“So what happened?”
“Take over this flipper.” He released the ball and reached for the beer with his free hand, his eyes cutting back to the glass. “Now, now! C’mon!” With a quick grab, he put her hand on the button. May punched it in time to prevent the ball from falling down the drain.
“Good save.”
He took a long drink, watching the game in his peripheral vision and effortlessly knocking the ball back into play when he needed to. May felt like a kid in the front seat of her grandfather’s car, asked to take the wheel so he could fiddle open his pack of Salems. “This is weird to do left-handed.”
“Good sobriety test. How drunk is May? Can she work one button without falling over?”
“I’m not going to fall over.”
“You didn’t have any dinner.”
“You’ve been stuffing me full of food. I could stop eating and live for a month on stored fat.”
He laughed. “I’d like to see you try.”
She wanted to be offended by that, but she couldn’t work up the requisite indignation. “Yeah, I’d probably give in the second you cooked me something.”
“I’d tempt you with an eel pie.”
“Yuck.”
“Don’t knock it. You haven’t tried my eel pie.”
“And yet somehow I’m not tempted.”
“If you tried it, you’d be more than tempted. I could tie you naked to my headboard and have you begging for it.” He slanted her a glance that made her flush all over. “Oops. Did I say that out loud?”
She elbowed him in the stomach and then had to scramble to catch the ball on her flipper.
“Slick,” he said.
“Thank you. So are you going to tell me the rest of this story, or did you intend to keep distracting me until I forgot all about it?”
“I thought you might want to hear more dirty thoughts.”
“No, that visual’s going to last me for a while.” She snapped her flipper and flung the ball up to the top of the table. “Carry on.”
Ben shook his head and took another drink, but he obliged her. “So Sandy had family money and connections, and she was even more ambitious than me. We opened our own restaurant less than a year after we met—with a hell of a lot more fanfare than our wedding, actually.”
“What was it called?”
“Is called. She’s still got it open. Sardo.” Ben’s eyebrows sank into their chevron of concentration. “Here, I’ve got this.” He took her button back. When the ball dropped toward him, he caught it and balanced it on the tip of his flipper. He bounced it there, toying with it, and then sent it back into play.
“The best part was planning the menu. I’d been thinking about it for years, testing recipes. I did a kind of heated-up Sardinian theme. Lots of seafood, homey pasta, and chile peppers, because I like them, and because nobody was doing much with chiles then.”
“It sounds great.”
He smiled, a quick flash of teeth that did nothing to warm her. “The food was great. But once we got the place off the ground, it was a fucking nightmare. I hardly slept. I didn’t even really eat. All I cared about was getting good reviews. Being the best.”
That didn’t sound so great.
“The worst part is, I was so deep into it, I just thought it was life. This was my identity, you know? This thirty-year-old guy with stress-induced hypertension, popping anxiety medicine and yelling at my staff all day long.”
His volume dropped. “I think I sort of got to the point where I’d forgotten there was any way to communicate other than taking orders or giving them. My dad was always giving them. Every kitchen I’d worked in for eight years, I’d been taking orders. I liked being the one in charge for a change.”
Ben let the ball fall down the drain and looked up at her. “You really want to hear the rest of this?”
She wanted to touch him. Put her hand on skin, on his arm, to tell him she was already on his side, and he didn’t have to close himself off like that. He didn’t have to defend himself against whatever he was afraid she would think or say.
“I do.”
He took a few steps away and leaned against the wall, as far from her as he could get in the tiny space they were sharing with the pinball machine. After polishing off the beer, he set it on the glass and crossed his arms.
“It’s not an excuse. I can’t excuse it. All I can say is that before you own a restaurant, you have no idea how much work it is. Any restaurant is, but especially if you’re as obsessed as Sandy and I were with getting those goddamn Michelin stars. You have to be completely consistent every night. Same food, same presentation, exactly as perfect as it was the night before. It’s like putting on an opera in a phone booth—there’s never enough room or enough time. You’re constantly under pressure, and I’m the director. I’m the one who has to bring it off, you understand?”