Page 12 of Best I Never Had

“So you’re, like, a cook there?” I ask, my hand still gripping his arm.

“A chef,” he corrects. Not to be rude, just to inform me of the accurate terminology in his line of work. “Actually, I’m the sous chef. Basically, I’m second in command.”

He brings the narrow opening of his beer to his lips, glugging the amber-yellow ale as he watches me over the bottle. I drop my hand back to my side, suddenly realizing that it’s been resting on his bare skin this whole time.

“How did you become a sous chef?” My body turns to face him, our arms no longer grazing against each other.

He does the same, gnawing on his lower lip while studying the label peeling off his beer bottle as if deciding to remove it completely or leave it alone.

“It’s a long story,” he says to the bottle with an air of hesitance, indicating that the problem with the story isn’t that it’s long but difficult to tell.

“We have all night.”

He smirks before letting out a long, drawn-out sigh. “I spent a year at Penn State to study finance, and I quit school after that year.”

“What did you do?”

“I went to France. Studied the art ofle French cuisinein Montpellier.”

“Wow,” I respond, genuinely impressed with the journey his life has taken.

“Anyway, after about a year and a half, I came back and moved to Chicago, where I worked at a restaurant for five years before my uncle offered me a job at Pour Toujours, so I accepted.”

“Wow,” I say again, this time as more of an acknowledging whisper. “That sounds pretty impressive. Maybe we should have started with your story first so I could’ve made up a more exciting version of mine.”

“It’s really not that exciting,” he assures. “A lot of burn marks and getting yelled at.”

Iclear my throat. “So you’ve only been here for, like, four, five months?”

He nods, swallowing the rest of his drink. “It’s been a bit of an adjustment. Hasn’t really felt like home yet.”

“I felt like that at first too,” I agree. “Kind of like a fish out of water. But I’m sure you’ll have no problem adjusting and meeting new people.” I playfully nudge him, poking the hard muscle of his forearm with my index finger.

A small smile lifts one side of his mouth while his eyes linger on the warm spot of skin that I just pressed, revealing the dimple that I’ve always remembered is there. The same one that only appears with certain smiles. Like the one he has on his face right now, not full but curved upward in one corner. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

I smirk. “Just that if you’re anything like you were in high school, gaining the attention of those around you shouldn’t be that difficult.”

“You make me sound a little arrogant. Like Ilikebeing the center of attention.”

“Come on, Hayden. You were a pretty big deal on the football team. Even I know that.Andyou were the prom king to top it off.” I side-eye him with a smile that carries the knowledge full of the lasting details of “hot guy” gossip that seemed to center around Hayden and the other guys on the football team. But the funny thing is, even though he played the popular guy role at school, that facade was only surface deep. It’s as if there are two sides of Hayden that I remember. The one that sat by me in biology class and the one that I watched from afar in the hallways.

“Runner-up prom king,” he says, as if correcting this minor inaccuracy lessens the status he held. “Meaning I wasn’t popular enough to win.”

I roll my eyes, bringing my hands up in fake surrender with a sarcastically obviousmy badplastered on my forehead. He smiles shyly, his face lowered to the ground as he stuffs a hand intohis pocket.

“It still gets a little lonely sometimes,” he claims, his gaze loosely settled on the railing in front of him before he looks up at me. “ThoseFinal Destinationmarathons start to become all too real after watching them alone so many times with no one to tell me that it’s just a movie. I start to come up with a hundred different scenarios on howIwould go.”

“Nothing can be worse than getting smashed by a large tree trunk,” I comment.

“I don’t know. I’m thinking getting burned to death in a tanning bed is worse.”

“Oh, sothat’show you get your skin that nice golden color. Here I was thinking you won the genetics jackpot.”

He chuckles, and his brows lift along with that amused smile before the corner of his eyes crinkle.

I tilt my head toward him and realize that as Hayden’s eyes stay fixed on mine, we’re both two lonely souls in the city of millions. And it seems like some big cosmic alignment that we’re here, hundreds of miles from home and almost a decade since our last goodbyes. Kismet really does work in mysterious ways.

“Well, you have me now,” I finally offer. “If you ever need a friend, I’m here.”

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