Page 89 of So Not My Thing
Chapter Twenty-Three
Icame down for breakfastthe next morning like I’d promised, unsure of how this was all going to go. Sometimes it was easy to believe a thing at night only to have it look totally different in the morning. Maybe Miles would regret it. Maybe today would be like every other one, with me being stiff and awkward.
But when I walked into the club, Miles looked up from a conversation he was having with Jordan and crossed over to pull me into his arms for an unhurried kiss and a long hug.
“Oh, it’s like that,” Jordan said, grinning at us.
“It’s like that.” Miles slung his arm around my shoulder and walked me back to Jordan. “You’ve met my girl, Ellie.”
His girl. My inner fourteen-year-old squealed. Then my inner grownup did too.
“I have. Good to see you again,” Jordan said, holding his hand out for a shake. “What do you think of the progress in here so far?”
“It’s amazing,” I said.
We fell into a conversation about the changes to come. Turned out Jordan spent most mornings with Miles at the Turnaround before heading over to the music center. Today’s big plan was interviewing chefs.
“I realize I know a whole lot more about the property development side than the business development side, but isn’t it kind of late in the game to be hiring a chef?” I asked.
“We had one,” Jordan explained. “We were keeping it under wraps. He didn’t want to advertise he was leaving his current place until he was sure it would work out. But he let them know last week so they’d have time to replace him, and instead, they made him a counteroffer that he couldn’t refuse.”
I winced. “That’s hard.”
Miles sighed. “Yeah. It wasn’t great. We love the concepts he had for the menu, but I don’t think we’re going to get a top-level chef who wants to come in here and execute someone else’s vision. We need to let them bring their own ideas to the table.”
“So there you go,” Jordan said. “Youdoknow the food matters as much as the music.”
It sounded like a point from an ongoing argument. That made me smile. New Orleans might be the only city in the world where the music wasn’t an afterthought.
“Of course I know that,” Miles said. “I don’t know why you always act like I don’t. And I want a homegrown chef too. Don’t need to import talent from LA when there’s so much here. So we went back to our stack of resumes, and we’re trying again.”
“Did you get a lot of applicants?” I asked. I wished I’d confessed my feelings to Miles sooner because I could have been around to hear these conversations and had Dylan apply for the job. He’d only been at Redbird for six months, but he was always eager to push to the next level.
“So many applicants,” Miles said.
“Yeah, not hard to find someone who can cook around here,” Jordan said. “More an issue with finding someone who has skills plus vision plus the ability to manage a staff.”
I wasn’t sure Dylan had that last skill yet. He had bottomless ambition and mad skills in the kitchen, but a short-temper and perfectionist tendencies. I didn’t know how he’d do running a whole team. “That makes sense,” I said, and left it at that.
“Guess what I found out about Ellie?” Miles asked Jordan.
“She’s a secret agent? She won the lottery? She works for the health department? I don’t know, man. That’s an annoyingly wide-open question,” Jordan said.
“Wow.” I smiled up at Miles. “He doesnotcare about your fame or money, does he?”
“Nope,” Miles said, cheerfully. “Just cares about music. Which is what I wanted to tell you.” My stomach gave a slight lurch. “Ellie here cansing.”
“Oh, really?” Jordan’s eyes lit up. “What kind of music do you do?”
“None,” I said with a tight smile. “I mess around on the piano sometimes, but that’s it.” I slipped from under Miles’s arm and headed for the exit. “I need to get ready for work, boys. Catch y’all later.”
I barely made it into the hall before Miles came after me.
“Whoa, what was that?”
“What was what?” I headed for the stairs without slowing down.
“I said something wrong again, obviously. Should I not have told him you can sing?”
