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The thing about running a top, up and coming restaurant with an illustrious former CDC with burgeoning emotional inconsistencies is that you sometimes can’t stand him.
Like really, on a deeply visceral and overt level. All that skill and knowledge and intrinsic knowing only carries him so far and as it turns out, never beyond his own misgivings and wounds and neurosis.
That’s the pocket of existence that Sydney currently found herself occupying. Her and Carmy were in the actual trenches of their own befuddling dynamic and partnership after a recent absolute stalemate. As a result of a particularly explosive argument, they hadn’t engaged in direct conversation in 10 whole days.
Aside from the occasional “behind” “corner” and “yes, chef”, neither directed any of their communication toward each other.
Carmy had sent her a text regarding clarification on a massive poultry order the other day and she had replied with a one word, single syllable response.
He had attempted to broach the energetic fortress she had created at the tail end of their fight and approached her directly two days ago.
It was the first time he had entered her space with intention outside of preparing a dish or the inner semantics of running a restaurant. She had, without even looking up at him, put a hand up and muttered, “I’m not ready.”
But it had gone on so long that Tina was starting to ask questions and Sweeps and Richie were making flippant statements about the growing tension and oddity of their malcontent.
Sydney mostly was putting off their conversation because she was so steeped in how ineffectual and unclear her feelings about not just the argument were, but rather about the scope of him in general.
Who he was to her, how deeply this whole thing impacted her very marrow. So much differently than any other place she’d worked and every other person she’d worked with or for.
And that’s the part that rattled her into silence, the inconceivable nature of it all.
Her inability to pin it down, to clock its impetus, its range, its direction.
After several months of building what they had together, she felt the crux of their relationship should be actively understood and felt and known by her.
Yet it wasn’t, it felt marred and out of sorts and like odds and ends and different pieces of so much more that she didn’t have the language or the specific relational perception to solve.
Sydney knew she respected him, knew she was impressed by him. Knew she had enough admiration for him to span Lake Michigan. But there was also this deep affinity, this quiet draw, to something else just below and far beyond his professional proclivities and skill.
She often was stunned by his implicit trust and scope of vision he’d allowed her to almost seamlessly step into and bring to the forefront of the industry alongside him.
But parts of him that rattled around with guilt, shame, perfectionism and deep, unmitigated fear would sometimes throw a wrench in things and they’d find themselves on opposite ends of something pertinent.
7 times out of 10 they’d ease around whatever the issue was, he’d acquiesce or she would. Those other 3, he’d dig his heels in and pull rank.
And he was rarely belligerent or unkind about it. But sometimes she couldn’t help but meet him bar for bar, word for word.
Which could get ugly, and quickly. But it had gotten that way only a few times in the better part of a year.
It was still a reality infinitely better and safer and more freeing than anything she’d known in industry spaces before.
But that didn’t stop her from wanting to scream at the top of her lungs on occasion. Or do the very opposite, ice him out because their last attempt at communication had felt like navigating a minefield of mostly live grenades.
So it had finally come to the point where they’d have to mend whatever had been severed so specifically that silence was the only course of action for those agonizing 10 days.
After a private party, for one of the Chicago Bulls players, had wrapped and she could tell that everyone else had gone home for the night, she decided now was as good a time as any.
Sydney says his name, not Chef, before she even fully reaches his office door.
He looks at her the way he always did, with a type of profound and focused extension, but doesn’t respond.
“C’mon…” she offers, angling her head toward the direction of the front of the restaurant.
She hears him following her, several paces behind.
Sydney approaches the bar they’d had installed in renovations, grabs two glasses and places one in front of the barstool next to her.
She pours amber liquor into both glasses.
Carmy settles in beside her and takes his drink. Though her attention is elsewhere, she would have bet he hadn’t taken his eyes off of her since she’d gone to summon him.
“I hate when you’re mad at me,” Carmy lets out loosely after a moment. The words escape without much forethought.
As if that specific sentiment was the first thing he could think of. As if it was all he had been thinking about since she had started ignoring him.
“It’s not my favorite thing in the world either, I can assure you,” Sydney breathed.
“This time felt especially horrible,” Carmy admitted, taking a sip of his drink. “It ju-just reminded me of… I don’t do well when people shut me out.”
“Oh, you’d just rather be the one doing the shutting out?” It was a quip she almost regretted when she looked at him on the tail end of it landing.
