Page 39 of Oops, I'm Having My Best Friend’s Baby!

CHAPTER 15

AMY

Amy pulled into the parking lot of the event center where she would be catering that night and sighed as she turned off the ignition. She just needed a moment before she got out of the van because as soon as her feet hit the floor, she was going to be in work mode and it would be a long night ahead. She’d never catered for an event this big before and definitely never one this fancy. Even the outside of the event center looked intimidating as it loomed over her, and she had to resist the urge to turn the van on again and drive away.

It stung her pride bad, really bad, but she had accepted all of the jobs that had come through thanks to Kai’s unsolicited meddling. Amy was many things, but she wasn’t an idiot. For one thing she needed the money, and with this sort of money, she could upgrade a bunch of things in her kitchen and, after another few jobs, maybe even upgrade her van. Not to mention if she started actively refusing jobs, especially high-profile catering jobs like these ones, for no apparent reason other than “Sorry, there was this whole thing where I didn’t want Kai Nichols to recommend me because of a very complicated history between us,” word would get around. People would think she was insane and that would be a lethal blow to her business. She would be digging her own grave, so she swallowed her pride, even if it hurt, and took the jobs. But still… she was allowed to be nervous.

There was a knock on the window and Amy nearly jumped out of her skin, her hand instinctively going to her throat like an old woman clutching her pearls.

A young man, a teenager really, in a black and burgundy waiter’s uniform, was looking through the window with a lopsided smile and a wave. Amy caught her breath and opened the door, forcing herself not to admonish the guy for giving her the fright of her life.

“Hey,” he said, shifting shyly from foot to gangly foot. “You’re Amy, right?”

“Yep, that’s me,” she said, heading straight for the back to start unloading the food that she’d prepped, ready to be finished off in the event center’s kitchen.

“I’m Andy. I’m one of the waiters, like, obviously,” he said, gesturing to his uniform. “Uh, my boss told me to come help you, that if you needed anything, that would be my job. So, here to help!”

He gave her an enthusiastic thumbs up and Amy immediately forgave him for scaring the daylights out of her. It was like watching a puppy stumble around. How could you be mad at that?

“Thank you, Andy,” she said with a more genuine smile this time. “Could you help me carry these trays inside?”

“Oh, sure! I’ll show you where the kitchens are and everything. Just follow me.”

Over several trips the two of them got Amy’s trays into the kitchen, most of them laid out on the counter, the shrimp in the fridge and the tiny tacos in the oven to crisp up. Andy gave her a rundown of the evening, reading from carefully taken notes in his phone, showed her where the bathrooms and fire exits were with stern gravity, and then asked if she needed anything else.

“I’m good, Andy, thank you. You’ve done a great job.”

He beamed at the praise. “This is my first real job,” he said, straightening his uniform. “You know, apart from being a cashier after school. I’m saving up for a car too. Not a nice one, but at least some sort of car.”

“That sounds great,” Amy said. “As long as it has a running engine, right?”

“Ain’t that the truth!” he declared before getting called away by the boss of the wait staff that had been hired. The boss gave them all an extra rundown for the evening before the guests arrived, and he explained how they would take the food from the kitchens and in what order. It seemed like a logistical nightmare, and Amy was more than happy to keep to herself in the kitchens instead of serving up the food by herself like she usually would.

For the first time since arriving at the venue, Amy was on her own, everything prepped as much as was possible for the moment, with nothing to distract her from her own thoughts. She instantly hated it.

The first thing that hit her in the now silent kitchen was the nerves. They’d been bad all day, but now they swamped her. This was the biggest job she’d ever signed up for, both in terms of the guest list — over two hundred people were expected to show up — and the prestige of the event. This wasn’t some high school reunion for a random school on the outskirts of San Diego. This was a proper charity gala, where a table cost at least ten grand and men would be wearing tuxedos and women would be arriving in floor-length gowns and stilettos. It was the stratosphere that Jason and Jess belonged to, that Kai belonged to. It was the type of life Amy had had a taste of for a brief week on the yacht. This was what she’d been afraid of with being left alone… Already her thoughts had spiraled back to Kai.

She was still mad at him, but it was getting harder to rationalize being mad at him. Because maybe, maybe, she’d been wrong, which wasn’t something that had even crossed her mind until the last few days when she’d started doing the prep for the gala. It was a different level of catering, a different level of creative control, not to mention an entirely different level of paycheck that had been sent through. So, yeah, she could see why Kai had been so insistent on trying to help her because he could see how wildly different these types of gigs were going to be.

She should reach out to him and apologize. But how did you have that conversation? Hey, I get it, I do. I understand now why you just wanted to help me, and I realize how my own pride and my own demons were getting in the way of my success. It’s okay to have help. I realize this now. But also, I’m still really, really mad, and you deserve it because you went behind my back and ignored my wishes. How did you even begin to talk about that? Amy just wanted her friend back… that was all.

But here was the other problem; she and Kai had swiftly and irreversibly stepped over the line from friendship into something else. Could they even go back to being just friends? Could things ever be the same between them? This is what she’d always been afraid of, that the line would be crossed and everything would fall apart immediately. Well, point proven. Yay.

She pressed her forehead against the cool, stainless-steel surface of the industrial fridge and sighed. What a mess.

Maybe food would help; food usually helped. Either way, if she didn’t eat something right now, she wasn’t going to have the time for the rest of the night as she finished off courses and sent them out. She opened the fridge and took stock of the massive amounts of garlic shrimp skewers she’d made. Amy had ordered way too much, and instead of just letting it go to waste, she had prepped the whole bunch. If she was going to snack on anything, it would have to be the shrimp. A full meal of it wouldn’t even make a dent.

What a weird day. There she was, depressed at the whole situation with Kai, starting to feel the thrill of having this job be a success, but also terrified if this job wasn’t a success, and all the while eating garlic shrimp and waiting for the chaos to begin.

So far the evening had gone well, and even though this wasn’t a sentence Amy had ever thought she’d say, thank God for the awkward teenager that had been assigned to be her helper. Whenever the next course was ready to go out, Andy enthusiastically jumped in to help her take trays out of the oven or out of the fridge, to set the final garnishes on each canapé, and listen intently to what each dish was so that he could help to pass on the information to the rest of the waitstaff should the guests have any questions. The kid was a gem, and it made it painfully clear to Amy that if she was going to keep doing this scale of event, then she was seriously going to need to hire some help of her own. The thought made her feel queasy, and once that feeling reared its head, it never really left.

But then that entire train of thought, as always, led back to Kai and to another stab of guilt at how she’d constantly rejected his attempts to help. It turned out that having assistance made life a whole lot easier. Who knew? Well, Kai had known, and she’d crucified him for trying to make her see it.

So even though the technical side of things had been going well, the waitstaff coming in batches to take out the next course, with Andy jumping in as Amy’s sous chef when needed, Amy was just feeling worse and worse as time ticked by. Mentally and physically. The queasy feeling that had been building in her stomach the whole evening started to flood through her in dizzying waves.

As the waitstaff filed in to take out the trays of shrimp skewers, it all came to a crescendo, the dread and the guilt and then the seasick feeling that had been getting worse and worse, blowing up into straight-up nausea. Amy left the kitchen, having to run to the bathroom to be sick. She made it just in time, thank God, but waves of that terrible seasick feeling kept washing over her. It was a few minutes before she was able to splash her face with cold water and head back to the kitchen with something new to worry about weighing her down.

She never threw up. Ever. No cold, flu or bout of car sickness had ever had her throwing up like that. The only time she could ever remember feeling that sick and having it pass so suddenly was when she’d gotten food poisoning when she was eighteen.

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