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The sheets are soft under his cheek.
She’s the first and only thing that he sees when he opens his eyes. The sunlight hitting her from behind. The braids spilling down from the pillow into the space between them. Her fingers circled around his wrist, holding his arm steady.
He tries to clear his throat to ask her – what are we doing? The air hits it like shards of glass. Why the fuck would he ask? Why the fuck would he ruin this?
He follows Sydney’s gaze. She hasn’t looked up since he came to. She might not know he’s awake. Maybe that is precisely why this exists - skin on skin, her so close. As long as it’s just his body, he can’t fuck it up.
Up, up, higher and higher, the space on his inner arm gets filled with her focused scribbling, words pushing each other, circling around his tattoos. He can’t make out much, it’s all upside down for him, but the measurements give a hint - recipe. That’s what she’s lost in. And on the top, inching closer to his shoulder - repeated four times and short, easy to decipher - pen driving deeper into his skin to the point it almost hurts:
Acid Acid Acid Acid
He wakes up before the alarm hits, like always. Sydney’s first notebook, forgotten and found, in his outstretched hand.
///
Luca comes in when most of their staff have already cleared out. In the dark blue apron, he looks like he’s not just a guest in the kitchen. Sydney gravitating towards him the moment she sees him, her face lit up, he looks like a splatter of blood on the cutting board.
He sees it before he feels it, Tina’s yelp bringing him back to his station, his body, even if from the outside. The mushrooms he’s been cutting starting to get drenched in red. His hand, just another slab of meat.
“Fuck,” Tina says, bouncing forward but then moving away, setting motion. Marcus is there, muttering “Shit, man,” hovered over. Sydney, taking the knife still clutched in his other hand.
“Fuck, this actually looks bad,” she swallows, eyebrows high up at the fucking mess that he made. It’s the most emotion he’s seen directed at him in a – long time. How long? Hysterically, he knows how long he’s been trying to figure it out - the last four days. “Like, ER bad.”
He tries not to flinch. The ER is not a synonym for Claire. She’s not saying her name.
“Is it ER bad? Call Claire, maybe? bad?” she asks. Not an accusation. There’s worry in her voice. “Dude, Carmy, say something.”
“Sorry – I’m — sorry,” he finds his voice at the same time he finds himself back in his body, his finger pulsing with pain. But over it just the familiar desperation taking its hold, twitching him away from Sydney, from all of them.
He crashes into the back door with his right shoulder, careful not to smear it. There is a lot of blood. It already trails down his wrist and into the sleeve of his coat.
It’s bizarre. It’s fucking stupid. Donna’s hands, over his, over the knife too heavy for him yet. Mikey adjusting him just so. On the small screen of their home computer, a faceless chef, let the knuckle guide the knife. He’s cut himself so many times these past few months. Stupid mistakes he shouldn’t make anymore and still does, again and again, more and more often lately.
He’s an idiot. He’s a fucking brainless moron.
The door doesn’t bang against the wall. Careful, thought-through motions. Thick accent.
“Tina is very unhappy that you walked right past her med kit,” Luca says. It’s just him.
Carmy tries to remember. Two seconds ago. Ten. Forty. All smudged into the dirty pavement. A cigarette stub someone left on the ground. No Tina.
When he turns around, it is just Luca, a med kit and a water bottle in his hands.
“Uh, you don’t need to do it,” Carmy warns. Asks, maybe. They’re not friends, they don’t work together. He doesn’t know if it makes it better or worse or just more embarrassing that he’s standing there dripping blood in the back alley of his restaurant after hours. That Luca’s the one following after him.
“I walk back now and someone will really drive you to the hospital,” Luca argues, but his tone is not demanding. It never is. An open invitation: okay, here. I’ve warned you, now it’s up to you.
Carmy lets himself look at his own hand. It’s not good. There’s a flap of skin that he barely escaped cutting off in its entirety, and the blood just kind of keeps gushing out from under it.
