fic: Food Porn (1/7) R - J2 AU
ONE | TWO | THREE | FOUR | FIVE | SIX | EPILOGUE
MASTER POST
CHAPTER ONE
It’s not like Jensen has thought long and hard about it or anything-honestly, he’s not that psychotic-but he has come to the conclusion that there are two things that he loves more than anything else in the world. One is Ross, his nine-almost-ten-year-old son. The other is the restaurant.
His kid is terrific, but Supernatural is pretty much Jensen's whole world, especially since the divorce.
He loves every single person who works there, even the skeevy Venezuelan salad kids who delight in calling him every Spanish obscenity they can think of like he didn’t grow up in Texas knowing what every goddamn word of it means. He would even admit to loving his rotisseur, Chad, even though the guy’s more interested in the racks on the waitresses than the racks of lamb on the grill.
He loves getting up sometime before dawn to go and fight with seafood suppliers and produce people. He doesn’t mind one bit that he works ‘til midnight most days, sweating in front of the sixteen-burner range.
He also really just loves his toque.
He’s been first sous chef under Jeff Morgan for a little over two years and he very much enjoys the fact that every single person who works at Supernatural is utterly fucking terrified of the guy. It makes the kitchen run smooth and purring like a Lamborghini. People just do their jobs when they’re scared of the chef.
This is, of course, the problem. Jensen’s shitting kittens over what might happen while Jeff’s off in Seattle. It’s not that Jensen isn’t excited as hell-because, dude, when your executive chef gets picked to go be on fucking Top Chef, you get fucking stoked.
Jensen is just about the least scary person on earth. The Olsen Twins circa 1992 and fuzzy little golden retriever puppies are scarier, according to his roommate, Jared, (who’s kind of a dick), and Ross (who’s a dick in training). Jensen’s ninety-eight percent sure that Jeff being halfway across the country means that absolutely nobody is going to listen to a goddamn word Jensen says. No matter how many times people tell him not to worry about it he has a panic-induced mini-aneurysm every time he thinks about it.
So he does what he’s always done in times of stress: cook compulsively. His mother used to do it when he was little and Jensen developed the habit himself. What he does is buy out about half of the grocery store around the corner from the house and dirties just about every piece of cookware he and Jared have. He produces a ten or so course meal that wouldn’t look out of place on a French Laundry tasting menu, but no one will eat it because somewhere along the course of cooking, he will have convinced himself that he’s a horrible chef and that the food is utterly inedible and not even fit for Jared’s two huge dogs. Then the dogs will give him baleful, deeply patronizing looks-the dogs, mind you, not their owner (though that fucker does it, too)-before turning tail and going to cry and shit all over his bed for wasting perfectly awesome food. He regrets the massive waste precisely two seconds after grinding up the last speck in the garbage disposal, so then he breaks out the Patrón to drink on an empty stomach like any civilized failure of a human being.
Jared usually finds him passed out in a miserable heap in the middle of the kitchen floor and steps over his mostly dead body to start cleaning up. This happens way more than Jensen cares to admit. Jared seems to think that everything about Jensen is open season for mockery, but even he doesn’t tease him about his neurotic fits.
Eric, the man who owns Supernatural, is concerned for Jensen’s mental health. “I really would like to hire a second sous chef while Jeff is gone,” he’d said at a staff meeting not long after Jeff got the casting call from Bravo.
Intellectually, Jensen totally agrees that it’s a perfect idea, and despite what his ex-wife might tell you, he isn’t a complete crazy person. He just finds the idea that he’ll have a nervous breakdown if they leave him in charge and on his own to be kind of insulting. It’s one thing to think of yourself as a neurotic loser; it’s another thing entirely for your boss to agree.
Jeff had managed to convince Eric to at least give Jensen a chance. He’d leaned back in his chair, taken a long drink of tonic water, and said, “You never know, Kripke, the kid might surprise you,” like their age difference was twenty years bigger or something. Asshole.
Thinking about it makes Jensen break out in hives. And he has fair, dry skin anyway, so once he breaks out he has to soak in a tub full of Aveeno for an hour just to get some of the redness to go down. Jared totally mocks him for this.
“Oh my god, would you just chill out about it?” Jared says exasperatedly one morning a week before Jeff leaves, right after poking him awake and plying him with coffee. It’s almost six AM and Jensen’s alarm isn’t due to go off for another two hours, and all Jared gets for his troubles is a zombie moan and a swift kick to the thigh. “Seriously, it’s going to be fine, you big ugly girl.”
“I hope you die in a fire,” Jensen says, not even opening his eyes.
Jensen is not impressed with how awake the guy is, even if Jared is a freak whose sleep schedule makes no fucking sense. Jerk probably stayed up all night writing or something and then decided he was desperately starved for human company and came downstairs to bug Jensen.
“Can’t you call your girlfriend or something?” he grumbles, then rolls over and crushes his face into his pillow.
Jared laughs. “I’m way more scared of her than I am of you, bitch,” he says, sitting on the edge of Jensen’s bed and draining the cup of coffee himself. Jensen can hear him swallowing. He’s slurping obnoxiously loud on purpose, and if Jensen had more energy he’d maim him. “Anyway, Mike-your, what is he? Produce? Yeah-guy, called the house phone. Doesn’t he have your cell number for this kind of shit? He got you that meeting with that guy from Evanston about some shipment? I don’t speak Mike and he sure as hell don’t speak anything like English, so I wasn’t sure what the fuck he was saying.”
Jensen groans again. He’s been waiting for two weeks for Mike, Supernatural’s main produce dealer, to get around to setting up this meeting, so of course it happens the first morning Jensen gets to sleep in in a week. He peels himself out of bed and mutters something that might be “Fuck you” on his way into his bathroom.
He brushes his teeth haphazardly and doesn’t look at himself in the mirror. The thought of what he must look like makes him want to crawl underneath his bed and never come out. This supplier guy is just going to have to live with the fact Jensen hasn’t shaved in a few days and probably still smells like the rest of last night’s unmetabolized tequila.
Traffic is, predictably, a bitch. Jensen’s halfway to Evanston and on cup of coffee number six when Mike calls his cell and tells him the guy had to cancel. Jensen feels a little like finding a bridge to go drive off of, but laziness and maybe the fear that Jeff might figure out how to resurrect him only to kill him again for making him miss flirting with Padma Lakshmi on national television win out and he turns his Altima around and goes back to bed instead.
Six cups of coffee leave him too wired to sleep, and he spends three hours huddled under his comforter and watching soap operas and SportsCenter from under his covers. It’s not his best morning.
--
Jeff leaves for Seattle on a Thursday morning, so the first night he’s gone from Supernatural is actually Jensen’s night off. This leaves Kristen in charge of the kitchen, which is always an amusing kind of disaster. Jensen deliberately leaves his cell phone off and in one of the kitchen cabinets, and he spends the night in his underwear watching a Coen brothers marathon in bed with the dogs. He does not want to hear about the catastrophes his tiny little pastry chef always manages to create when she tries to expedite the main line. He wants to eat cheap hot wings and scratch his balls in peace.
Friday night, though? Jensen totally gets why Eric wants to hire another sous chef. He also understands Murphy’s Law on a cosmic level.
Bartólo, the skeevier of the two skeevy Venezuelan salad kids, flips his shit an hour before the dinner rush starts. The kid, who’s six inches shorter than Jensen and weighs maybe a hundred and thirty pounds, punches an impressively large hole in the wall in the employee men’s room and tells Jensen to “vete a la verga” before walking out like he’s starring in fucking Office Space or something.
An hour later, Kristen has dropped a tray of delicate chocolate lattices, ruined a semifreddo, spilled crème anglaise everywhere (it went places Jensen wasn’t even aware existed in Supernatural’s kitchen), and burned her arm on the oven so badly that she has to go to the hospital.
“Why are you such a spaz tonight?” he demands, even though Kristen’s already looking at him with big, liquid blue eyes like he’s canceling Easter candy forever, and maybe Halloween, too, if he can swing it and not break Jared’s and Ross’s hearts.
“Hi, Pot, I’m Kettle, horrible to meet you!” she snaps while she’s running her arm under cool water, glaring at him so hard she’s vibrating and her ponytail’s swinging. “And you weren’t even here last night! It was frigging Hamburger Hill in here!”
Chad leaves a gorgeous piece of sirloin to die on the grill to go drive her to the hospital, and Jensen only just rescues the meat in time. It’s a smidge too far on the well side of medium, but he so does not care. People who get their steaks anything beyond medium rare deserve to suffer anyway, in his opinion.
Five minutes after the rescued sirloin hits the table, Victor-the other, slightly less skeezy Venezuelan kid in salads-picks a fight with Sandy, Jensen’s favorite of the waitresses. Poor Victor ends up with a blue Papermate pen rammed half an inch deep in the fleshy part of his upper arm. There isn’t nearly as much blood as Jensen might have expected, you know, if he were the kind of morbid fuck who sits around imagining how much certain wounds should bleed.
