Work Text:
To: grubmaster48
Subject: Advice
I need help. Do you still want to meet?
To: lemonmeringue
Subject: Re: Advice
Yes. Where? When?
* * *
Jaime’s stomach was tightly coiled into a knot. It had been like that all week since he’d logged into the food forum on Sunday and found lemonmeringue’s message. He desperately wanted to meet her in person—he had been petrified after last time, when she’d told him not to ask her to meet up again, that he would have to go the rest of his life without looking her in the face at least once, after all the hours they’d spent arguing over the proper way to grill a steak or the best kind of avocados (she insisted on Tonnage avocados, he on Hess), or just talking about movies and current events and their lives in the vaguest terms possible. He wanted to know about her childhood, look at her face, and taste her food. Jaime hadn’t been in love for a long time, but this urgent need to know lemonmeringue’s name felt awfully familiar.
“This is it,” he said, stopping in front of the Atomic Café. Lemonmeringue had picked it because of its “world famous” blueberry pie. Jaime had never heard of it, but she’d sworn up and down that it was the best in the city. She would be sitting inside with two slices of pie, waiting for him. The knot in his stomach tightened. “Gods, what if she hates me?”
“She might,” Addam said, and Jaime shot him a glare. He needed reassurances that everything would work out, not the truth. “Just don’t be a dick. If she’s been able to stand talking to you for more than a few days, you’re halfway there already.”
Jaime stared up at the café windows. A thick hedge hid the patrons from view. Was he making a mistake? Best case scenario, they would hit it off immediately, and there would be no difference between the way they wrote each other and the way they talked. Worst case scenario, the conversation would grind to a halt, neither of them impressed by the other, and he would be reduced to re-reading old emails until he was old and gray and alone. “There’s a big difference between chatting online and talking face to face.”
“Yeah, online, you don’t have to look at her if she’s ugly.”
“I don’t care about that,” he scoffed. “This woman, Addam… she could look like a fucking mailbox and I’d be stupid not to marry her.”
Adam whistled impressed. “Wow… the cybersex is that good?”
“What? No—there’s no—Gods, Addam.”
“Well, I sincerely wish you luck, man,” Addam said, clapping him on the back. “Maybe you’ll get lucky tonight.” He turned to leave, but Jaime grabbed his shoulder firmly and held him back.
“Go check her out for me.”
“What?”
“Just… take a peek inside. Tell me what she looks like.” Jaime couldn’t pretend he hadn’t imagined her as drop-dead gorgeous from the first day he’d spoken to her. It wasn’t a deal-breaker if she wasn’t, but if she was beautiful on top of smart and funny… Seven save me.
Addam rolled his eyes and shrugged him off, but he climbed the steps anyway. “You’re pathetic, you know.” He leaned his weight over the hedge and looked inside. “You said she has two slices of pie?”
“Blueberry pie.” Jaime sat down heavily on a bench and held his head. His hands were sweating and shaking and he felt like throwing up. Father, please let this work out.
“I think I see her,” Addam said. Jaime leaped to his feet and rushed to the foot of the stairs. Addam was still looking inside the café, but his face had fallen. “She, uh… She’s not pretty, Jaime.”
“Oh. Well, that’s not—”
“In fact, she kind of looks like Brienne Tarth.”
“Brienne Tarth from that restaurant? Who cares about Brienne Tarth?”
“You should, ‘cause… it is Brienne Tarth.”
Jaime’s stomach dropped. He waited for Addam to laugh and tell him he was kidding, but he wasn’t moving from his spot by the window. “Oh, seven hells,” Jaime grumbled, rushing up the steps to lean over the hedge next to Addam.
Indeed, there was Brienne Tarth—tall, ugly, rude, vindictive Brienne Tarth—sitting on a small corner table with two slices of delicious-looking blueberry pie and a cup of tea. She fidgeted nervously, glancing up towards the door every two seconds and looking away, a permanent blush suffusing her face.
Jaime pushed himself away from the hedge and climbed down to the sidewalk. He felt an eerie sense of calm sweep over him, as if he were relieved. He figured he must have been—he’d been dangerously close to making a terrible mistake and he was tired of following his heart to disaster. He pulled his scarf out of his pocket and wrapped it around his neck.
“You’re just going to leave her there?” Addam asked. “After all those emails she wrote you?”
“Yes. Good night, Addam,” he said, and walked away.
* * *
Brienne fidgeted in her seat and checked her watch again. He was half an hour late. Maybe he went to the wrong address. She brought out her phone and checked that the address she’d given him was correct. The café was plainly visible from the corner. There was no way to miss it. Maybe he had an accident. She resisted the temptation to send him another private message. Unless he logged into the forum on his phone and checked his inbox, he wouldn’t see it in time, and she didn’t want to come across as desperate, despite the fact that she felt like she was about to explode.
Why did she feel compelled to meet this man anyway? So they’d been chatting online for the better part of a year. So what? Sure, she’d told him things she’d never told anyone before, but nothing really personal; not her name or where she worked or what she looked like. She had told him about how scared she was of losing her business and how much she missed her father. She had even waxed poetic about wanting to watch the sunset from the bridge with him.