“I’ve never done that to you, I could never…”
“It was an educated guess,” Sydney attempted to correct.
“Look, Syd… I get it,” Carmy exhales. “I’m a proper fucking dick. On most days, I can’t communicate well with a fucking pamplet giving me step by step pointers.”
Sydney finishes half of her drink to keep herself from responding.
“I’m a shitty brother, I’m an even worse son. Truthfully, I don’t know how to be normal with people, how to be there with and for them.”
He pauses, accesses the way she’s absorbing what he’s saying.
“Keep going…”
“But I know how to do this… I know how to cook, how to grind, how to work so ferociously I can’t feel the friction of my bones, can’t feel the pressure in my skull. And when you walked into The Beef that day, I – I…”
“You what?” She prodded, realizing she might just want to listen to him speak this way, this openly, this honestly for the duration of the night.
She might feel the closest to him when he ambled on and on within his innermost truth.
“I don’t know.. I guess I just, I th- thought that… maybe here was someone who could do what I do and be human at the same time. Be graceful, enthusiastic, be warm. You’re all those things. You manage to be all of that and still so wildly talented and commanding and gracious and I think when I get in my head, when I’m doing more thinking than acting, I might make that more difficult for you than I would ever want to. I don’t want to make this impossible for you… I don’t want to drive you away. Th- that’s actually my worst fear.”
“What is?”
“That you’ll get closer and closer to the truth that the Carmen Berzatto you thought you were coming to work for and then ended up starting a whole new and different restaurant with is nothing like you thought. That he’s more broken and a bigger disaster than you ever could imagine.”
She breathed out, finished her drink and poured more. Carmy watched her and wet his mouth with his own.
“10 days was excessive, I admit that,” Sydney relented. “That much silence is a punishment and it’s unkind and unfair.”
“It felt like a month.”
“It was more than the fight,” Sydney sighed, cradling the glass lightly in her palm. “I needed to figure other things out. Maybe I just couldn’t do that and interact with you at the same time. I could have communicated that better.”
“Real draining guy…” Carmy offered in a self deprecating quip.
Carmy could feel himself almost unable to look away from her and what’s more is that he was conscious of it. Like his gaze and line of sight had this way of finding her whenever she was nearby or sometimes even on the other side of the room.
It was even more prominent when she was within such proximity. An otherness of need to see he was unaccustomed to.
It had been hell trying to give her space when they worked so closely with one another day in and day out and she would cross his vision or come up beside him even for a short moment, never one that lasted very long.
When so much about her helped to orient him, helped to calm him. Even in such a wordless and unknowable way. She would immediately and silently anchor him without even realizing he was adrift in the moment.
“I’m not proud of it,” Sydney continues. “It’s no way for us to successfully and professionally run a business. It’s not a great example of leadership to our team.”
Carmy nods wordlessly, sipping his drink, feeling his weight unconsciously swivel the stool seat in her direction, his knees a couple of centimeters from her own.
“I was just so angry,” Sydney explained. “And then I felt silly for being angry, and then I was mad at myself for feeling silly.”
“You have every right to be angry,” Carmy rushed to an agreement. “Be as angry as you can stand. Just don’t hate me. I couldn’t handle that.”
“I don’t hate you Carmy,” Sydney responds softly, her heart skittering in her chest.
“Do you ever regret it?’
“Regret what?”
Carmy tears his eyes from her to look around the sleek, completely renovated space. Clearly far more sophisticated and polished than its former shell.
“Not for a second,” Sydney replies quickly. “This has been the crowning achievement of my career thus far.”
“I guess I just always expect the worst to happen. The worst always happens.”
Carmy pours the rest of his drink down his throat. Then slowly empties more from the bottle into his glass and watches the liquid rise.
“It felt like you were deeply regretting this,” Carmy confessed, running a hand over his tired eyes and the stubble on his face. “Like you were trying to figure out how to silently get out of it.”
“I wasn’t,” Sydney assures him, her knees briefly making contact with his. He feels the contact in his toes. “I’m not trying to leave. Not right now.”
He hears the last part blaring on a looped siren, galloping away like the thought loops in his mind so often do.
Carmy tries to direct his focus back to the feeling in his feet. His eyes scan hers.
“Who’s your best friend?” Sydney wonders aloud, attempting to change the subject despite his earlier admission of being the opposite of a people person.
“What?”
