Page 11 of Knot Just for Show

Mavren

It’s nearly half-past two in the morning and I’m standing here, in the sparkling clean kitchen of my incredibly successful restaurant,Pomme Verte.

We closed at midnight, then ran through all of our front of house and kitchen shutdown tasks. I waved Jimmy, theplongeur, off after he’d dried the last of the dishes and hauled the last of the trash bags to the big dumpster out back.

With Jimmy gone, I ducked into my office to make sure that everything was lined up for Delia, my younger sister and sous chef–who would be acting head chef during my upcoming absence.

Of course there was nothing for me to worry about. Delia is just as capable, if not more than myself, in the kitchen. I know I only have a couple more years out of her before she flies off to run her own incredible place–and my front of house manager, Reina, is the one who runs the floor even when I’m out back on the line.

Whether my worry is justified or not, I’ve been anxious about leaving my restaurant—my baby, for more than two days at a time sincePomme Verteopened its doors three years ago.

Resigned to my neurotic fate, I shuck off my dirty chef’s coat and ball it up into a stained white linen projectile before launching it into the bin of dirty coats and aprons. The opening staff will ferry it to the laundry tomorrow morning. I let down my locs from their place tied high on top of my head for the entirety of dinner service and shimmy into a light sweatshirt before I shut off the kitchen lights and grab my jacket and backpack from a metal hook beside my office and push through the swinging double doors into the dining room.

The greenhouse-like enclosure of the main dining area is bathed in pinky orange city night light filtering in through the many panes of glass that make up the ceiling and walls. A few greasy yellow emergency lights shine from behind the bar, reflecting off the dark green leaves of the nearly omnipresent hanging plants.

A shiver runs up my spine as I take in the gently swaying outsized wicker weave hanging light fixtures, and I silentlyremark to myself how in the wee hours like this the bar looks more likely to be attended by ghouls and phantoms.

Sleepily, my brain tries to puzzle out why I am still standing here in the eerie small hours of morning instead of being home at my apartment, packed up and ready to embark on this absolutely absurd quest to find my pack. My pack and my omega.

“Mav,” a voice speaks gently, a hand falling softly on my right shoulder.

“What the fuck!?” I scream, arms windmilling as I’m startled nearly out of my skin.

“Woah, easy man. It’s just me! The Bert-miester!” My trusty, himbo saucier and one of my oldest childhood friends, tries to calm me— his hands raised up to protect himself from my panicked flailing.

“Bert, what the fuck are you still doing here?” I hiss, doing a double take—unsure where he has materialized from.

“Oh, I just picked up some dabs from Jimmy before he headed out. My torch at home is busted so I was using the creme brulee torch.” he explains with a giggle. Now that I look at him, Bert has that classic glazed expression of any successful pothead.

“Well you almost gave me a fuckin’ heart attack, Bert,” I snort, jangling my keys at him meaningfully. “And I wanna get outta here, so—shall we?” I gesture him toward the door.

“Dude, don’t take this the wrong way,” Bert hustles to the door, punching in the security lockdown code on the number pad beside it. I keep my eye on him, one skeptical brow raised as we prepare to both exit from the primed doors and lock them behind us before the system finishes arming.

“But,” I supply him, encouraging him onward.

“But… I can’t wait until after you’ve gotten laid again, dude.” Bert shakes his head.

“You’ll be at least 30% less insufferable, I guarantee it,” he adds definitively as we dart through the glass doors and lock them tightly behind us.

“Bert,” I begin on a sigh.

“Yeah, Mav?” He perks up hopefully as I turn to face him, his big blonde bushy brows pushing up toward his buzzed hairline.

“Can you try to remember that I’m also your boss now before you say absolutely asinine shit like that to me?” I scoff and laugh.

“Sure thing, boss!” He nods enthusiastically.

“Maybe you’ll be less of a tight-ass after you get your knob slobbed,sir.” Bert adds officiously. The two of us pause in a moment of stony silence, before dissolving into laughter.

“Guess that’s what I get for putting a son-of-a-bitch like you on payroll,” I tease, punching Bert playfully in the shoulder as we take off down the sidewalk, both of our apartments only a handful of blocks away in the twinkling city night light.

I manage a measly three hours of sleep between my late arrival home, packing, and wakeup-shower-shaving before the sprinter van sent by the production crew pulls up in front of my apartment building.

I sit in silence for the nearly hour ride with traffic between my apartment, not far from my restaurant in Koreatown to the nondescript building in Studio City. I will be spending the next two weeks blind-dating in specialized ‘bubbles’ while countless cameras watch the entire ridiculous scenario unfold.

It still seems somewhat unbelievable that I'm even here. The whole thing started one night at my younger sister’s condo. Delia, along with her pack members, fed me entirely too much alcohol one late night asBuild-A-Pack-Blindplayed in the background.

One of the alphas on a blind date with an omega he would never consider approaching in the “real world,” poured out his heart to the woman he couldn’t see on the other side of a backlit partition. Later in the same episode–he explained how much the experience of the show had opened him up to new ways of exploring intimacy with potential pack members.

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