With no warning, Luca unclasps the bottle, starts pouring water in a thin well-aimed stream. It lightens the red as it flows down to the pavement, mixes with it. It stings like a motherfucker.
“Shit,” Carmy yelps, his hand twitching from surprise and a new kind of pain.
“Dude,” Sydney’s voice comes from behind Luca’s back. Then she follows, peering over his side, looking at the impromptu wash station in clear frustration. Her headscarf is dark dark blue with white leaf strokes scattered in a loose pattern. It matches the skies over them. She grabs the almost finished bottle from Luca. “You were supposed to bring him back in, not start an amateur outside triage, the fuck.”
When she looks up, her eyes meet Carmy’s. Golden dots of light reflected in deep brown. It’s been useless attempt after useless attempt at getting her to meet his gaze, lately, and now she is. Slam the breaks. He needs to pause this crash for just, please, one single second.
“Come on,” she says, and when he nods she nods back but looks away.
///
He talks to Claire a couple of days after he talks to Fields. It goes better. He doesn’t cry and she doesn’t cry, even though her eyes start glistening halfway into their conversation, and none of them say that the other has been improved by how it all went down.
It takes one Fak for the news that they met up to spread like weeds. Carmy realizes that he’s been waiting for Richie’s reaction just as it doesn’t come.
His time in the freezer is half blur half shard-sharp clear snippets of words and emotions he still stumbles upon every day. Claire’s name, accusatory, in Richie’s voice - a particularly pointed piece. Richie must have an opinion. Whatever it is, though, he doesn’t care to share it with Carmy.
///
He comes in at five thirty. Stares at the money clock set firmly under the words, Every second counts, the numbers swinging in different direction day after day. Stares at the menu they need to set. Tries to guess whose keys are turning in the lock, Syd’ or Marcus’, Luca trailing after him.
Marcus brought up the question a day after the stupid fucking money-counting screen that by all means shouldn’t be a real thing was installed square in the middle of their kitchen.
It was during a time just like that, only the three of them and the glow of white overhead lights. Carmy couldn’t sleep at all, reeling from the news. His brain felt like a piece of rock just knocking on the sides of his skull. Sydney was dressed in the same clothes as yesterday, only the scarf went from orange to a checkered light blue and white. She was slumping against the wall while he paced around slowly, cursing, trying to rub the tiredness out of his eyes.
Marcus came out of his transfixion with numbers. Softly, as always, he said: “I want to do something really good while I can.” Not resigned, no. Determined. It made Syd come out of her own transe.
She was nodding. “What do you need?” She asked, just as soft.
He shrugged. “I guess, if I might not have time, I need another pair of hands. Actually, that’s kind of an excuse, I would’ve asked either way.”
He turned to look fully at both her and Carmy, and his calmness was somehow worse than everyone’s yesterday’s fretting. More than anyone, Marcus deserved all of the overpriced mixers and pastry brushes that could be hauled out of there at the end of the month. He deserved having a job that wasn’t at risk of blowing up any day. And Carmy couldn’t provide.
“Ask,” he said, hoping it was something he could promise and actually do good on that, for once.
“If it’s fine, Luca offered to help me. Before prep starts, of course. Or after service? For free.”
And it was weird, but what he wanted - easy.
///
“So, okay,” Sydney says. Her back is turned to the kitchen door and she doesn’t see Carmy coming, too immersed in the conversation. The plates clink and clank in her and Richie’s hands. Richie holds one up to look at it in the light.
Her voice raises considerably, fake urgency. “Pomochi, potrzebuje lekarza! Right?”
“Pomocy,” Richie corrects, his accent morphing. He sets the plate he was holding aside, on a different table. “Okay, one more. Very important.”
His gaze snaps to Carmy, finger pointed. Sydney turns to follow the direction. “Pierdol się!”
Carmy stops.
“Someone like that comes your way, you use it,” Richie says, looking at him for a few more long seconds. Then he picks up another plate.