Sandy, however, is, and she remarks on it after Jensen drags them both into Jeff’s office in the back room. She’s in her second year of med school at the U of C and she’s just wrapping a unit on the musculoskeletal system in the summer anatomy enrichment course she's taking. While Victor shrieks like a pig in a slaughterhouse and threatens to rip her ovaries out through her nostrils and make burritos out of them, Sandy calmly tells Jensen that she aimed for that spot on purpose.
“He needs this job, so I didn’t want to, like, incapacitate him, just teach him not to be such a fucking twatwaffle!” She turns to Victor and points a finger at him. “You hear that, vato? I am more than T&A!”
“Chingate, you a crazy bitch,” he squawks back, holding his hand over his wound and glowering.
They both make Jensen feel like a fucking giant, too big to fit in the tiny little office without crushing them both to death. Sandy’s bigger than Victor, who’s built like a sharpening steel, although most of her body weight is contained in her tits. Jensen sinks down in Jeff’s office chair and sighs.
“Just… go be elsewhere,” he says, pointing in the general direction of the door. He really just wants to cry, crawl into a large bottle of alcohol, and pretend that Jeff’ll actually be back tomorrow. He wants to ask her why she hasn’t stabbed Chad yet. Hell, he wants to stab Chad most of the time, and she’s known the guy a hell of a lot longer than he has.
Victor scurries out of there like they’re going to stab him again if he sticks around, but Sandy pats Jensen on the shoulder and tells him it’ll get better. “I mean, statistics basically say it has to, right?”
“Fuck you,” he says tiredly. “Go check on your tables.”
Later on, Jensen stands there miserably in the middle of the line, watching as his kitchen and the whole of civilization topple down around him. All he can think of is exactly how desperately he’s going to grovel to Eric in the morning. He has a feeling that he will be shedding his last scraps of dignity.
He looks around, cringes when the kid in the dishroom breaks something, and realizes that he is completely okay with that.
--
Jared apparently TiVo’d the Cubs-Blue Jays game (“I fucking love interleague play, man! And Canada!”) and is having a bunch of people over to watch it, so Sandy catches a ride back to Jared’s little 1920s bungalow with Jensen. She and Jared have some convoluted unlabeled relationship that Jensen gets to listen to a lot-Jared’s bedroom is directly over the living room and the ceiling is really, really thin-but Jensen staunchly doesn’t want to know. Sandy insists that the sex goes downhill once labels get slapped on relationships; Jensen walks away when she starts talking about it.
While Jensen drives home with Sandy riding shotgun, he fiddles with the radio that never works and she keeps up an entirely one-sided rant about why Victor deserved to be “shanked” in the arm, and how the little fucker wouldn’t have dared say whatever vile thing he said if Jeff had been there, which only serves to make Jensen feel even worse. Apparently, he’s not just awful at running a kitchen, he’s responsible for Victor getting stabbed, too. He glares at Sandy and pouts and ignores every attempt she makes at including him in conversation because he’s apparently a fifteen-year-old emo kid, too. That scary-skinny Ryan kid in the dishroom has nothing on him.
The first person Jensen sees when he unlocks his front door is fucking Chad, sitting on the couch with his bare feet on up on the coffee table. Jared’s playing Guitar Hero for the fucking gold while Kristen-her arm bandaged from wrist to elbow-cheers from the sidelines and drinks a bottle of Amstel Jensen damn well bought for himself. The dogs are nowhere to be seen, which isn’t all that surprising since Harley might actually be bigger than Kristen.
“I bought a waffle iron today,” Jared says, not taking his eyes off the screen.
That’s just about enough for Jensen. Sandy pushes past him to squeeze in between Jared and Chad on the couch. He quietly sheds his jacket, clogs, and checks right there in the living room, stripping right down to his undershirt and boxers and ignoring Chad’s token protest of “My eyes! Don’t need to see your hairy-ass man legs!” Jensen just grabs something from the hall table to throw at Chad’s head and heads around the corner to his bedroom without a word.
He does feel marginally more human after a scalding shower, and he’s not the least bit surprised to come out of his en suite bathroom to find Kristen curled up in his bed, watching a Lifetime movie about teenage pregnancy (which: ouch) on his little fifteen-inch TV. Jensen loves that TV. He’s had it since high school and it’s been his loyal friend through all four years at CIA, all eight years of marriage to Jessica, and the last year of sharing a house with Jared. The sound might be shot and the picture bleeding, but that TV might be Jensen’s best friend.
“Oh my god, would you look at yourself, you maudlin son of a biscuit?” Kristen gripes at him. She gave up swearing for Lent earlier in the year and decided that it was way more fun to try to come up with G-rated insults than go back to her wicked ways. She insists she’s a happier person because of it. Jared always asks her what she calls out during sex.
“Fuck you,” Jensen says blithely, pulling up pajama pants under his towel and yanking on the first relatively clean shirt he comes across on the floor. “How much Vicodin did they give you? Your opinions mean nothing.”
“Yeah,” she says, unimpressed. “Half your kitchen is so baked they can’t see straight and you’re judging my drug use?” She makes a big production of rolling her eyes and waves her bandaged arm. “Hey, at least I have a legal prescription, okay?”
She makes a harrumph sound and rolls over to face away from him. He can hear the other three laughing out in the living room and he feels a little bad that Supernatural’s little pastry virtuoso waited all by herself for him to quit trying to drown himself in the shower. She’s got second-degree burns on her arm and she’s worried about him. If that doesn’t make Jensen feel like an even bigger tool than before, well.
He crawls under the covers next to her, snitches the remote from under her pillow (she always stashes it there, like he’s not going to find it or something) and changes the channel. There’s a rerun of CSI on Spike, the one with the rapist-murderer with two sets of DNA. Jensen hates Grissom-has a rather long, passionate argument that he busts out at parties, detailing his hatred for the character and William Petersen as well-and Sara’s gappy teeth bother the shallow end of his personality, so he scrolls right past. Kristen makes the same growling sound Jared’s dogs make when somebody teases them with a Beggin’ Strip then puts it back in the bag.
“Dude, I love that episode,” she huffs. “What’s he called-a chimera! He’s a mythical beast, Jensen. That’s so hardcore.” Jensen rolls his eyes but flips the channel back. He tosses the remote on the bedside table and settles back against his pillows.
“You’re a mythical beast,” he says lamely.
She giggles. “Let’s watch my brethren outsmart Gil Grissom, okay?” she says, turning back to the TV.
“So… I’m going to ask Eric to hire somebody to help out while Jeff’s out,” he blurts out during the next commercial break.
“Ah, so you do occasionally exercise something resembling logic,” she says, shooting a grin at him over her shoulder.
“Hey, if you’re going to be a bitch, go aim it at Chad. He’s made of fucking gelatin and foam.”
Okay, so here’s the thing: the restaurant where Jared used to work is one of those uber-trendy molecular gastronomy places, so Jared’s completely obsessed with the bullshit. Jensen, with his classical French training, is wary. He figures that when the time comes that he lives in a dystopian cyberpunk society, he’ll cheerfully eat the squares of clear, steak-essenced gelatin embedded with curlicues of roasted red pepper, served over a tiny puddle of delicate foam made from the ground shells of crustaceans and garnished with a egg white flash-frozen with liquid nitrogen and coaxed into the shape of a broken heart. Until such time, he will eat a fucking steak that looks and chews like a fucking steak, possibly with a very fattening side of mushroom risotto, thank you.
Kristen giggles. “Oh, Chad. Now you know that words can never hurt him, right?” she says. Jensen wraps an arm around her waist and pulls her closer. She pats the back of his hand and leaves hers there, fingers curled loosely around his wrist. Her bandage is scratchy against his skin and she smells like sugar.
“Tonight, you know how he jumped all over himself to take me to the hospital? Totally trying to make Sophia jealous so she’ll take him back.”
“I don’t want to know,” Jensen says. He really, really doesn’t.
She keeps talking, though. “He spent the whole time all ‘Sophia this’ and ‘Sophia that.’ I felt bad about it-which is so wrong, since I was the one crying in pain-but I just couldn’t not tell him that it’s not going to happen, you know?”
“Seriously, K-Bell,” he says, sighing and pulling away from her. “I do not want to know. As far as I’m concerned, Chad and Sophia spend their extracurricular time collecting stamps and playing gin rummy with the elderly-and no that is not a euphemism for anything, you pervert. Watch your show.”
He crosses his arms over his chest and ducks his chin, closing his eyes to doze until the show is over.
Kristen pokes him hard in the ribs some time later. He cracks one eye open and frowns. She has one of her serious-talk-coming looks on her face. He has visions of two-weeks notices, stories about Chad naked, and questions about his lovelife, and he steels himself for the worst.
“Hey, I was just thinking,” she says. “What about Jared?”
Jensen feels like he’s missed a step in the conversation, not unlike his pastry classes back in culinary school, actually. Give him a few vegetables in season, some S&P, and a little bacon fat and he can make you Jesus on a plate. Give him an egg, some sugar, and a recipe for cake and shit’s going to end in tragedy.
