Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 81113 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 324(@250wpm)___ 270(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81113 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 324(@250wpm)___ 270(@300wpm)
Good luck revamping the entire restaurant industry just to undo a bad review, though.
The restaurant had been struggling these past two weeks, was the result. There was no avoiding it. As much as I wanted to change things, to undo that review or erase it or what the fuck ever, I couldn’t. And we were all feeling it.
Michael had to let two servers go this week. I’d felt so shitty. I knew that it wasn’t my fault, I was a good cook—but could it be? I mean, who else’s fault was it? Maybe I shouldn’t have rushed to push the menu. Maybe I should have waited, and just pushed for smaller changes instead. Making some menu items less complicated, changing a few things in the lineup in the kitchen, insisting on the same dishes but with fresh local ingredients.
I’d tried to bite off more than I could chew and look where it got me.
I woke up in the morning on Monday and just… lay in bed. Didn’t get up for hours. Scrolled on my phone, looking at social media and generally making myself feel worse as I saw all my classmates from culinary school off being successful, all the food they were making at these famous restaurants.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t had offers to work other places. But I’d given that up. I’d fought instead to be at Michael’s place, because I loved him and I loved the restaurant, and I wanted both to thrive.
Of course, social media was skewed. Nobody posted about the times that they were upset, or failing, or the time that they looked like shit, or when their girlfriend broke up with them. No, they only posted the good things, the successes. So of course when you looked through it you only saw that good shit, thought that their life was nothing but that good shit, and ate yourself alive with envy and self-loathing.
I knew all of that. And yet, I still wanted to throw my phone at the fucking wall.
Around noon I got up and migrated like a sloth to the couch, where I put on some trashy television and let it play in the background. Usually I would put on the Food Network but I knew that if I did I’d get too invested and start yelling at the contestants on Chopped or something.
God, I felt like such shit.
When I’d seen what Virginia had done to Michael… it had changed everything about my plan for myself.
Before that, my plan had been to go to culinary school and get a job across the country, or possibly in Europe. Far away from Michael, in other words. I’d take some more time and see if I couldn’t get over him. I’d been an idiot teenager but even I’d known that if I’d caused her parents to split, Brooke would’ve murdered me. She’d loved her mom, gone on girl dates with her and stuff all the time.
Then Virginia had fucked Theo and fucked over Michael and I’d had to stand by, helpless, and watch this man that I knew to be so vibrant, full of life and vigor, just turn into a depressed shell of himself.
As a teenager I hadn’t had the emotional maturity to really help him with that, and I’d hoped that while I was in culinary school that he could have at least helped himself out of the pit a little. And he didn’t seem to be in full despair anymore, but he was… coasting. He wasn’t being the person I knew he could be. Okay sure of course he was still amazing. I wouldn’t be in love with him if he wasn’t. But I knew there was so much more to him and I wanted him to be happy and goddammit, he wasn’t fucking happy.
So I’d tried to swoop in and be the savior and look what happened.
I made it all worse.
Virginia and Theo did their fair share to ruin it all. Fuck them, honestly. They better hope - the both of them - that they never met me. But I’d come in and put the final nail in the coffin myself. I’d pushed too hard and too fast, convinced that I could do it all, like some kind of fucking superwoman.
What the hell, Stevie?
His business meant everything to him, aside from Brooke. I had promised to turn that around for him and instead I had made everything worse. I had all but assured, thanks to the changed menu, that the restaurant would fail.
All right, maybe it wasn’t as bad as sleeping with his head chef and cheating on him. But it sure felt damn close. It felt like its own kind of betrayal.
I felt like such shit.
I just kept lounging on the couch all day. I ordered pizza, which actually I had never been a huge fan of, but I was suddenly craving it like nobody’s business. With tons of pepperoni and pineapple. Yeah, weird combination. But comfort food, sometimes, was just what the doctor ordered when the patient felt like a shitbag who’d just tanked her one true love’s chances of keeping his dream job.