“And that means..?” Syd asks, suspicious, raising her brows. She’s in a loose green shirt embroidered with flowers and butterflies, red head scarf to match its accents. She is sort of looking at Carmy, but like he is an ordinary part of the layout, not a stand-out piece.
“Fuck you,” Carmy fills in.
There was a month, he doesn’t remember when exactly, but he was still trying to crack algebra at that point, even knowing that it was hopeless, a month or a couple of weeks when Mikey and Richie were walking around hurling those words at each other and other people like parrots who only ever heard one thing, until Mikey got bored with it. Fuck you. One of the few things Richie apparently knew how to say in Polish.
“Go-o-ot it,” Syd drags out, not even slightly surprised. “So I can tell an unknown polish man to fuck himself and then ask for medical help. Cool, cool.”
“Maybe you ask for help and then you tell the doctor to fuck himself,” Richie says, wincing. “Variety.”
Sydney passes him a plate and in a swift, unthinking motion he takes it and adds to the pile on the other table. Carly watches them work from a few steps away.
There’s a bottle of good apple juice and used glasses close to the edge of their station. On a pulled out chair, an empty plate with the crumbs of the cheesecake Marcus and Luca made in their joint creative frenzy that’s still continuing in the kitchen. They exist around each other in a space filled with laughter that Carmy could hear through the wall.
“So what’s up?” Sydney asks, twisted around. She is actually seeing him, maybe. Some part of his face, at least.
He wanted her to try the ribeye he’s been trying to make sense of this whole morning. It was finally something worth showing her, the plate he left back in the kitchen. But it must’ve gone cold, now. He spent a minute against the door, just listening to their muffled voices, bracing himself to come out and see them, bright in the morning sun spilling across the room.
He searches for some excuse.
Tries to shrug it off. “Just wanted to give the guys some privacy.”
The effect is not what he was expecting. Richie looks up at him, surprised, and then he and Sydney are staring at each other with bewildered expressions before they turn the twin stare back to Carmy.
“Look who’s gaining awareness,” Richie says, cryptically, but he can say whatever he wants forever, because there’s a small smile on Sydney’s lips.
“Don’t give them too much privacy, though,” she half-laughs. The collar of her shirt is slightly askew on one side. It shows the promise of the skin of her shoulder. Carmy wishes he understood.
“What are you doing?” He asks quietly, instead. Breaches the last remaining steps. When she left the kitchen he thought that it was a brief reprieve, and then she took camp here, at the front, having breakfast with Richie and staring at plates.
She points a plate at him. “Picking out what to steal if we get closed, obviously.”
“That’s actually really necessary in your case,” Richie laughs. “You gotta have more than one fork next time you have people over.”
Because he, and like a dozen other people they know, have all been to Syd’s new apartment. Carmy haven’t, and it is fine. He is not entitled. It doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t.
“Oh, oh,” Sydney starts, excited, riled up. “Pierdol się, Richie!”
///
With Marcus and Luca whispering in the background, Tina humming, multiplying voices, figures, footsteps as the morning grows into day, he tries to find the right rhythm of breath, the right rhythm of muscles and joints moving. He watches Sydney, across from him. The incremental twitch of her eyebrows, the slant of her wrist as she stirs the sauce when he asks. The way her jaw works as she tries it. He envies the hinges that connect her jaw to her skull, integral part of the process.
“Tasted good,” Sydney says, reserved. He doesn’t know if it’s true. How it feels on her tongue, going down her throat.
From the side, Tina exults, startling him out: “Yes!”
She’s at Sydney side in a couple of seconds, a plate of white and green setting down in front of her.
“Please try it, Chef,” she asks, intent, expectant.
It’s a thing of wonder, how Tina looks at Sydney, how Syd doesn’t even realize half the time. It’s not like that with Tina and him. There’s respect, and familial warmness, but Tina admires Syd. The first person to seek out when she makes a breakthrough, which he understands.