“Um, Jared?” he asks.
“You know, the big, smelly dude whose house you live in?” she says, waving her hand and giving him her patented ‘oh my god, you’re a dummy’ look. “How long did he work for Gilmore’s again?”
It’s Jensen’s turn to roll his eyes. He sits up a little straighter. “Oh, so you weren’t sitting in the living room here that night he quit, then?” he says, even though she very fucking much was.
Kristen and some of the waitstaff had been over to drink and watch a Top Chef marathon on the huge new TV Jared had just bought. Around nine, Jared came barging through the front door like a rampaging livestock animal, yelling unintelligibly, throwing shit, tripping over Jensen’s stuff, and generally scaring the bejeezus out of everybody, including probably the neighbors three doors down.
See, Jared didn’t really need the job at Gilmore’s, and that was probably a lot of his problem. The place was the whole reason he started that stupid blog, because as far as Jensen could tell from listening to his and Chad’s stories, Gilmore’s was the worst kitchen ever to work in.
“This is what’s wrong with the restaurant industry!” Jared used to yell. It took Jensen a while to get used to, but Jared hadn’t done it since he quit Gimore’s. Apparently, Gordon Ramsay had nothing on Gilmore’s fast-talking feminazi executive chef. And then there’s that appalling fusion menu Jared still makes shit from sometimes. Call him parochial, but Jensen doesn’t think that kimchi belongs anywhere near a dessert menu.
The thing is, Jared is, like, famous on the Internet. He’s the Waiter Rant of chefs, only bigger. He’s the Food Porn guy. His post about the horrible night Senator Obama came to Gilmore’s was mentioned in the national media. And Jared’s a good writer, too, which Jensen didn’t really expect when he met him since he looks kind of like a big dumb jock.
Food Porn is anonymous, of course, in that wink-wink-nudge-nudge way among those who know better, narrated by a guy called ‘Chef Guy.’ He’d had the website for a little over a year when Sandy introduced them at some party. Jensen had just lost his own house in his divorce, and Jared was looking for someone to take over his spare bedroom and some of the mortgage. The roommate thing had been Sandy’s idea.
Sandy is a genius, too, because Jared is a seriously awesome roommate. Not that Jensen has a lot of experience living with people he’s not related or married to, but he thinks his arrangement with Jared is probably unusually good. Jared actually likes doing the dishes for some god-unknown reason, and he doesn’t even seem to notice that Jensen’s stuff has pretty much taken over the house like mold on French bread.
Which is nice, because Jensen’s something of a huge mess.
Anyway, not too long after Jensen moved in, some publisher offered Jared a book deal. He got a big advance and everything, so of course he freaked out when he found himself still working in the same job he hated back when he actually needed it. After Jared quit Gilmore’s, his friend Chad came over to inflict himself on Jensen and Supernatural. Jensen does not think this was fair at all.
The night Jared actually snapped and walked off the line at Gilmore’s, though, was particularly legendary. So Jared’s a big fucking guy-big enough that he’s generally the largest living thing in rooms not containing either elephants or NBA players. The night he told his boss to go fuck herself, thanks, he stormed into the house with his toque still on his head, a whisk still in one hand, and one gigantic clog missing. Everyone crowded in the living room had gone very quiet, watching him storm through the house, trip over Jensen’s crap, swear, punch the walls, scare the dogs, then go and systematically break most of the dishes in the kitchen. Luckily, Jensen hadn’t unpacked his own mix of vintage Fiestaware yet at that point, or there would have been bloodshed.
When he finished destroying his dinnerware, he sat down in the brown easy chair across from Kristen, still exhaling heavily through his nose, and glared fiercely at the new TV like he was trying to decide if it would be worth it to break that, too. Everyone traded looks.
“So, drama queen,” Jensen had said finally, “I take it you just quit?”
Jared had jumped, looked around at his wide-eyed audience, and blushed the color of a really good cabernet. He probably would’ve sparkled purple in candlelight. “Oh, fuck off,” he’d muttered, sinking down in his seat while everyone laughed.
So needless to say, Jensen’s a little confused when Kristen brings up Jared and Gilmore’s.
“What?” he asks her again. “Yes, my roommate. What about him?”
Kristen rolls her eyes again, a little more exaggerated this time, and sighs. “Well, we need somebody to just fill in for a few weeks ‘til Jeff gets back, right? And our good buddy Jared just so happens to be a classically-trained chef who isn’t currently employed, right? He spent, like, all night whining about having the writer’s block of doom, so working at Supernatural might be good for him, too.”
Jensen stared at her, open-mouthed and so impressed he’s speechless. “Oh my god, Belly, you’re the smartest woman on the planet,” he tells her finally, pulling her tight against his chest and squeezing her ‘til she squeaks.
--
Of course Jessica, Jensen’s ex-wife, calls him before he can approach anyone about Kristen’s idea. Jessica is a food writer, which he so doesn’t understand. She looks like an underfed pet and she doesn’t even like food. He doesn’t think she’s written a good review in her life, but she has a bit of a cult following. People eat that shit up, apparently.
Sometimes Jensen wonders how he managed to go from living with one person making a living bitching about food to another, but he figures that at least Jared doesn’t expect anything from him. He and Jess got married when they were nineteen, stupid, and pregnant, back in culinary school when Jensen was full of promise and shit. By the time Ross was about seven, Jess spent half of her time looking at Jensen with all kinds of disappointment. The rest of the time she studied Pilates and did nothing resembling fun. They had the most boring, amicable divorce ever.
Anyway, apparently one of the various magazines Jess freelances for wants her to go to New England for something that sounds a lot like bullshit to Jensen (do they really have vineyards in Rhode Island? Jensen thinks not, since the whole state is, like, the size of half a Texas cattle ranch), but whatever, it means he gets Ross to himself for a week. Jensen works so much that he never gets to see his kid, even though technically he has joint custody.
He’s not totally sure how he’s going to swing it, what with being at Supernatural every fucking minute, but he knows Jeff manages somehow. Jeff’s got an evil shrew of an ex-wife and a couple of kids of his own. Jensen figures he’ll stop sleeping if he has to. Then again, that’s probably what’ll happen anyway, since Ross is getting his bed and he’s looking at a week of trying to sleep on the least comfortable couch in Chicago.
No, seriously. Jared’s couch sucks.
“Jess, I have half an hour to eat lunch before I have to go back to the store. Can we talk about this later?”
He can actually hear her roll her eyes through the phone. “Fine,” she says. “I’m telling your son how you no longer love him, and then I’m putting him on a plane to Dallas so he can spend two weeks with your mother.”
“Do that and die,” Jensen says. He wouldn’t wish two weeks with his mother on Chad, who might actually benefit from her lifestyle boot camp, let alone poor Ross. Or maybe Jensen’s just been nagged to please grow up one too many times.
Jess laughs. “So his school’s got a break coming up and his last day is next Friday. I’ll drop him off on my way to the airport, okay?” Ross’s school goes all year, with three-week-long breaks every so often.
“Yeah, yeah,” Jensen says, pouring himself a glass of sweet tea from the pitcher in the fridge door.
Jared comes into the kitchen then, hair all in disarray, wearing nothing but a pair of jeans that smell like weed. Jensen quirks a brow at him and Jared just grins lazily. Right, then.
“Okay, I have a deadline, too,” Jess says. “I hate that woman at Food & Wine. Have I mentioned this lately? I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”
“Yeah, fine. Bye, Jess.”
She laughs. “Toodles!” she says, and then she hangs up before he can say anything else.
“But dude, your kid is fucking mean,” Jared says after Jensen sets his phone aside and crawls onto one of the barstools.
Ross goes to a special school for seriously gifted kids, and he’s recently discovered sarcasm. Jensen thinks it’s funny, but he can understand that it’s probably not so much fun for Jared, who’s pretty scary brilliant in his own right, to have a kid who comes up to his waist run mental circles around him, but really, Ross runs mental circles around everybody. Now that he’s thinking about it, Jensen gets the feeling that he’s going to spend the week with these two feeling like the slow kid in class.
“Shut up. You love him and you know it,” Jensen replies, not even looking up from his croque-monsieur. He loves the panini grill Jared brought home last week, although this thing with the weekly trip to Williams-Sonoma and the bringing home the random small electric probably has got to stop.
Jared shrugs, leans against the fridge and folds his hands behind his head. “If he beats me at Guitar Hero again, we’re gonna have a problem. Just sayin’.”
Jensen cocks an eyebrow at that, right over his sandwich as he takes a bite. He swallows and takes a drink. “Um, we are talking about Ross Ackles, the kid whose YouTube video of himself playing ‘Through the Fire and the Flames’ on expert awesomely has, like, a million hits, right?”
Jared gives him a look from under his bangs and huffs out a breath. “Okay, so maybe we’ll play, like, Halo or something instead.”
