond. I haven’t even thought about Becky like that.
I haven’t thought about lying her back on your kitchen worktops as she whispers everything she wants me to do to her in that damn sexy British accent.
‘I hear you, Ed,’ I say instead. ‘She just wanted a friend in the city. That’s all I am.’
‘You’re being a friend?’ Marty asks across my shoulder as he comes for another beer. ‘Is this that chick you met at the bagel truck?’
I just look from him to Edmond because I’m still trying to make sense of my spinning head and erratically beating heart.
‘Hold up! Is she the reason you didn’t change your clothes the other night?’
‘That wasn’t what you think.’
‘You did. You fucked her.’
‘Christ, Marty, are you twelve?’ Who am I kidding, lays are quite often a topic of conversation between us. But Becky… I don’t want to talk about her like that. ‘I didn’t sleep with her. I went… There was something I had to take care of, and I fell asleep.’