He thinks about Fields, him saying You left an excellent chef, so you’re welcome. It’s technically true. But here, in front of him, Sydney takes a careful bite and says, licking her lips, brows furrowed in amazement: “Fuck, Chef, that’s fire.” And that makes Tina glow.
///
Richie storms in when he and Nat are staring hopelessly at the walls of the office. With her hair in a ponytail, in a simple white T-shirt, she looks a lot like a nine-year-old who cleaned out his busted knee when he fell trying to broad jump in their backyard. Everyone at school could do it better than him. It also feels like that, now, with the bills and receipts spread on the table, her looking over them with tired eyes while he wishes that she would just magically take care of things. Find some medicine for their condition.
Richie almost crashes into the door frame, but then he stills, just looking at Carmy, and the expression on his face is frightening, but not new. Acute disappointment.
He starts talking just as soon as Nat opens her mouth, probably to ask what the hell’s going on.
“Did you know?” He asks, nonsensically.
Carmy tries hard to swallow. “About what?”
“About wh– about what?” Richie looks between them, agitated.
“Yes, Richie, about what,” Sugar snaps, putting down her pen to give him full attention. “Explain what you’re asking about before you do, Jesus.”
“Okay, explain,” Richie laughs bitterly. Carmy wants to take it back. He doesn’t want to know, actually. He’d rather try to do math again before hearing what made Richie mad.
“Did you, Carmen Berzatto, know that your CDC, Sydney Adamu, has received an offer to say fuck all of you and leave for the restauraunt your ex-coworker is opening? Because people are talking, but I don’t see you giving a single fuck, so hey, a guy decided to check in. Did you know?”
He can’t manage his throat to work.
“Hold on,” Nat says. She doesn’t sound irritated anymore, only utterly lost. “Is Sydney leaving? Who is — is Luca opening? Is he doing fucking recruitment in our kitchen?”
Richie must be answering, because Carmy can see his mouth moving in the circle left by his quickly diminishing field of vision. The only sound he hears, though, louder with every second, is static, like the world is filtered through an old, faulty radio. He knows what it is. His body runs cold-hot, hot-cold. His stomach feels like someone is trying to drive a hammer home on his organs. And his chest - he’s having a heart attack. Except that he isn’t. There’s not enough heart muscle to die over three hundred consecutive times. There is just enough panic to make him feel like it is.
He grips what he thinks is the table in hopes to stay tethered. He doesn’t know how fast the time is passing, and he doesn’t know where Richie and Nat are anymore, if they’re still here, and he doesn’t know if—-
There’s pressure on the side of his body. Rise and fall, rise and fall.
“Honey, sweetheart – just breathe,” the voice is saying, reaching through the crackle. “Hee, hee, like that, okay? Hee – let’s go, Bear, let’s hee.”
His body mimics the motion. He can glimpse, as he breathes, the blonde of Nat’s hair curtaining his remaining vision. The smell of the perfume she’s been wearing since Pete first gifted it to her years ago. The steady warmness enveloping one half of him is her. A hand on his back.
“Is he breathing?” Richie asks.
“Yes, Richie, he’s fucking breathing,” Nat snips, and then starts going again, decidedly calm: “Hee, hee, just follow me.”
His mouth is met with a glass surface, cold water lapping at his lips. Automatically, he opens them, lets the liquid go down his throat in a breezy wave, cool spreading around his chest. It’s a different kind of cold-hot sensation with Nat still pressed close to him. Not like his body is fighting itself to death.
Richie pulls the glass back. “Easy there, don’t choke.”
Nat pulls back too, slightly, pushes her hair away and he sees now, the both of them, worried looks.
“You’re a fucking asshole,” Natalie sighs at Richie. “Did you have to spring it like that?”
And Carmy is more grateful to her than he’d ever be able to tell, but maybe that is what makes it hurt. How much she cares for him when she shouldn’t. When he fucked up worse than ever, because –
“It’s okay,” Carmy says, even though the words hurt his throat to say, and the tightness in his stomach, in his chest, is still there and won’t go away, he knows. It’s his fault. “What–What did you say, ab-bout Syd leaving?”