“Yeah, his mother will love that,” Jensen says darkly, talking around a mouthful of ham and Gruyère. Jess doesn’t seem to realize that their precocious kid isn’t like normal almost-ten-year-olds in his tastes. Except for Disney Channel stars, anyway. Jensen finds the High School Musical thing disturbing for sure.
“Fuck her,” Jared says, grinning. Jensen gets up to stick his plate in the sink.
He turns around and leans back against the island, wiping his palms on his thighs and looking nervous. “Um, would you want to work at Supernatural until Jeff comes back?” he blurts out. Jared’s answering grin is blinding.
“Oh, you cock-gargler. I was wonderin’ when you were gonna ask.”
--
A few mornings later, Jensen is in a significantly better mood. A couple of the waitresses have volunteered to look after Ross on their nights off so that Jensen can avoid the stress of worrying that his kid’s going to choke on pizza or electrocute himself on one of Jared’s appliances or trip over Jensen’s shit and braining himself while he’s sitting around by himself in Jared’s house with the dogs. He knows Sandy’s planning on making him help her study for something in the gross anatomy class she’s taking over the summer, which he imagines Ross will get a kick out of, being the morbid little bastard that he is.
He hears Jared come back from his morning run and slam the front door just as he’s stepping out of the shower. He really is in a good mood. The restaurant’s closed on Mondays, so he has the whole day to himself, and he just had a nice, long jerkoff session in the shower thinking about nothing in particular. It wasn’t the best orgasm ever, but pleasant. It’s a little disheartening that he doesn’t even have, like, fantasties lately, but whatever. He’s really looking forward to making breakfast, which is his favorite meal of the day, and trying out the new waffle iron (and hey, at least he didn’t jerk off thinking about that, right?).
There are the softer sounds of the dogs being let outside, and then an ominous thump from the dining room and a muffled string of curses. He grins at himself in the mirror. It’s always funny when Jared runs into something. There’s a grunt from the hallway outside his room as Jared stumbles over something else and bumps into the wall.
“Good morning!” Jensen tells. He glances at himself in the mirror again and decides that no way is he going to bother fucking with his contacts on his day off. He tosses his contact case across the counter. It falls in the sink, where he leaves it. He grabs his glasses and blinks as his vision suddenly goes crisp and clear.
“Jesus Christ, would it kill you to pick your shit up once in a while?” Jared moans. Jensen can hear him throwing what sound like shoes into the closet. They hit the back wall with a flurry of dull thumps.
“More’n likely,” he drawls. He takes a step back to survey the little basket of toiletries his mother included in the big batch of junk she Fed-Exed to him after the divorce. He debates not shaving, but he’s almost working a full-on beard at this point and it’s not really his best look. It’s also annoyingly itchy. “Also, need I point out that you came into my room?”
“It’s a minefield, I swear to god,” Jared says. “I need sweepers and, like, fucking anti-aircraft missiles just to come near the door. Not to mention that thing in the dining room. I almost died twice and you’re still in there… doing whatever it is that you do in the bathroom for hours. What do you do in there, anyway? Stare at yourself and wonder why God hit you with the pretty stick a few extra times? Fuck. I think near-death experiences qualify for at least a blowjob, you know, in the grand scheme of things.”
Jensen snorts. “If I had any intentions of ever going anywhere near your cock, you know, that would actually be a valid argument,” he says. Going down on Jared would make things so incredibly awkward. He purses his lips at his reflection in the mirror then frowns. The beard really has got to go. “Anyway, continue.”
“Fuck you. And your fucking Turkish rug. What is this, the goddamn seventeenth century? Who has a rug like that?”
“It’s from Iraq,” he points out. He doesn’t particularly like it much himself, but one of his uncles bought it for him and Jess, and she didn’t want it after the divorce (in fact, she was insulted when he implied that he might leave the “fugly fucking thing” in the house when he moved out). He takes his glasses off again, then grabs his can of Barbasol and dispenses a big dollop of shaving cream into his palm.
“Even worse!” Jared exclaims. Something else thumps against the wall. “I hate your ugly fucking Iraqi rug!”
“It matches your ugly red walls, asshole. Also, you were just whining about your feet being cold on the hardwood floors two weeks ago and I said, ‘Well, I have this rug…’ and you said-and I quote-‘Sounds awesome!’ Thus, the rug.” He smears lather over his cheeks and jaw, rinses his hands, and grabs his razor.
“It’s probably harboring terrorists and throwing grenades at American troops as we speak,” Jared growls.
Jensen pauses, trying and failing not to laugh. “You shouldn’t say things like that when I have a razor near my jugular. It’s unfair and I might die.”
“Lumpy. Iraqi. Rug. Of. Death.” He can hear Jared collapsing backwards onto the bed like a downed mastodon. “It’s like your life just exploded all over this room, I swear to god,” Jared continues. “You might be pretty, but man, you’re actually kind of disgusting. This is my house, you know. You’re just destroying it with your squalor.”
“You, get off my bed. Sweaty motherfucker.” He swishes the razor in the sink. “I have to sleep there and you’re going to make it smell like ass. And death.”
“I’ll show you ass and death.”
“Anywhere but my bed,” Jensen replies in a long-suffering tone.
Jared doesn’t say anything for a while and Jensen finishes shaving in silence, humming some Zeppelin to himself. He’s just finishing up when the bathroom door slams all the way open and he jumps and drops the razor in the sink with a splash. A bright red bead of blood blooms on his cheek.
“Fuck!”
“God, now what?” Jared asks, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed over his chest and a huge smile on his face.
Jensen shoots him a glare and grabs his glasses. He leans forward to survey the damage. “I’m bleeding, you dickhole!” He squawks.
“It’s not my fault you’ve been shaving half your life and you still can’t navigate a razor.”
“Did you actually want something?” Jensen gropes for the toilet paper roll sitting on the far end of the counter, next to the toilet. There isn’t actually a little dispenser peg in this bathroom, which Jensen thinks is strange and annoying, but he’s about as handy as a housecat, so he hasn’t just installed one. He knocks the roll in the sink pretty much every morning, so his toilet paper is always warped and stiff, like flaky white scar tissue. It’s still wet from earlier, too, so the absorbency is shot all to shit and he’s still got blood running down his jaw and neck.
Jared runs a hand through his sweaty bangs and tries to keep the hair out of his face. “I want food.”
“People in hell want cold beer and sunscreen. Right now I want a Band-aid.” He opens the medicine cabinet, but no cigar. He turns to Jared and points at the cut on his face. “You have ‘em in your bathroom?”
Jared doesn’t answer for a second, staring at him in horror. “You’re naked!” he squeaks. He backs out of the room with his hands clapped over his eyes.
Jensen stares after him in surprise, then looks down at himself and shrugs. It’s not like he looks bad. In fact, he likes to think he looks at least a little better than the average guy his age. “I just got out of the shower, you ten-year-old. Actually, no. Ross is more mature than this.”
“We’re human beings!” Jared says in a hilariously squeaky voice. “We use towels!”
Jensen shrugs again, even though Jared can’t see him, and scowls at himself in the mirror. “Band-aid,” he says petulantly. He rinses the rest of the shaving foam off his face and dries off carefully with a dark-colored towel.
“You fuckin’ girl. Ow.” Jared stumbles over something. “Get in here and clean up your shit and maybe I’ll think about it. You’re dragging down my property value while we have this conversation right now. And put on some pants! God.”
“Okay, yeah. Just wait until I bleed out right here into this sink. That’s totally fine. I don’t care. Not like head wounds don’t bleed excessively, or anything.” Jensen tears off a drier piece of toilet paper and sticks a big wad of it to his face. “I need a Band-aid.”
“I need to lie down,” Jared says. He collapses back on the bed. The rustling of fabric sounds suspiciously like he’s snuggling the comforter.
“I’m coming in there, just to warn you. Don’t stare at my ass when I walk past you,” Jensen calls. He flicks off the bathroom light and goes back into his bedroom, squinting around for the boxers he’s pretty sure he left out. It’s a lot less bright in the bedroom and he needs a second to adjust to the new lighting.
Jared is sprawled out on his back on the bed, both feet flat on the floor and one arm slung over his face. His Underarmor shirt is completely soaked through with sweat from his run, and gross, the bedding’s going to have to be fumigated or something. “Put that thing away before you blind somebody,” Jared murmurs.
Jensen stops dead in front of him, hands on his hips and a shit-eating grin on his face. “I could, if you weren’t laying on my underwear.” Jared’s hips jerk up and he gropes around under his back with his free hand. He groans when he pulls out a clump of black fabric and holds it out pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He makes a hilarious keening sound when Jensen relieves him of his burden.
“Okay, you can look now, you big pussy. The big, scary penis is all put away.” He snaps the elastic band against his hip.
Jared drops his arm and cracks open one eye. “Eh, it’s not that big,” he says.
“I hate everything about you,” Jensen says cheerfully, pulling on a white T-shirt.
Jared hoists himself to his feet and peers down at Jensen. “Hey, you know you’ve got something on your face, right?”