“Your best friend…” Sydney repeated. “And don’t say Richie.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Carmy leans back and pivots more deeply in her direction.
“Oh good.”
“You, probably,” Carmy admits against a giant exhale, as if he had been holding that truth and position alongside his breath.
Sydney’s eyes snap to his, lips parting in shock.
“You can’t say me!” Sydney protests.
“Why not?”
“Because Carmy,” Sydney tries to reason with both him and herself on the tail end of her confusion and the way this admission had made her instantly realize how tipsy she was. “Because we don’t do best friend things. We don’t go to dinner every other Thursday, we don’t send each other Tiktoks, we don’t know each other’s favorite colors… The title ‘best friend’ comes with criteria.”
“I don’t have a Tiktok.”
“You know what I mean.”
“So let’s go to dinner sometime,” Carmy suggests and Sydney can tell by the way that he says it he’s not perceiving just how much weight that phrase could potentially carry.
She takes a deep breath. She suddenly wants to change the topic of conversation when she realizes for the first time that their knees keep grazing underneath the bar.
“Maybe,” Sydney answered finally. She’s certain the whiskey makes up at least 40 percent of that answer. She suddenly feels warm and absentmindedly pulls her expertly tied colorful silk scarf from her head, freeing her braids as they topple across and along her shoulders.
Carmy watches as she places the scarf across her lap and gathers her braids at the nape of her neck with both hands and lets them all cascade against the front of one shoulder, exposing the full length of her neck.
His stomach instantly tightens and she seems to be under some miraculous and resounding spotlight. Like an errant stream of sunlight that suddenly broke through the ceiling of the restaurant at nearly midnight.
He tries to look away, tries to catch some semblance of a breath but all he could sense was the scent of mangoes and the way the brisk fall air smells the first few mornings of the season.
She always smelled like those two things. So distinct, so specific, so blinding. He felt the freight train crest in his chest.
“You are debilitating, you know that?” Sydney wondered aloud, knowing as she says it that it means a whole host of things she doesn’t feel apt or prepared to explain.
“Hmm, I bet,” Carmy chuckled. “Why did you say yes? To the Bear? You really went out on a limb, you barely could stand me in that moment I asked, or in several moments since, and you still said yes. Why?”
“You know,” Sydney studies his face, and he’s looking back at her again like he never stopped. “I’ve asked myself that question a couple times. And all I ever really came away with is that you represented so much possibility in this world, in this industry. And you’re so fucking good. Even if you were gonna make me wanna throttle you sometimes, maybe it wouldn’t even matter because you were the very best. And I deserve to work with the very best.”
“I’m not the best, Syd,” Carm says softly, almost painfully. “But you do deserve whatever you want.”
“And that’s it right there,” Syd says, the liquor smudging the ends of her words ever so slightly. “You don’t just believe in me, you let me display it, you don’t hover unnecessarily, you aren’t mean. You give me more than a say. You give me way more responsibility than I thought you would AND you pay me for it. I mean you proposed this entire thing before you even really knew me at all. And then you’re this brooding stone wall sometimes and a fucking puddle the next and you’re so particular and I know you’re going through alot but…”
“But…” Carmy wants to wrap his hands in the ends of her braids.
“But, I don’t know… it just confuses me,” Sydney relents, she realizes she’s drunk but not enough to begin denying the watering hole.
“You wanna know why I asked you to do this with me?”
“Yeah.”
“Because you came in that day with way too much fucking experience and presence like a gleaming light,” Carmy chuckles against the memory. “You really saved me in that moment. I wasn’t sleeping. I could barely function. Was late on everything, trying to prove to everybody who didn’t give a shit that I could do it. That I could make it happen. That I could do it for Mikey. And you came in and you knew what I knew, you were so fucking good at it all. And you did deserve it. You deserved this. The Bear, whatever you want. So I’d do whatever you wanted, I wanted to give you what you wanted.”
Carmy shrugs against how the end of his admission sounded. He thinks maybe he’s only on his third drink.
“A big proponent for sweeping grand gestures, huh?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
And Sydney lets out a small giggle because she can tell he’s being sincere and it’s deeply endearing.
“Syd…”
“Carmy…”
They both let the taste of each other's name exiting their mouths simultaneously roll around with the whiskey they’d been nursing. One of each of their legs is connected from knee to calf.
“You go,” Carmy encourages.
“Have you considered therapy?”