“Uh,” Richie fumbles. He looks at Nat for a cue.
Carmy waves his hand in his face, shaking embarrassingly wild.
“Talk. Syd. Wh-who said that? That she’s q-quitting?”
Nat moves her hand from his back to his shoulder, rubbing in circles. He can feel her eyes on the side of his face. Richie leans against the opposite wall, looks at his shoes for a long moment before sniffling, his nose twitching momentarily to the side.
“Neil overheard Marcus asking her about the offer. And before you start – cause I know, I’m aware! Ebra and Jess heard them talking too. Trustable sources of information. Here ya go.”
“Marcus was asking her?”
“Yeah, man. I don’t know how he knows, they’re both gone. Probably fucking took off as soon as this got brought up.” He sighs heavily. “So I get it you weren’t aware.”
“No shit,” Nat quips. Her hand goes from his shoulder to her temples. “Fuck. Fuck!”
He tries breathing again, deep, shaky breaths. He thinks about the agreement sitting unsigned in her inbox. Eyes looking anywhere but at him. I’m not your fucking babysitter. He should’ve known. “And it’s Luca? Who made–made the offer?”
“I just s– No. Okay, no, it’s not Luca, he’s doing fuck shit with his career right now except for assisting Marcus for free. He’s crazy. No, it’s the Shapiro guy. Jess confirmed that he’s trying to open something, looking for a place. And stealing our fucking CDC.”
“And she agreed?” That’s the most important thing. The only thing.
Richie looks at him. The drawing behind him, The Bear.
“I don’t know, cousin,” he says, tired, and doesn’t even notice the slip-up. “They didn’t hear that part.”
///
Nat thinks it’s an atrocious idea for him to go. Richie agrees. Let me call her, she says. I will talk to her and I will tell you everything, okay, just sit down, Carmy, please.
He goes. He almost gets lost two buildings away from hers, because it’s an unfamiliar street, because his head is pounding and his eyes hurt being open even in the dusk. He can’t look around too much without feeling like he just got off a carousel and is about to throw up on Mikey’s shoes.
He’s not fully sure that the door he’s knocking on is hers. He knocks anyways.
She opens the door in loose-fitting gray pants and a T-shirt dotted with constellations, braids put in a bun except for a few loose ones grazing her collarbones as she moves. Into the phone she says “Yeah he’s here.” She’s looking right at him. She ends the call.
“Sydney,” he says. He doesn’t know how to put all that he wants into words. Do you hate me? Are you leaving? Is it over? Why are you doing this? What are you doing?
“Hey, Carm.” She looks exhausted. Her hand is still on the doorknob, holding the door open only just so.
His mouth is burning from the amount of lozenges he gnawed on on the way there. When he opens it, unsure how to continue, the air hitting the roof of his mouth just makes it worse. “Can we talk?”
She presses her forehead into the doorframe for a second, hits her forehead with it slowly. “This is about Shapiro’s offer?”
So straight to the chase. “Yes.”
She looks at him again, pure intent. The hand on the handle twitching. She pushes away, back into the light of her apartment to let him in, and he follows in one big, desperate step, their faces almost colliding for one brief second.
Inside, she walks through an empty room into an equally empty kitchen. On the table, there’s a half-finished cup of instant noodles and three glasses.
“I had Marcus and Luca over before Nat started to blow up my phone,” she offers, as if sensing his thoughts. He tries to guess which glass was hers. She doesn’t offer him one, just sits in a chair, one leg under her, waiting, watching him, big brown eyes. He’s not used to it anymore. The weight of her gaze.
“You can say what you want,” she says, not sounding like it. Her hands find one of the loose braids and twist it.
A year ago, he would hear her name and not know. Just a stranger he had never seen before. Just a blurred idea of a person, maybe not even that.