“Dick.” Jensen kicks him in the shin and abandons him for the kitchen. He’s got waffle batter to make.
Part two
MASTER POST
CHAPTER ONE
It’s not like Jensen has thought long and hard about it or anything-honestly, he’s not that psychotic-but he has come to the conclusion that there are two things that he loves more than anything else in the world. One is Ross, his nine-almost-ten-year-old son. The other is the restaurant.
His kid is terrific, but Supernatural is pretty much Jensen's whole world, especially since the divorce.
He loves every single person who works there, even the skeevy Venezuelan salad kids who delight in calling him every Spanish obscenity they can think of like he didn’t grow up in Texas knowing what every goddamn word of it means. He would even admit to loving his rotisseur, Chad, even though the guy’s more interested in the racks on the waitresses than the racks of lamb on the grill.
He loves getting up sometime before dawn to go and fight with seafood suppliers and produce people. He doesn’t mind one bit that he works ‘til midnight most days, sweating in front of the sixteen-burner range.
He also really just loves his toque.
He’s been first sous chef under Jeff Morgan for a little over two years and he very much enjoys the fact that every single person who works at Supernatural is utterly fucking terrified of the guy. It makes the kitchen run smooth and purring like a Lamborghini. People just do their jobs when they’re scared of the chef.
This is, of course, the problem. Jensen’s shitting kittens over what might happen while Jeff’s off in Seattle. It’s not that Jensen isn’t excited as hell-because, dude, when your executive chef gets picked to go be on fucking Top Chef, you get fucking stoked.
Jensen is just about the least scary person on earth. The Olsen Twins circa 1992 and fuzzy little golden retriever puppies are scarier, according to his roommate, Jared, (who’s kind of a dick), and Ross (who’s a dick in training). Jensen’s ninety-eight percent sure that Jeff being halfway across the country means that absolutely nobody is going to listen to a goddamn word Jensen says. No matter how many times people tell him not to worry about it he has a panic-induced mini-aneurysm every time he thinks about it.
So he does what he’s always done in times of stress: cook compulsively. His mother used to do it when he was little and Jensen developed the habit himself. What he does is buy out about half of the grocery store around the corner from the house and dirties just about every piece of cookware he and Jared have. He produces a ten or so course meal that wouldn’t look out of place on a French Laundry tasting menu, but no one will eat it because somewhere along the course of cooking, he will have convinced himself that he’s a horrible chef and that the food is utterly inedible and not even fit for Jared’s two huge dogs. Then the dogs will give him baleful, deeply patronizing looks-the dogs, mind you, not their owner (though that fucker does it, too)-before turning tail and going to cry and shit all over his bed for wasting perfectly awesome food. He regrets the massive waste precisely two seconds after grinding up the last speck in the garbage disposal, so then he breaks out the Patrón to drink on an empty stomach like any civilized failure of a human being.
Jared usually finds him passed out in a miserable heap in the middle of the kitchen floor and steps over his mostly dead body to start cleaning up. This happens way more than Jensen cares to admit. Jared seems to think that everything about Jensen is open season for mockery, but even he doesn’t tease him about his neurotic fits.
Eric, the man who owns Supernatural, is concerned for Jensen’s mental health. “I really would like to hire a second sous chef while Jeff is gone,” he’d said at a staff meeting not long after Jeff got the casting call from Bravo.
Intellectually, Jensen totally agrees that it’s a perfect idea, and despite what his ex-wife might tell you, he isn’t a complete crazy person. He just finds the idea that he’ll have a nervous breakdown if they leave him in charge and on his own to be kind of insulting. It’s one thing to think of yourself as a neurotic loser; it’s another thing entirely for your boss to agree.
Jeff had managed to convince Eric to at least give Jensen a chance. He’d leaned back in his chair, taken a long drink of tonic water, and said, “You never know, Kripke, the kid might surprise you,” like their age difference was twenty years bigger or something. Asshole.
Thinking about it makes Jensen break out in hives. And he has fair, dry skin anyway, so once he breaks out he has to soak in a tub full of Aveeno for an hour just to get some of the redness to go down. Jared totally mocks him for this.
“Oh my god, would you just chill out about it?” Jared says exasperatedly one morning a week before Jeff leaves, right after poking him awake and plying him with coffee. It’s almost six AM and Jensen’s alarm isn’t due to go off for another two hours, and all Jared gets for his troubles is a zombie moan and a swift kick to the thigh. “Seriously, it’s going to be fine, you big ugly girl.”
“I hope you die in a fire,” Jensen says, not even opening his eyes.
Jensen is not impressed with how awake the guy is, even if Jared is a freak whose sleep schedule makes no fucking sense. Jerk probably stayed up all night writing or something and then decided he was desperately starved for human company and came downstairs to bug Jensen.
“Can’t you call your girlfriend or something?” he grumbles, then rolls over and crushes his face into his pillow.
Jared laughs. “I’m way more scared of her than I am of you, bitch,” he says, sitting on the edge of Jensen’s bed and draining the cup of coffee himself. Jensen can hear him swallowing. He’s slurping obnoxiously loud on purpose, and if Jensen had more energy he’d maim him. “Anyway, Mike-your, what is he? Produce? Yeah-guy, called the house phone. Doesn’t he have your cell number for this kind of shit? He got you that meeting with that guy from Evanston about some shipment? I don’t speak Mike and he sure as hell don’t speak anything like English, so I wasn’t sure what the fuck he was saying.”
Jensen groans again. He’s been waiting for two weeks for Mike, Supernatural’s main produce dealer, to get around to setting up this meeting, so of course it happens the first morning Jensen gets to sleep in in a week. He peels himself out of bed and mutters something that might be “Fuck you” on his way into his bathroom.
He brushes his teeth haphazardly and doesn’t look at himself in the mirror. The thought of what he must look like makes him want to crawl underneath his bed and never come out. This supplier guy is just going to have to live with the fact Jensen hasn’t shaved in a few days and probably still smells like the rest of last night’s unmetabolized tequila.
Traffic is, predictably, a bitch. Jensen’s halfway to Evanston and on cup of coffee number six when Mike calls his cell and tells him the guy had to cancel. Jensen feels a little like finding a bridge to go drive off of, but laziness and maybe the fear that Jeff might figure out how to resurrect him only to kill him again for making him miss flirting with Padma Lakshmi on national television win out and he turns his Altima around and goes back to bed instead.
Six cups of coffee leave him too wired to sleep, and he spends three hours huddled under his comforter and watching soap operas and SportsCenter from under his covers. It’s not his best morning.
--
Jeff leaves for Seattle on a Thursday morning, so the first night he’s gone from Supernatural is actually Jensen’s night off. This leaves Kristen in charge of the kitchen, which is always an amusing kind of disaster. Jensen deliberately leaves his cell phone off and in one of the kitchen cabinets, and he spends the night in his underwear watching a Coen brothers marathon in bed with the dogs. He does not want to hear about the catastrophes his tiny little pastry chef always manages to create when she tries to expedite the main line. He wants to eat cheap hot wings and scratch his balls in peace.
Friday night, though? Jensen totally gets why Eric wants to hire another sous chef. He also understands Murphy’s Law on a cosmic level.
Bartólo, the skeevier of the two skeevy Venezuelan salad kids, flips his shit an hour before the dinner rush starts. The kid, who’s six inches shorter than Jensen and weighs maybe a hundred and thirty pounds, punches an impressively large hole in the wall in the employee men’s room and tells Jensen to “vete a la verga” before walking out like he’s starring in fucking Office Space or something.
An hour later, Kristen has dropped a tray of delicate chocolate lattices, ruined a semifreddo, spilled crème anglaise everywhere (it went places Jensen wasn’t even aware existed in Supernatural’s kitchen), and burned her arm on the oven so badly that she has to go to the hospital.
“Why are you such a spaz tonight?” he demands, even though Kristen’s already looking at him with big, liquid blue eyes like he’s canceling Easter candy forever, and maybe Halloween, too, if he can swing it and not break Jared’s and Ross’s hearts.
“Hi, Pot, I’m Kettle, horrible to meet you!” she snaps while she’s running her arm under cool water, glaring at him so hard she’s vibrating and her ponytail’s swinging. “And you weren’t even here last night! It was frigging Hamburger Hill in here!”
Chad leaves a gorgeous piece of sirloin to die on the grill to go drive her to the hospital, and Jensen only just rescues the meat in time. It’s a smidge too far on the well side of medium, but he so does not care. People who get their steaks anything beyond medium rare deserve to suffer anyway, in his opinion.
Five minutes after the rescued sirloin hits the table, Victor-the other, slightly less skeezy Venezuelan kid in salads-picks a fight with Sandy, Jensen’s favorite of the waitresses. Poor Victor ends up with a blue Papermate pen rammed half an inch deep in the fleshy part of his upper arm. There isn’t nearly as much blood as Jensen might have expected, you know, if he were the kind of morbid fuck who sits around imagining how much certain wounds should bleed.
