TV producers did pretty well for themselves, and Aaron’s Chelsea apartment somehow had a wet bar. It wasn’t the biggest space, but Aaron had sunk some money into making the space nice. It made Brad think about the sad Post-its on his wall where art should have gone, and Lindsay’s crack about his only art being a Star Wars poster. And she wasn’t wrong; he had some work to do to make his apartment look like an adult lived there. But Aaron’s place looked mature and expensive, even though it was small.
Aaron mixed Brad a manhattan and slid it in front of him. “So. Tell me about Lindsay. Does she still hate you?”
Brad sighed. “She still hates me. Well, no, that’s not true. She doesn’t trust me.”
“It was wild seeing her again. She looks better now than she did five years ago.”
“I know.”
Aaron laughed. “She doesn’t trust you because she still thinks you cheated on her?”
“I think we’ve gotten past that, actually. She doesn’t trust me because she doesn’t trust anyone.”
“That’s a pickle. And you still want her back?”
“More than anything in this life. I can’t even put a finger on why, just that whenever I see her, I feel…” Brad couldn’t explain it. Something in him melted whenever they were in a room with each other, but that was the kind of schmoopy, romantic nonsense Aaron would definitely make fun of him for.
“Turned on?” Aaron suggested.
“Sure, that. But…happy. I feel happy. I think we can make each other happy. But winning her back is turning out to require a lot of effort.”
“In what way?”
Brad huffed out a breath and sipped his drink. “Well, she requires some convincing.”
“So you contacting me to get her on Mystery Meal didn’t do the trick?”
“I didn’t do that to win her back.”
“The hell you say.”
“Well, okay, maybe in the back of my mind, I thought she might be grateful, but I genuinely just wanted to help her. Because I still really care about her. If she decided to view that as a reason to give me a second chance, then bonus. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s how she saw it.”
“Hmm.”
“And on top of that, I managed to piss off a journalist in the process.” Brad explained what had happened with Heather, the Times reporter.
When Brad finished talking, Aaron said, “So let me get this straight. You pissed off a New York Times reporter for Lindsay’s sake?”
That wasn’t exactly how Brad had seen it in the moment, but… Yes, that is exactly what he’d done. But he said, “I didn’t think you’d do me another favor.”
“Nor could I have without pissing off my bosses. Especially in that case. Heather Chapman is a hack.”
“You know her?”
“She took over for Russo when he got promoted, but her writing lacks any life. She writes about food with about the same excitement I have for watching grass grow.”
“I’m pretty sure she’s a robot. She has no personality.”
Aaron nodded. “My boss doesn’t like her because she gave one of the Food Channel’s regular chefs a bad review. You know Wood Plank in the Village?”
“Yeah. That’s Billy Watts’s place, isn’t it?” Billy Watts was kind of the ur-celebrity chef. He hosted or worked as a judge on a half-dozen different properties.
“Yup. And Billy Watts is a god at the Food Channel. I’m not saying Wood Plank is this amazing restaurant, because I ate there once and it’s good but definitely trying too hard. Although the salmon there is…” Aaron moaned. “Well, anyway, her panning Wood Plank effectively got her blacklisted.”
“She said she’d been trying to get Champion Chef tickets.”
“Don’t mess with Billy Watts. That is for sure why she keeps getting turned down. He coproduces Champion Chef.”
“So just as well I didn’t try to get her in with you.”
“Yeah, that would have been embarrassing for all of us.”
Paige was still a little pissed Brad had biffed the interview, but so far no story had run. Brad thought no review was better than a negative one, which he’d been worried about. Heather might have been a robot, but she could have retaliated if she was genuinely mad at him.
He sighed and sipped his manhattan.
Aaron pulled over a stool and sat across from Brad. “Okay. So, let’s think about this for a second. You did Lindsay a solid. She was great on the show, by the way. I have zero regrets about setting that up.”
“I knew she would be.”
“You have it bad, man.”
“I know. She doesn’t like that I’m flirty with everyone. That’s part of her issue with me.”
“So stop flirting with everyone.”
“If I could just turn it off, I would. I don’t even think about it most of the time.”
“Yeah, sure. Must be hard to be a good-looking guy with women throwing themselves at you all the time.”
Brad rolled his eyes. “It’s not like that.”
“Then what’s it like?”
Brad stared at his drink.
