The Man Behind The Menu

Jenson

# CHAPTER TEN

Bree was looking at me.

"Are you sure," she said.

"I'm not sure of anything," I said. "I just — I think it's him."

She turned in the booth, not obviously, just enough to look toward the bar. I didn't turn. I had already looked once and I wasn't going to do it again.

"Dark clothing," I said. "End of the bar. Talking to someone."

Bree looked for a moment. Turned back.

"Could be anyone," she said.

"I know."

"You've seen him what — twice? Three times?"

"I got a proper look today," I said. "The back of house thing. He was four feet away."

Bree picked up her drink. Considered something. "And?"

"He's dressed like the private booking guests," I said. "Not like someone who just finished a service. Like someone who was always going to end up somewhere like this tonight."

Bree looked at me with the quiet attention she gave things she was actually thinking about.

"It's a Saturday night," she said finally. "People go out. Even chefs."

"I know."

"It doesn't mean anything."

"I know that too."

"So."

"So nothing," I said. "I just noticed."

Bree nodded once. Sipped her drink. Said nothing further about it, which was Bree's way of closing something — not dismissing it, just deciding it had received enough attention for now.

I agreed with her. It was nothing. He was a person in a city and the city was not that large and people occupied the same spaces sometimes without it meaning anything. I worked in his restaurant four evenings a week. That didn't make us connected. That made us professionally adjacent and nothing else.

I picked up my drink.

"Tell me about the design project," I said.

Bree told me about the design project.

---

Somewhere around midnight I made a decision I would not fully remember making.

The decision involved a second drink, which led to a third, which led to Bree looking at me at some point with the expression of someone doing a quiet assessment and saying, without drama, "you're not going home tonight."

I told her I was fine.

She told me I had just called the bartender by the wrong name twice and tipped him for a drink I hadn't received yet.

I considered this information.

"I'm staying," I said.

"Yes," she said. "You are."

What happened between that conversation and waking up in Bree's spare room I could account for in fragments. The walk from Harlow — cold air, Bree's hand on my arm at the kerb, Morvaine at one in the morning doing its quiet glittering thing. Bree's building, the lift, the spare room that smelled like cedar and clean linen. Water on the nightstand that I didn't remember being given but was grateful for.

That was approximately all I had.

---

I woke up to grey light and the specific quality of stillness that belonged to someone else's apartment on a Sunday morning.

Bree's spare room was neat in the way Bree was neat — everything with a purpose, nothing unnecessary. A small bookshelf. A print on the wall that I recognised as her own work from a few years ago, one of the pieces she had done before she decided interiors paid better than art and had not, as far as I could tell, fully made peace with that decision.

I lay there for a moment taking stock.

Head — manageable. Mouth — less so. The particular full-body awareness of someone who had drunk more than they intended and was now receiving the invoice for it.

I sat up slowly.

There was water on the nightstand. I drank half of it and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the grey Morvaine morning through the gap in the curtains and let my brain do what brains did the morning after — piece things back together slowly, like a document that had been closed without saving.

Harlow. The booth. Bree.

The end of the bar.

I filed that immediately and kept moving.

The third drink. The bartender whose name I had apparently gotten wrong. The walk home.

And then — something else. A fragment from later in the night, soft at the edges, the way memories were when they had been made in a state that wasn't entirely reliable. Bree's kitchen. Both of us sitting on the counter because neither of us had apparently considered using chairs. Something warm in a mug — tea, probably, Bree's solution to most things.

And something on the counter beside Bree's phone.

A jacket.

Not Bree's. The cut was wrong, the size was wrong, it was folded in the specific way of something that had been placed rather than abandoned — carefully, like whoever had left it knew where they were leaving it and expected to come back for it.

I sat with that for a moment.

Then I got up, found my shoes, and went to find Bree.

---

She was in the kitchen.

Already dressed, already caffeinated by the look of it, standing at the counter with a mug and her phone and the particular composure of a Sunday morning Bree, which was the same as every other Bree except slightly softer around the edges.

The jacket was gone.

"Morning," she said.