Sandy, however, is, and she remarks on it after Jensen drags them both into Jeff’s office in the back room. She’s in her second year of med school at the U of C and she’s just wrapping a unit on the musculoskeletal system in the summer anatomy enrichment course she's taking. While Victor shrieks like a pig in a slaughterhouse and threatens to rip her ovaries out through her nostrils and make burritos out of them, Sandy calmly tells Jensen that she aimed for that spot on purpose.
“He needs this job, so I didn’t want to, like, incapacitate him, just teach him not to be such a fucking twatwaffle!” She turns to Victor and points a finger at him. “You hear that, vato? I am more than T&A!”
“Chingate, you a crazy bitch,” he squawks back, holding his hand over his wound and glowering.
They both make Jensen feel like a fucking giant, too big to fit in the tiny little office without crushing them both to death. Sandy’s bigger than Victor, who’s built like a sharpening steel, although most of her body weight is contained in her tits. Jensen sinks down in Jeff’s office chair and sighs.
“Just… go be elsewhere,” he says, pointing in the general direction of the door. He really just wants to cry, crawl into a large bottle of alcohol, and pretend that Jeff’ll actually be back tomorrow. He wants to ask her why she hasn’t stabbed Chad yet. Hell, he wants to stab Chad most of the time, and she’s known the guy a hell of a lot longer than he has.
Victor scurries out of there like they’re going to stab him again if he sticks around, but Sandy pats Jensen on the shoulder and tells him it’ll get better. “I mean, statistics basically say it has to, right?”
“Fuck you,” he says tiredly. “Go check on your tables.”
Later on, Jensen stands there miserably in the middle of the line, watching as his kitchen and the whole of civilization topple down around him. All he can think of is exactly how desperately he’s going to grovel to Eric in the morning. He has a feeling that he will be shedding his last scraps of dignity.
He looks around, cringes when the kid in the dishroom breaks something, and realizes that he is completely okay with that.
--
Jared apparently TiVo’d the Cubs-Blue Jays game (“I fucking love interleague play, man! And Canada!”) and is having a bunch of people over to watch it, so Sandy catches a ride back to Jared’s little 1920s bungalow with Jensen. She and Jared have some convoluted unlabeled relationship that Jensen gets to listen to a lot-Jared’s bedroom is directly over the living room and the ceiling is really, really thin-but Jensen staunchly doesn’t want to know. Sandy insists that the sex goes downhill once labels get slapped on relationships; Jensen walks away when she starts talking about it.
While Jensen drives home with Sandy riding shotgun, he fiddles with the radio that never works and she keeps up an entirely one-sided rant about why Victor deserved to be “shanked” in the arm, and how the little fucker wouldn’t have dared say whatever vile thing he said if Jeff had been there, which only serves to make Jensen feel even worse. Apparently, he’s not just awful at running a kitchen, he’s responsible for Victor getting stabbed, too. He glares at Sandy and pouts and ignores every attempt she makes at including him in conversation because he’s apparently a fifteen-year-old emo kid, too. That scary-skinny Ryan kid in the dishroom has nothing on him.
The first person Jensen sees when he unlocks his front door is fucking Chad, sitting on the couch with his bare feet on up on the coffee table. Jared’s playing Guitar Hero for the fucking gold while Kristen-her arm bandaged from wrist to elbow-cheers from the sidelines and drinks a bottle of Amstel Jensen damn well bought for himself. The dogs are nowhere to be seen, which isn’t all that surprising since Harley might actually be bigger than Kristen.
“I bought a waffle iron today,” Jared says, not taking his eyes off the screen.
That’s just about enough for Jensen. Sandy pushes past him to squeeze in between Jared and Chad on the couch. He quietly sheds his jacket, clogs, and checks right there in the living room, stripping right down to his undershirt and boxers and ignoring Chad’s token protest of “My eyes! Don’t need to see your hairy-ass man legs!” Jensen just grabs something from the hall table to throw at Chad’s head and heads around the corner to his bedroom without a word.
He does feel marginally more human after a scalding shower, and he’s not the least bit surprised to come out of his en suite bathroom to find Kristen curled up in his bed, watching a Lifetime movie about teenage pregnancy (which: ouch) on his little fifteen-inch TV. Jensen loves that TV. He’s had it since high school and it’s been his loyal friend through all four years at CIA, all eight years of marriage to Jessica, and the last year of sharing a house with Jared. The sound might be shot and the picture bleeding, but that TV might be Jensen’s best friend.
“Oh my god, would you look at yourself, you maudlin son of a biscuit?” Kristen gripes at him. She gave up swearing for Lent earlier in the year and decided that it was way more fun to try to come up with G-rated insults than go back to her wicked ways. She insists she’s a happier person because of it. Jared always asks her what she calls out during sex.
“Fuck you,” Jensen says blithely, pulling up pajama pants under his towel and yanking on the first relatively clean shirt he comes across on the floor. “How much Vicodin did they give you? Your opinions mean nothing.”
“Yeah,” she says, unimpressed. “Half your kitchen is so baked they can’t see straight and you’re judging my drug use?” She makes a big production of rolling her eyes and waves her bandaged arm. “Hey, at least I have a legal prescription, okay?”
She makes a harrumph sound and rolls over to face away from him. He can hear the other three laughing out in the living room and he feels a little bad that Supernatural’s little pastry virtuoso waited all by herself for him to quit trying to drown himself in the shower. She’s got second-degree burns on her arm and she’s worried about him. If that doesn’t make Jensen feel like an even bigger tool than before, well.
He crawls under the covers next to her, snitches the remote from under her pillow (she always stashes it there, like he’s not going to find it or something) and changes the channel. There’s a rerun of CSI on Spike, the one with the rapist-murderer with two sets of DNA. Jensen hates Grissom-has a rather long, passionate argument that he busts out at parties, detailing his hatred for the character and William Petersen as well-and Sara’s gappy teeth bother the shallow end of his personality, so he scrolls right past. Kristen makes the same growling sound Jared’s dogs make when somebody teases them with a Beggin’ Strip then puts it back in the bag.
“Dude, I love that episode,” she huffs. “What’s he called-a chimera! He’s a mythical beast, Jensen. That’s so hardcore.” Jensen rolls his eyes but flips the channel back. He tosses the remote on the bedside table and settles back against his pillows.
“You’re a mythical beast,” he says lamely.
She giggles. “Let’s watch my brethren outsmart Gil Grissom, okay?” she says, turning back to the TV.
“So… I’m going to ask Eric to hire somebody to help out while Jeff’s out,” he blurts out during the next commercial break.
“Ah, so you do occasionally exercise something resembling logic,” she says, shooting a grin at him over her shoulder.
“Hey, if you’re going to be a bitch, go aim it at Chad. He’s made of fucking gelatin and foam.”
Okay, so here’s the thing: the restaurant where Jared used to work is one of those uber-trendy molecular gastronomy places, so Jared’s completely obsessed with the bullshit. Jensen, with his classical French training, is wary. He figures that when the time comes that he lives in a dystopian cyberpunk society, he’ll cheerfully eat the squares of clear, steak-essenced gelatin embedded with curlicues of roasted red pepper, served over a tiny puddle of delicate foam made from the ground shells of crustaceans and garnished with a egg white flash-frozen with liquid nitrogen and coaxed into the shape of a broken heart. Until such time, he will eat a fucking steak that looks and chews like a fucking steak, possibly with a very fattening side of mushroom risotto, thank you.
Kristen giggles. “Oh, Chad. Now you know that words can never hurt him, right?” she says. Jensen wraps an arm around her waist and pulls her closer. She pats the back of his hand and leaves hers there, fingers curled loosely around his wrist. Her bandage is scratchy against his skin and she smells like sugar.
“Tonight, you know how he jumped all over himself to take me to the hospital? Totally trying to make Sophia jealous so she’ll take him back.”
“I don’t want to know,” Jensen says. He really, really doesn’t.
She keeps talking, though. “He spent the whole time all ‘Sophia this’ and ‘Sophia that.’ I felt bad about it-which is so wrong, since I was the one crying in pain-but I just couldn’t not tell him that it’s not going to happen, you know?”
“Seriously, K-Bell,” he says, sighing and pulling away from her. “I do not want to know. As far as I’m concerned, Chad and Sophia spend their extracurricular time collecting stamps and playing gin rummy with the elderly-and no that is not a euphemism for anything, you pervert. Watch your show.”
He crosses his arms over his chest and ducks his chin, closing his eyes to doze until the show is over.
Kristen pokes him hard in the ribs some time later. He cracks one eye open and frowns. She has one of her serious-talk-coming looks on her face. He has visions of two-weeks notices, stories about Chad naked, and questions about his lovelife, and he steels himself for the worst.
“Hey, I was just thinking,” she says. “What about Jared?”
Jensen feels like he’s missed a step in the conversation, not unlike his pastry classes back in culinary school, actually. Give him a few vegetables in season, some S&P, and a little bacon fat and he can make you Jesus on a plate. Give him an egg, some sugar, and a recipe for cake and shit’s going to end in tragedy.