There’d been a time in his life when he’d overcompensated. His family was very conservative. Brad had been a pretty average kid—he’d played sports and got decent grades and had a lively social life—but he and his father had gotten into a knockdown, drag-out fight over Brad’s career when he was about twenty. College was…fine, but Brad hadn’t found anything he was passionate about until he got a job at a restaurant to help pay tuition. He’d just been waiting tables, but he became friendly with the kitchen staff and started learning more about cooking.
Men didn’t cook, his father had said, which was patently absurd. Most chefs were men; sexism in the industry still made it incredibly hard for women to break through to the highest levels. And then Brad had gotten excited about pastry, which his father thought was even less masculine. Brad ultimately didn’t care—he’d pursued what he was passionate about, and he loved his job.
But he knew he’d internalized some of his father’s bullshit about being a pastry chef and how that made him less masculine, and he supposed he’d gone a little out of his way to prove his heterosexuality. Here at the ripe old age of thirty, he could see how ridiculous and homophobic that had been, but when he’d started culinary school, he hadn’t been so self-assured.
So, yeah, subconsciously, he’d probably gotten into the habit of flirting with many women to prove to someone—his father, himself—that he was an adult heterosexual man even though he made cupcakes for a living.
Hell, just the other day, Brad had called home to ask his mother for something, and Dad had gotten on the phone and said, “Still working in that pussy café, huh?” He’d seemed tickled by his double entendre. Brad didn’t have it in him to tell his father to fuck off, so he’d gotten off the phone instead and realized after the fact that he’d forgotten to tell his parents he’d won a cooking competition. At least here in New York he was a safe distance from his father’s bullshit, but Dad still got into his head sometimes.
Brad sipped his drink. “Residual childhood trauma.”
“How’s that?” asked Aaron.
“Our parents have fucked us up so much. Me, Lindsay, probably you.”
Aaron grimaced. “We never had alcohol in the house when I was growing up because my uncle is an alcoholic.”
“Not so unusual.”
“Perhaps not. But I was afraid to drink for a long time because I might be an alcoholic. I’m not and I got over that, obviously.” Aaron held up his own tumbler.
“And my dad thinks pastry is girlie. And Lindsay’s parents hate each other’s guts because her dad couldn’t keep it in his pants. And all of that garbage weighs on us as adults.”
Aaron nodded. “You think all that is at play here now? With you and Lindsay, I mean. You said she doesn’t trust anyone.”
“I mean, yeah. I don’t mean to psychoanalyze her, but that’s my present theory on why we can’t make things work. So all I have to do is show her she can trust me.”
Aaron smirked. “Oh, is that all?”
“Uphill battle, I know. Well, enough about me. My life is stupid and boring and this is some middle school drama, just me waiting for Lindsay to say whether she likes me enough to go steady. How are things with you and Bianca?”
Aaron held up a finger and pointed at Brad. “Oh, no. Don’t change the subject on me. You’re trying to win Lindsay back. It sounds like a challenge. Are you really sure she’s worth all this effort?”
“Yes.”
Brad hadn’t even hesitated. Aaron gave him a long look. “Bianca’s great. I’m gonna marry that girl one of these days. Maybe you can bring Lindsay to our wedding.”
“Yeah? You gonna propose?”
“Thinking about it.”
Brad sipped his cocktail. “Sorry I’m eating a lot of your time with my romantic nonsense.”
“I asked. My bad.”
Brad laughed. “Well, thanks for listening anyway.”
“Let me get you a refill.”
***
Lindsay sat at one of the stations in the Forum office and put on her headphones, although she didn’t play any music because she wanted to eavesdrop on conversations around her. She hoped she could pick up more information about the financial status at the Forum, but so far, no one had said anything enlightening within earshot.
Erica walked over midmorning with a big grin on her face. Lindsay slipped off her headphones.
“I just got off the phone with a buddy of mine at the Food Channel,” said Erica. “They loved you.”
“Oh, that’s great! I’m glad that all worked out.”
“That article you wrote about unusual food trucks was also fantastic. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback.”
“Great. I’m glad.”
“But the Food Channel thing, just you saying you’re the Forum’s food editor is bound to get the website some attention when the episode airs.”
“Brad Marks helped set it up,” said Lindsay.
“The cat café baker? That’s wonderful. I was meaning to ask if he’s as hot as he looks in his head shot.”
“More,” Lindsay said, feeling resigned.
Erica laughed. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“Brad and I have some history, is all. From our culinary school days. It’s nothing.”
“My friend Heather bombed with him.”
Lindsay balked. Brad turned someone down? “Really?”
“She’s a feature writer for the Times. She’s been gunning for Ben Russo’s job now that he’s given up food writing to pen self-righteous op-eds, but I don’t think she’ll get it. Don’t tell her I said this, but she’s not that great a writer. But she’s my friend, so I support her. For the record.”