"Morning." I went to the kettle. Still warm. I made tea and leaned against the counter across from her and we existed in the easy silence of two people who had known each other long enough for morning silences to require no management.

I drank my tea.

Looked at the counter where the jacket had been.

Looked at Bree.

"Hold on," I said. "I think I remember something from last night." I paused. "Bree. Are you still sleeping with Jenson?"

Bree looked at me over the top of her mug.

She didn't answer immediately. Not in the way of someone buying time or deciding how to deflect — in the way of someone who had been asked a direct question and was deciding how directly to answer it.

"On and off," she said.

I looked at her.

"Since when," I said.

"Since about four months ago." She put her mug down. "He came back to Morvaine in the spring. We ran into each other. It just — resumed."

"Resumed," I said.

"That's the word I'm using, yes."

I absorbed this. Jenson had been a person in Bree's life two years ago, briefly, in the way things were sometimes brief when the timing was wrong and both people knew it and neither of them said so. Bree had mentioned him exactly once, which meant I had known about him and had not asked about him because Bree did not invite questions about things she wasn't ready to discuss and I had learned to respect the shape of that.

"And you didn't tell me," I said.

"I'm telling you now."

"Bree."

"It's complicated," she said. Simply. Not defensively. Just stating a fact about the situation the way she stated facts about everything.

"Is it good complicated or bad complicated."

She thought about it. Which was itself an answer of a kind.

"It's just complicated," she said. "He's — Jenson is not a simple person. He never was. And I'm not sure what this is yet. So I didn't want to say anything until I knew what I was saying."

I looked at her for a moment. Bree, who always knew what to say about everything. Bree, who had opinions about my life that she delivered with the quiet precision of someone who had thought them through. Bree, who had a person in her life for four months and had said absolutely nothing because she didn't know what to call it yet.

"Are you okay," I said.

She picked her mug back up. "I think so."

"You think so."

"I'm working on it."

That was, for Bree, approximately the most honest thing she could have said. I recognised it as such and did not push further because that was not what she needed and because Bree's version of working on something was usually more thorough than most people's version of having it figured out.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay," she said.

We drank our tea in the Sunday morning kitchen and the grey Morvaine light came through the window and somewhere in the city Jenson existed and somewhere else Callan Constantine Oswald existed in a bar he had occupied at the end like he occupied everything, like the space had always expected him, and none of it was my business and all of it was sitting in my head in the pile of things I was not currently thinking about.

"Do you want breakfast," Bree said.

"Yes," I said.

She made eggs. I sat at the table she had, which was a proper table, unlike mine which had been functioning as a filing system since September, and I ate and the hangover receded by degrees and outside the window Morvaine did what it always did on Sunday mornings — slowly, quietly, without apology, became itself again.

I did not think about the jacket.

I did not think about the end of the bar.

I was almost completely successful.

---

I left Bree's at noon.

She handed me my coat at the door and looked at me with the quiet directness she had always had.

"The Jenson thing," she said.

"Is yours," I said. "I know."

She nodded. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Tell me things."

Something moved in her face. Not quite a smile — the warm thing adjacent to it that Bree sometimes allowed.

"I will," she said.

I walked home through the Sunday version of Morvaine — slower, more forgiving, the city in its coat rather than its performance wear. Past the market square that was already packing up. Past the café on Rue Selvaine that I sometimes went to on Sundays and did not go to today because my head was still lodging a formal complaint about last night.

Past Veldmarch Street.

I did not go down it. I had no reason to go down it. Oswald's was closed on Sundays and I was not going to walk past a closed restaurant for no reason on a Sunday afternoon like a person who had lost their mind.

I turned left instead.

Went home.

Drank more water. Lay on the couch under the throw blanket and watched something that required nothing of me. Thought about Bree and Jenson and the particular difficulty of things that resumed without ever having been properly finished.

Thought about complicated.

At some point I fell asleep on the couch and when I woke up it was four in the afternoon and Morvaine was doing its October thing with the light and I had three days before I was back at Oswald's and I was, I told myself, perfectly fine with that.

Perfectly fine.

---

*End of Chapter Ten*