“Um, Jared?” he asks.
“You know, the big, smelly dude whose house you live in?” she says, waving her hand and giving him her patented ‘oh my god, you’re a dummy’ look. “How long did he work for Gilmore’s again?”
It’s Jensen’s turn to roll his eyes. He sits up a little straighter. “Oh, so you weren’t sitting in the living room here that night he quit, then?” he says, even though she very fucking much was.
Kristen and some of the waitstaff had been over to drink and watch a Top Chef marathon on the huge new TV Jared had just bought. Around nine, Jared came barging through the front door like a rampaging livestock animal, yelling unintelligibly, throwing shit, tripping over Jensen’s stuff, and generally scaring the bejeezus out of everybody, including probably the neighbors three doors down.
See, Jared didn’t really need the job at Gilmore’s, and that was probably a lot of his problem. The place was the whole reason he started that stupid blog, because as far as Jensen could tell from listening to his and Chad’s stories, Gilmore’s was the worst kitchen ever to work in.
“This is what’s wrong with the restaurant industry!” Jared used to yell. It took Jensen a while to get used to, but Jared hadn’t done it since he quit Gimore’s. Apparently, Gordon Ramsay had nothing on Gilmore’s fast-talking feminazi executive chef. And then there’s that appalling fusion menu Jared still makes shit from sometimes. Call him parochial, but Jensen doesn’t think that kimchi belongs anywhere near a dessert menu.
The thing is, Jared is, like, famous on the Internet. He’s the Waiter Rant of chefs, only bigger. He’s the Food Porn guy. His post about the horrible night Senator Obama came to Gilmore’s was mentioned in the national media. And Jared’s a good writer, too, which Jensen didn’t really expect when he met him since he looks kind of like a big dumb jock.
Food Porn is anonymous, of course, in that wink-wink-nudge-nudge way among those who know better, narrated by a guy called ‘Chef Guy.’ He’d had the website for a little over a year when Sandy introduced them at some party. Jensen had just lost his own house in his divorce, and Jared was looking for someone to take over his spare bedroom and some of the mortgage. The roommate thing had been Sandy’s idea.
Sandy is a genius, too, because Jared is a seriously awesome roommate. Not that Jensen has a lot of experience living with people he’s not related or married to, but he thinks his arrangement with Jared is probably unusually good. Jared actually likes doing the dishes for some god-unknown reason, and he doesn’t even seem to notice that Jensen’s stuff has pretty much taken over the house like mold on French bread.
Which is nice, because Jensen’s something of a huge mess.
Anyway, not too long after Jensen moved in, some publisher offered Jared a book deal. He got a big advance and everything, so of course he freaked out when he found himself still working in the same job he hated back when he actually needed it. After Jared quit Gilmore’s, his friend Chad came over to inflict himself on Jensen and Supernatural. Jensen does not think this was fair at all.
The night Jared actually snapped and walked off the line at Gilmore’s, though, was particularly legendary. So Jared’s a big fucking guy-big enough that he’s generally the largest living thing in rooms not containing either elephants or NBA players. The night he told his boss to go fuck herself, thanks, he stormed into the house with his toque still on his head, a whisk still in one hand, and one gigantic clog missing. Everyone crowded in the living room had gone very quiet, watching him storm through the house, trip over Jensen’s crap, swear, punch the walls, scare the dogs, then go and systematically break most of the dishes in the kitchen. Luckily, Jensen hadn’t unpacked his own mix of vintage Fiestaware yet at that point, or there would have been bloodshed.
When he finished destroying his dinnerware, he sat down in the brown easy chair across from Kristen, still exhaling heavily through his nose, and glared fiercely at the new TV like he was trying to decide if it would be worth it to break that, too. Everyone traded looks.
“So, drama queen,” Jensen had said finally, “I take it you just quit?”
Jared had jumped, looked around at his wide-eyed audience, and blushed the color of a really good cabernet. He probably would’ve sparkled purple in candlelight. “Oh, fuck off,” he’d muttered, sinking down in his seat while everyone laughed.
So needless to say, Jensen’s a little confused when Kristen brings up Jared and Gilmore’s.
“What?” he asks her again. “Yes, my roommate. What about him?”
Kristen rolls her eyes again, a little more exaggerated this time, and sighs. “Well, we need somebody to just fill in for a few weeks ‘til Jeff gets back, right? And our good buddy Jared just so happens to be a classically-trained chef who isn’t currently employed, right? He spent, like, all night whining about having the writer’s block of doom, so working at Supernatural might be good for him, too.”
Jensen stared at her, open-mouthed and so impressed he’s speechless. “Oh my god, Belly, you’re the smartest woman on the planet,” he tells her finally, pulling her tight against his chest and squeezing her ‘til she squeaks.
--
Of course Jessica, Jensen’s ex-wife, calls him before he can approach anyone about Kristen’s idea. Jessica is a food writer, which he so doesn’t understand. She looks like an underfed pet and she doesn’t even like food. He doesn’t think she’s written a good review in her life, but she has a bit of a cult following. People eat that shit up, apparently.
Sometimes Jensen wonders how he managed to go from living with one person making a living bitching about food to another, but he figures that at least Jared doesn’t expect anything from him. He and Jess got married when they were nineteen, stupid, and pregnant, back in culinary school when Jensen was full of promise and shit. By the time Ross was about seven, Jess spent half of her time looking at Jensen with all kinds of disappointment. The rest of the time she studied Pilates and did nothing resembling fun. They had the most boring, amicable divorce ever.
Anyway, apparently one of the various magazines Jess freelances for wants her to go to New England for something that sounds a lot like bullshit to Jensen (do they really have vineyards in Rhode Island? Jensen thinks not, since the whole state is, like, the size of half a Texas cattle ranch), but whatever, it means he gets Ross to himself for a week. Jensen works so much that he never gets to see his kid, even though technically he has joint custody.
He’s not totally sure how he’s going to swing it, what with being at Supernatural every fucking minute, but he knows Jeff manages somehow. Jeff’s got an evil shrew of an ex-wife and a couple of kids of his own. Jensen figures he’ll stop sleeping if he has to. Then again, that’s probably what’ll happen anyway, since Ross is getting his bed and he’s looking at a week of trying to sleep on the least comfortable couch in Chicago.
No, seriously. Jared’s couch sucks.
“Jess, I have half an hour to eat lunch before I have to go back to the store. Can we talk about this later?”
He can actually hear her roll her eyes through the phone. “Fine,” she says. “I’m telling your son how you no longer love him, and then I’m putting him on a plane to Dallas so he can spend two weeks with your mother.”
“Do that and die,” Jensen says. He wouldn’t wish two weeks with his mother on Chad, who might actually benefit from her lifestyle boot camp, let alone poor Ross. Or maybe Jensen’s just been nagged to please grow up one too many times.
Jess laughs. “So his school’s got a break coming up and his last day is next Friday. I’ll drop him off on my way to the airport, okay?” Ross’s school goes all year, with three-week-long breaks every so often.
“Yeah, yeah,” Jensen says, pouring himself a glass of sweet tea from the pitcher in the fridge door.
Jared comes into the kitchen then, hair all in disarray, wearing nothing but a pair of jeans that smell like weed. Jensen quirks a brow at him and Jared just grins lazily. Right, then.
“Okay, I have a deadline, too,” Jess says. “I hate that woman at Food & Wine. Have I mentioned this lately? I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”
“Yeah, fine. Bye, Jess.”
She laughs. “Toodles!” she says, and then she hangs up before he can say anything else.
“But dude, your kid is fucking mean,” Jared says after Jensen sets his phone aside and crawls onto one of the barstools.
Ross goes to a special school for seriously gifted kids, and he’s recently discovered sarcasm. Jensen thinks it’s funny, but he can understand that it’s probably not so much fun for Jared, who’s pretty scary brilliant in his own right, to have a kid who comes up to his waist run mental circles around him, but really, Ross runs mental circles around everybody. Now that he’s thinking about it, Jensen gets the feeling that he’s going to spend the week with these two feeling like the slow kid in class.
“Shut up. You love him and you know it,” Jensen replies, not even looking up from his croque-monsieur. He loves the panini grill Jared brought home last week, although this thing with the weekly trip to Williams-Sonoma and the bringing home the random small electric probably has got to stop.
Jared shrugs, leans against the fridge and folds his hands behind his head. “If he beats me at Guitar Hero again, we’re gonna have a problem. Just sayin’.”
Jensen cocks an eyebrow at that, right over his sandwich as he takes a bite. He swallows and takes a drink. “Um, we are talking about Ross Ackles, the kid whose YouTube video of himself playing ‘Through the Fire and the Flames’ on expert awesomely has, like, a million hits, right?”
Jared gives him a look from under his bangs and huffs out a breath. “Okay, so maybe we’ll play, like, Halo or something instead.”
“Yeah, his mother will love that,” Jensen says darkly, talking around a mouthful of ham and Gruyère. Jess doesn’t seem to realize that their precocious kid isn’t like normal almost-ten-year-olds in his tastes. Except for Disney Channel stars, anyway. Jensen finds the High School Musical thing disturbing for sure.