“Of course.”
“She did an interview with him about the cat café, but it kind of fell apart when she asked for a favor and he turned her down. She killed the story in retaliation.”
“You’re joking. Why did it fall apart?”
“Not clear, but if I’m reading between the lines, she wanted him to do her a favor the way he did a favor for you, and he refused.”
“Is that a euphemism?” Did this woman come on to Brad? Well, Erica couldn’t possibly know that Lindsay and Brad had slept together recently. Twice. So why was jealousy burning up Lindsay’s chest?
Erica laughed. “No, no. Heather’s a big fan of the Food Channel and has been trying to get tickets to something so she can write about it for the paper, but someone there must hate the Times because they keep turning her down. And I think she took that out on poor Brad.”
Lindsay’s head spun. Brad had really done her a solid. She suspected that he only had so many favors he could get from Aaron. Aaron had been accommodating because he remembered her from culinary school, but Brad could talk his way into anything. Could he have gotten this Heather woman a judge position on a Food Channel show or set her up with an inside tour to write about one of the shows? Hell, he could have gotten Heather screeners of Mystery Meal and called it a day. But Brad had torpedoed it, probably for Lindsay’s sake, and blown up a good publicity interview with the Times in the process.
She was touched. She knew he wanted her back. And he’d done this nice thing for her, knowingly sacrificing publicity for himself, and he hadn’t mentioned it when she’d gone over to his apartment to thank him. If Brad had wanted her to know about it, he would have said something.
As she turned that over in her head, Erica said, “I’m sure you’ve heard we’re going to have to do some reorganizing.”
That brought Lindsay’s attention back to the present. Reorganizing was just a fancy word for layoffs, but Lindsay nodded.
“I have to cut a few contractors, but you have nothing to worry about. My boss is ecstatic you’ve gotten us so much good publicity. Our circulation numbers are static, but web traffic has gone up a little, and you’re part of the reason. So thanks, Lindsay. And thank Brad Marks for me. I can’t wait to see the show when it airs.”
Lindsay suppressed a sigh of relief, but she was overjoyed that her job was safe. It was funny how the possibility of losing this job had made her think about cooking again, but hearing Erica tell her that this job was safe was a load off her shoulders. Cooking was the great unknown. Would it make her happy? Could she even still cook restaurant-quality meals? But this job she could do well. “I’ll let you know the air date as soon as I do. I could write something up about my experience on set, too.”
“Oh, yeah, great idea. People love behind-the-scenes stories. I mean, if you had to sign an NDA, don’t violate it or anything, but if there’s any insight you can share, I’d be happy to publish it.”
“I could focus on what it’s like to judge a contest like that. Like, they had me sit out the episode in which I was allergic to one of the mystery ingredients. I always wondered about that. Like, if you’re a judge who is allergic to shellfish or doesn’t eat pork, how can you be a good judge? And now I know.”
“Interesting!” said Erica. “Yeah, write that up. Anything you can include about what it was like to be on set would be good. I have a meeting in five, but great job, Linds.”
When Erica was gone, Lindsay turned back to her laptop but stared into space for a minute. Her Food Channel appearance had clearly gone a long way toward securing her job. She had Brad to thank for that. Brad, who had torpedoed an interview with the Times for Lindsay’s sake. She could almost picture how that must have happened. She bet that woman flirted with him, but Brad was so oblivious that he didn’t notice. How mad would she have been when he tried to shut her down gently? Maybe it was time to think about Brad in a new way.
What was her problem, anyway? Here was a great guy who cared about her and was basically throwing himself at her. Why couldn’t she just accept that? What was making her resist him?
He wasn’t perfect. Nobody was. She had some ideal in her head about who her perfect mate was, but she’d never opened herself up to possibilities; she only let men fall short of her impossibly high expectations. She kept herself safe, single, and free from heartbreak, because the one time she had opened up, she’d gotten her heart stomped on.
Had Brad measured up to her ideal? Probably not, but nobody could. Brad was real and he cared about her. She couldn’t control him, nor did she want to. She just…wanted to feel safe. For a time she had with him, but she’d been constantly expecting the other shoe to drop. Then it had.
The bottom line was that, despite her deeply held conviction that everything was bound to go wrong, she had to open herself up to the possibility that it wouldn’t. She didn’t need perfect, but she did need faith, and she had to put her faith in Brad.
Brad was right. It was hard for her to trust anyone. But maybe it was time to give Brad a shot.