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“Get out of here, old man!” Nafil told him. “You’re just holding me back!”
Hannah smiled beatifically at Nafil. “I like you. Do you want to take over the kitchen at Carrigan’s?”
Nafil waved her off. “Maybe if I were getting too old for the yachting hours and had a hot wife here, I’d be as interested in settling here as Matthews. I have a little brother, though. He’s half the chef I am, but since I’m twice the chef Matthews is…”
“Why are all my friends mean to me?” Levi asked out loud, as inside he thought,Why do my friends think I want to work at Carrigan’s?
“Because you’re an asshole and you only like mean people,” Hannah told him. “Are you coming out to greet guests?”
Levi growled a little. “Give me a couple of minutes to get everything ready.”
She nodded.
“Wait,” Levi called after her as she turned to leave. He didn’t miss the flash of fear in her eyes, or the way she’d sort of half taken off her “talking to Levi” mask and had to quickly slip her face back into it as she turned back.
“Take my jacket” was all he said, handing her the ancient leather biker jacket hanging on one of the kitchen hooks. “It will look cool with your dress, and you won’t freeze.”
She shrugged into the worn leather, and his heart skipped. She’d worn it before, countless times. He’d bought it when they were thirteen, at a vintage shop in Queens while they were on a trip to the city for something, and it had been too big for both of them but that hadn’t stopped her from stealing it. He’d always loved when it made its way back to him, smelling of her old lady rose soap and sweat.
Now, when she pulled the waist-length rope of her hair out of the collar and tugged on the sleeves to get it to sit right, he was hit with a wrecking ball of nostalgia and lust. The jacket wasn’t too big anymore; it hugged all her perfect ample curves, and the contrast between it and her sundress made her look like some sort of good girl gone bad fantasy. He didn’t even have those fantasies, he didn’t have sexual fantasies at all, except about his wife, apparently, at the worst possible times.
“This jacket always did look better on me,” she said, and he didn’t argue. He wondered if he really heard a catch in her voice, or if he’d imagined it.
They managed to get through the engagement party without anyone freezing to death or running out of food. It was exhilarating, collaborating with Hannah, watching her work her magic. Her almost superhuman competence was breathtaking.
It had been fun, he realized, the whole thing. A lot of fun, which surprised him.
“Okay,” Hannah said, hands on her hips, standing in front of the giant sheet of paper that had been hung over the bookshelves in her office. In Hannah’s neat cursive it said:
Compliments
Feedback
Plans:
Immediate needs
Medium-term needs
Long-term needs
“Blue, welcome to debrief. Here’s the structure—immediate needs are, like, we gotta fix this before the next event, medium-term needs are we can’t fix this before the next event but we have to get started on it ASAP, and long-term needs are also stretch dreams; that is, what would we get if we had all the money and space in the world? Who wants to start with a compliment?”
Noelle raised her hand. “Levi kind of killed it out there,” she said, to his surprise, shrugging nonchalantly.
“Agreed.” Miriam nodded. “Food was great, speedy, no one noticed any issues.”
They went on, threw around ideas for cold passed apps for the wedding since Levi now knew they wouldn’t have enough ovens for their original plan, tweaking their service sheet.
After a few hours, Miriam and Noelle wandered off to bed while he and Hannah stayed up into the witching hours, a pot of coffee between them, brainstorming long-term dreams. It was everything he was great at and everything she was great at, the first time in their lives their brains had gotten a chance to go wild bouncing off each other, collaborating and learning from each other.
It was exhilarating, in a way he had believed nothing at Carrigan’s could ever be.