Carmy lets out a laugh. It happens so rarely and despite it being a defensive and protective reaction and maneuver, she watched how its force briefly ran through his being and changed his expression.
“C’mon Syd,” Carmy laments, his slender fingers finding the crown of his head to lay down and scratch the curls there.
“I’m being serious, Carmy. I know you’ve been going to those meetings and I’m sure they have helped but maybe it’s time to get some more individualized and direct support.”
“What’s a shrink gonna tell me?” Carmy questions, shrugging. “I’m not the only one with a family that’s nuts or a dad that left or a brother who offed himself. There’s probably at least 4 or 5 kids from my block with similar stories.”
“Why do you think therapists are in such high demand? For that very reason. Life kicks most people in the ass at some point, there’s no reason to not get help when that time comes around for any of us. Just think about it. Please.”
Sydney begins to fold her silk scarf in her lap. Gathering the fabric and placing it into smaller squares and triangles. Her knuckles graze against his knee intermittently as her hands move. His awareness of this catapults against his thought process.
They sit in silence for a few moments, letting the gravity of every word already uttered careen together and rest against their combined energetic beings.
“Your favorite color is orange.”
Sydney thinks she misheard him; she looks up into his face for confirmation of the claim he’s just made. It takes her a moment to find her voice.
“How do you know that?”
He reaches across their connected legs to briefly touch the folded scarf.
“It’s typically the most featured color in these,” Carmy admits. “You also wore an orange dress to the ribbon cutting ceremony.”
“That ceremony was almost 10 months ago,” Sydney counters, almost stunned into her voice escaping her mouth in a softer, lower register.
Sydney pours two fingertips of whiskey and knocks it back in one gulp. She sighs aloud, folds her arms, gives him a quizzical look.
“I just pay attention, I guess.”
“I wish I could figure out how I feel about you,” Sydney mutters more to herself than to him, but what was meant to be a wordless musing has now somehow been uttered for him to hear.
She instantly regrets that last bit of whiskey because clearly she’s already two sheets to the wind.
Carmy swallows and bites the inside of his mouth. Ponders this confession before offering a rebuttal he probably otherwise would have sat silently on for another 10 months or another 100 years.
“Sugar thinks I’m in love with you,” Carmy reveals, his tone so slight. Delivering those words with the delicacy they deserve.
Sydney is stunned into complete stillness and silence. The only thing she can hear or perceive is the blue of his eyes and the rattling of her heart. She’s a helium filled balloon just released from its weight.
“And what do you think?”
“I told her I wouldn’t know either way.” Carmy had no frame of reference for such powerful things. “Not sure I’d even recognize it.”
“Hmm, but you’re so astute.”
“You’ve forgotten deeply emotionally repressed.”
“That too,” Sydney responds, the corners of her mouth upturn.
“You’re the best person I know,” Carmy reveals and considers leaving it at that. He’s already said too much. But he feels warm and close to her and unfurled. “That’s part of it too, you know.”
“Part of?”
“Why I picked you, why I wanted to do this with you. Because I know it’d all be in good hands if I ever- If I…”
He can’t fashion his lips around the sounds of the words to finish that specific sentence.
“You know… if anything were to happen to me.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Who knows? That Berzatto curse may not have run out just yet.”
Sydney notices the way the tendons in his neck flex, sees the sliver of his gold chain and feels her heart sink and soar in equal measure. Feeling imperfect and unknowable degrees of a confounding something, she reaches out and lays her hand on his shoulder.
He’s warm and sturdy and intense. She feels the slight graze of his fingertips against her knee through the fabric of her pants.
“You aren’t leaving me this restaurant, Carmen. You’ll be right here. You are the Bear, no one else.”
He slightly nods, aching underneath the slightness of her touch. His brain short circuiting when he feels the pads of two of her fingers on the underside of his gold chain.
Sydney can feel the ricocheting of his pulse.
“I’m drunk,” Sydney mumbles against a deep breath.
“Hmm, me too.”
“I’ll make us some coffee,” Sydney suggests and before Carmy can think or respond, she’s slipping off the barstool, fully into the space between his knees.
In a split second that feels like being shocked by an electrical current, her body leans into and brushes against and then past him in a blaze of limbs, braids, potency and pure essence before she is gone and walking around the bar.
Carmy sits a bit stunned and tries to regulate his breathing and although he’d contemplated it a handful of times, maybe his sister was right.