The past few weeks had made her question her place in the world. If she didn’t cook for her father’s restaurant, what was she meant to do? No one would ever hire her as executive chef, and she couldn’t fathom being a line cook after running a kitchen for five years. She could hardly talk to Olenna or Margaery about that—everyone at the restaurant was working under the assumption that it would be business as usual for the foreseeable future. And her relationship with Hyle had degenerated into that of roommates who occasionally slept together, and not even that often. The only person she could ask for advice at this point was a cybernetic stranger. But could she turn that into a real relationship with someone who called himself grubmaster? What kind of a username was that anyway? She stared down at the two pieces of pie and felt like an idiot.
She was about to ask the waiter for a doggy bag when the shop bell rang and a man came in. She couldn’t see his face—he was unwinding the scarf from around his neck—but he was tall and well-proportioned under the expensive wool coat, and her heart hammered in her chest with anticipation, until he turned around and she felt her blood run cold.
Jaime Lannister. Brienne hunched over the table and covered her face with her hand, pretending she was engrossed in her phone, but it was no use. She was too tall to hide and he’d spotted her immediately.
“Brienne Tarth. What a coincidence.” He was standing in front of her table, smirking down at her in that infuriating way he did. “Mind if I sit?” He didn’t wait for permission before he pulled out the chair opposite her and slumped down, pulling off his coat to drape it over the back of the chair. He was in a suit—was he returning from a meeting with other evil restauranteurs?—and he looked dashingly handsome, and Brienne wanted to hit him.
“I do mind. I’m expecting someone.”
“I’ll leave when he gets here,” Jaime said with a shrug, his eyes drifting down to the slices of pie between them. “Blueberry pie. Any good?” He picked up a fork and speared it through the flaky crust.
“It’s the best in the city,” she said, snatching the fork back and sending crumbs all over the tablecloth.
“Really? Better than yours?” He clucked his tongue. “You’ll put yourself out of business talking like that.”
“I’m not too proud to admit when someone else’s dish is better than mine.”
“But you are too proud to admit when someone else’s restaurant is better than yours.”
Brienne gripped the edges of the table and took a deep breath. “Can you go?”
“Is your friend late?” He leaned back in the chair, making himself more comfortable.
She bit her tongue and said nothing. She wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of knowing that he was ruining her date. “You know, blueberry pies—or really, pies of any kind—are very hard to pull off. You need a perfect ratio of crust to filling or the texture will be completely off. The crust has to be buttery and flaky and melt-in-your-mouth, and the filling can’t be too sweet or too tart.”
Jaime cocked an eyebrow. “I know how to make a pie. I went to culinary school, you know.”
Brienne tried to hide her surprise. “Good for you.”
“I think you’d discover a lot of things if you got to know me.” His gaze lingered on her face, then drifted down her neck to her chest. She suddenly felt exposed in the button-down shirt she’d chosen for the night. Feeling an angry blush creep up her face, she did up one more button, and glared at Jaime. He knew exactly how to turn her into a wreck, and she hated him for it.
“If I got to know you, I know what I’d find—instead of a brain, a cash register; instead of a heart, a bottom line.” She clapped her hand over her mouth, shocked. Where had that come from? “Oh, my gods. That’s the first time in my life that I’ve ever come up with a comeback at exactly the right time.”
“Congratulations,” he said drily, “it was the perfect mixture of poetry and meanness.”
“Meanness? You’re one to talk.”
“I’m just paying you a compliment,” he said. “I’m glad I could help bring out your dark side.” He plucked the fork from the table again and took a bite from the pie before she could stop him.
She groaned. “Why are you doing this?”
Jaime hummed with appreciation as he chewed. “You’re right, this pie’s delicious.” He twirled the fork around his thumb the way he had the first time she’d seen him at the restaurant with the kids. It made her chest hurt.
Brienne tore the fork from his grasp and slammed it down with a clatter. “Please leave. I beg you.” She intended for it to come out harsh and assertive, but she sounded pathetic and weak and pained.
He held up his hands placatingly, stood up, and… sat down at the next table over. Brienne sighed and tried to ignore the way he was staring at her. She looked down at the slice of pie he’d bit into and switched it with the one closest to her. If grubmaster finally showed up—when, when, not if, when—she didn’t want him to think that she’d eaten his pie. The shop bell tinkled, but it was only a pair of elderly women holding hands.
“So, who’s this guy, anyway?” Jaime asked, leaning across the narrow aisle that separated their tables. “I imagine it’s not Mr. Hunt, the Times’ premier indie restaurant food critic. Will you be mean to him too?”
“No, because the man who’s coming here tonight is nothing like you. He’s kind and smart and funny and—”
“—and he’s not here,” Jaime finished.
Brienne scowled at him. “If he’s not here, he has a good reason, because there isn’t a cruel bone in his body. But I can’t expect you to understand someone like that. You don’t care about anyone but yourself and your bank account. You might think you’re doing some kind of public service, bringing bad Italian food to the masses with your dehydrated tomatoes and canned Alfredo sauce, but twenty years from now, no one will remember you, Jaime Lannister. And maybe they won’t remember me either, but plenty of people remember my father and they think his food was something special. You’re nothing but a suit.”
The air seemed to go out of the café, and Brienne’s face grew hot. Two comebacks in one day. She felt strangely proud of herself and vaguely wondered what grubmaster48 would think, until she caught the look on Jaime Lannister’s face. He almost looked… hurt. Brienne’s stomach twisted painfully.
Jaime stood up and shrugged into his coat. “I guess that’s my cue. Enjoy your evening, chef.”
The shop bell rang solemnly as he left.