“Fuck her,” Jared says, grinning. Jensen gets up to stick his plate in the sink.
He turns around and leans back against the island, wiping his palms on his thighs and looking nervous. “Um, would you want to work at Supernatural until Jeff comes back?” he blurts out. Jared’s answering grin is blinding.
“Oh, you cock-gargler. I was wonderin’ when you were gonna ask.”
--
A few mornings later, Jensen is in a significantly better mood. A couple of the waitresses have volunteered to look after Ross on their nights off so that Jensen can avoid the stress of worrying that his kid’s going to choke on pizza or electrocute himself on one of Jared’s appliances or trip over Jensen’s shit and braining himself while he’s sitting around by himself in Jared’s house with the dogs. He knows Sandy’s planning on making him help her study for something in the gross anatomy class she’s taking over the summer, which he imagines Ross will get a kick out of, being the morbid little bastard that he is.
He hears Jared come back from his morning run and slam the front door just as he’s stepping out of the shower. He really is in a good mood. The restaurant’s closed on Mondays, so he has the whole day to himself, and he just had a nice, long jerkoff session in the shower thinking about nothing in particular. It wasn’t the best orgasm ever, but pleasant. It’s a little disheartening that he doesn’t even have, like, fantasties lately, but whatever. He’s really looking forward to making breakfast, which is his favorite meal of the day, and trying out the new waffle iron (and hey, at least he didn’t jerk off thinking about that, right?).
There are the softer sounds of the dogs being let outside, and then an ominous thump from the dining room and a muffled string of curses. He grins at himself in the mirror. It’s always funny when Jared runs into something. There’s a grunt from the hallway outside his room as Jared stumbles over something else and bumps into the wall.
“Good morning!” Jensen tells. He glances at himself in the mirror again and decides that no way is he going to bother fucking with his contacts on his day off. He tosses his contact case across the counter. It falls in the sink, where he leaves it. He grabs his glasses and blinks as his vision suddenly goes crisp and clear.
“Jesus Christ, would it kill you to pick your shit up once in a while?” Jared moans. Jensen can hear him throwing what sound like shoes into the closet. They hit the back wall with a flurry of dull thumps.
“More’n likely,” he drawls. He takes a step back to survey the little basket of toiletries his mother included in the big batch of junk she Fed-Exed to him after the divorce. He debates not shaving, but he’s almost working a full-on beard at this point and it’s not really his best look. It’s also annoyingly itchy. “Also, need I point out that you came into my room?”
“It’s a minefield, I swear to god,” Jared says. “I need sweepers and, like, fucking anti-aircraft missiles just to come near the door. Not to mention that thing in the dining room. I almost died twice and you’re still in there… doing whatever it is that you do in the bathroom for hours. What do you do in there, anyway? Stare at yourself and wonder why God hit you with the pretty stick a few extra times? Fuck. I think near-death experiences qualify for at least a blowjob, you know, in the grand scheme of things.”
Jensen snorts. “If I had any intentions of ever going anywhere near your cock, you know, that would actually be a valid argument,” he says. Going down on Jared would make things so incredibly awkward. He purses his lips at his reflection in the mirror then frowns. The beard really has got to go. “Anyway, continue.”
“Fuck you. And your fucking Turkish rug. What is this, the goddamn seventeenth century? Who has a rug like that?”
“It’s from Iraq,” he points out. He doesn’t particularly like it much himself, but one of his uncles bought it for him and Jess, and she didn’t want it after the divorce (in fact, she was insulted when he implied that he might leave the “fugly fucking thing” in the house when he moved out). He takes his glasses off again, then grabs his can of Barbasol and dispenses a big dollop of shaving cream into his palm.
“Even worse!” Jared exclaims. Something else thumps against the wall. “I hate your ugly fucking Iraqi rug!”
“It matches your ugly red walls, asshole. Also, you were just whining about your feet being cold on the hardwood floors two weeks ago and I said, ‘Well, I have this rug…’ and you said-and I quote-‘Sounds awesome!’ Thus, the rug.” He smears lather over his cheeks and jaw, rinses his hands, and grabs his razor.
“It’s probably harboring terrorists and throwing grenades at American troops as we speak,” Jared growls.
Jensen pauses, trying and failing not to laugh. “You shouldn’t say things like that when I have a razor near my jugular. It’s unfair and I might die.”
“Lumpy. Iraqi. Rug. Of. Death.” He can hear Jared collapsing backwards onto the bed like a downed mastodon. “It’s like your life just exploded all over this room, I swear to god,” Jared continues. “You might be pretty, but man, you’re actually kind of disgusting. This is my house, you know. You’re just destroying it with your squalor.”
“You, get off my bed. Sweaty motherfucker.” He swishes the razor in the sink. “I have to sleep there and you’re going to make it smell like ass. And death.”
“I’ll show you ass and death.”
“Anywhere but my bed,” Jensen replies in a long-suffering tone.
Jared doesn’t say anything for a while and Jensen finishes shaving in silence, humming some Zeppelin to himself. He’s just finishing up when the bathroom door slams all the way open and he jumps and drops the razor in the sink with a splash. A bright red bead of blood blooms on his cheek.
“Fuck!”
“God, now what?” Jared asks, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed over his chest and a huge smile on his face.
Jensen shoots him a glare and grabs his glasses. He leans forward to survey the damage. “I’m bleeding, you dickhole!” He squawks.
“It’s not my fault you’ve been shaving half your life and you still can’t navigate a razor.”
“Did you actually want something?” Jensen gropes for the toilet paper roll sitting on the far end of the counter, next to the toilet. There isn’t actually a little dispenser peg in this bathroom, which Jensen thinks is strange and annoying, but he’s about as handy as a housecat, so he hasn’t just installed one. He knocks the roll in the sink pretty much every morning, so his toilet paper is always warped and stiff, like flaky white scar tissue. It’s still wet from earlier, too, so the absorbency is shot all to shit and he’s still got blood running down his jaw and neck.
Jared runs a hand through his sweaty bangs and tries to keep the hair out of his face. “I want food.”
“People in hell want cold beer and sunscreen. Right now I want a Band-aid.” He opens the medicine cabinet, but no cigar. He turns to Jared and points at the cut on his face. “You have ‘em in your bathroom?”
Jared doesn’t answer for a second, staring at him in horror. “You’re naked!” he squeaks. He backs out of the room with his hands clapped over his eyes.
Jensen stares after him in surprise, then looks down at himself and shrugs. It’s not like he looks bad. In fact, he likes to think he looks at least a little better than the average guy his age. “I just got out of the shower, you ten-year-old. Actually, no. Ross is more mature than this.”
“We’re human beings!” Jared says in a hilariously squeaky voice. “We use towels!”
Jensen shrugs again, even though Jared can’t see him, and scowls at himself in the mirror. “Band-aid,” he says petulantly. He rinses the rest of the shaving foam off his face and dries off carefully with a dark-colored towel.
“You fuckin’ girl. Ow.” Jared stumbles over something. “Get in here and clean up your shit and maybe I’ll think about it. You’re dragging down my property value while we have this conversation right now. And put on some pants! God.”
“Okay, yeah. Just wait until I bleed out right here into this sink. That’s totally fine. I don’t care. Not like head wounds don’t bleed excessively, or anything.” Jensen tears off a drier piece of toilet paper and sticks a big wad of it to his face. “I need a Band-aid.”
“I need to lie down,” Jared says. He collapses back on the bed. The rustling of fabric sounds suspiciously like he’s snuggling the comforter.
“I’m coming in there, just to warn you. Don’t stare at my ass when I walk past you,” Jensen calls. He flicks off the bathroom light and goes back into his bedroom, squinting around for the boxers he’s pretty sure he left out. It’s a lot less bright in the bedroom and he needs a second to adjust to the new lighting.
Jared is sprawled out on his back on the bed, both feet flat on the floor and one arm slung over his face. His Underarmor shirt is completely soaked through with sweat from his run, and gross, the bedding’s going to have to be fumigated or something. “Put that thing away before you blind somebody,” Jared murmurs.
Jensen stops dead in front of him, hands on his hips and a shit-eating grin on his face. “I could, if you weren’t laying on my underwear.” Jared’s hips jerk up and he gropes around under his back with his free hand. He groans when he pulls out a clump of black fabric and holds it out pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He makes a hilarious keening sound when Jensen relieves him of his burden.
“Okay, you can look now, you big pussy. The big, scary penis is all put away.” He snaps the elastic band against his hip.
Jared drops his arm and cracks open one eye. “Eh, it’s not that big,” he says.
“I hate everything about you,” Jensen says cheerfully, pulling on a white T-shirt.
Jared hoists himself to his feet and peers down at Jensen. “Hey, you know you’ve got something on your face, right?”
“Dick.” Jensen kicks him in the shin and abandons him for the kitchen. He’s got waffle batter to make.
Part two