“D-did you accept?” He asks, not hiding his shaking hands as they hang by his side, empty.
He guesses there’s a life without Sydney going forward. He would walk into the kitchen they built together and go through the same motions, and Sydney Adamu would be a name not meant for him to say. Someone else will come in to fill the space where she stood. The problem is, he can’t begin to imagine how much space that is to fill. They would need to break the walls down again.
She lets the braid fall back onto her shoulder. “No,” she says, simple.
“No?”
“You heard it the first time, Carmy,” she reaches for the glass. It’s the one with a scratch on the side of it, like he thought. There’s nothing to drink, she just holds it, taps the bottom on the table. “Are we done with it now?”
He reaches for the relief that should come. She’s staying, so it’s okay. It’s fine. It’s good. He feels sick all over again. He worries that he might vomit on her nice floors.
“Were you going to tell me about it?” He asks. The core of it, splitting open. Crack the bone.
She leaves the glass alone. The corner of her lips twitches, sharp. “You’re my boss, Carmen. I would have to.”
“So you would tell me because I’m – what, b-because of a two week notice or some shit? Like that?”
“That’s how it works, usually, yeah. Bravo.”
Maybe lozenges burnt a hole in his mucosa. He tastes metal. “We could’ve talked about it. I w-would want to know. Just. I would want t-to know. I want you to talk to me.”
The whites of her eyes grow bigger in disbelief. “Sure,” she snorts. “Sure. Let’s have a heart-to-heart about how we feel and what is going on in our lives, right.”
She says it like it’s a joke.
“Why not?”
“Why—why not?” Her voice reaches that high note that means she cannot believe what is happening. Then, in a blink, one rise and fall of her chest, all that energy seems to gather and harden, fall, heavy, to their feet. Quieter, defeated, she continues, blinking rapidly: “Because we don’t talk. We get to the kitchen and we do what you want us to and we survive the day, hopefully. Which is fine. You’re the boss, that’s how it works. Just let’s not pretend it is anything different.”
Idiotically, helplessly, still standing in the middle of her bare minimum kitchen, he begs: “You said we were good.”
That moves her again.
“No, we’re not good. We’re not good, Carmy, but I’m not going to let myself run away again because things are tough. I’m going to put in as much as I can for as long as I can, even if it’s just for a week, even if I’m losing the best offer of my life and upfront health insurance. Fuck. Shit.”
She’s breathing heavy. Her hands, he notices, also shake violently in her lap. They’re a match. They both need that health insurance.
“It might really be j-just a week,” he says, soft. It might really be just a week, and then what?
Her eyebrows shoot up. She laughs like it was punched out of her. “Are you trying to make me beg Shapiro to take me back?”
“He should be begging you,” he answers, automatic. He has to give it to Shapiro. He knew Sydney’s worth. He might know what he lost, too. He should. It moves like a snake inside his ribcage, a misplaced sense of pride at being to look at Adam and know that Syd stayed, even if not for him.
“Yeah, right,” Sydney huffs. She doesn’t let him argue. “It’s final, anyways. He’s already talking to someone else, so. Ship sailed.”
“I’m going to do everything that I can,” Carmy promises. She needs to know. “Whatever it is that I’m doing wrong, tell me, s-so I can–”
She’s shaking her head before he can even finish. “So you can promise not to do it again? Again?”
“So I can– I c-can make it worth it. Just. I can do something right.”
She puts both her legs down on the floor. Her socks are old with a washed-out print, a thread hanging from one of them. He wants to feel the material with his fingers. He wants to fall down on the hardwood and dissolve, just exist as a presence in her kitchen while she goes about her day in her run down socks.
“What do you think is right?” She asks.
///
He comes in at five thirty. He brews enough coffee for three cups and then prepares two stations, next to each other.
When Sydney stands, hesitant but defiant, in front of hers and breathes out: “So what’s the plan?”, he asks, fingers tapping on the table: “R&D. I want to hear your ideas. Something you want to make.”