Josh finished scrubbing the table down with detergent and steel wool and started using the squeegee to remove the soapy water from the bench before wiping it down with a sanitizer rag. He glanced up in the midst of this and noticed the instructor watching his hands with a glazed look on her face. When she caught his gaze she shook her head and smiled at him absently, but she was blushing. Interesting, he thought and filed the moment away for later.
In the meantime he needed to wrap up work in the classroom so he could get to his real job and cook some more. He'd gotten a job 2 years ago working in a union kitchen in a hotel in Kansas City and one of the many benefits they offered was tuition for culinary school courses. He'd worked his way up in kitchens from the prep table until he became a sous chef in some kind of middle of the road places before eventually landing the gig he had now, something he was quite proud of. He found himself still getting embarrassed occasionally by knowledge gaps, terms and phrases he hadn't been taught at a school and hadn't come across on the job. After a couple years he decided to take his work up on culinary classes, at least partially because he felt he had hit the ceiling of jobs he could get without a degree and also at least partially because he was starting to feel a little bored at his job.
After years of really dysfunctional high intensity kitchen jobs that left him almost no time to breathe, he was working somewhere that was well run, calm, and efficient and he had perfected all the skills he needed to use there. It was a hotel that was run by a larger restaurant group and there wasn't a ton of room for creativity that the dysfunctional places had offered him. It was rare to have a glut of food about to go bad that needed to be made into a special, there weren't huge disasters in ordering that left them without key ingredients meaning they had to improvise a solution on the spot. He wouldn't trade the stability for the creativity, he was in his 30s and unwilling to live a life getting screamed at by coked out cooks anymore, but taking these classes was offering him some experiences that he hadn't had before.
He found himself really drawn to the bread and pastry department, shockingly. This class was one of his favorites, an elective that he'd chosen on a whim, "Weird Cakes" as it had been mysteriously titled in the course catalog. As part of his association with the restaurant group at the hotel he got special registration privileges that allowed him an early pick of classes so that he could still maintain his work schedule. So he'd had no idea that he had nabbed an especially popular class. He was surprised the first day when he'd walked in to a room filled with 30 chattering twenty somethings.
The first thing they'd made was election cakes, a classic traditional American yeasted cake that used to be served as a reward for people voting. The teacher was really passionate, offering a lot of history. She reminded him of young grade school teachers who brought out bashful crushes in their students. The twenty somethings were falling into it for sure, a lot of the male students were putting a ton of effort into a pastry elective when they were on savory tracks. There was a distinct lack of the rivalry that only the savory chefs seemed to feel between the sweet and savory groups that you usually saw in kitchens and culinary programs.
He shook his head, these kids didn't have the life experience yet to know what to do with that kind of woman, she seemed warm and friendly but there was something else beneath the surface, if you got her to open up she wouldn't be all sugar.
Josh wrapped up his work and headed out while the instructor busied herself elsewhere.
Casey shook her head to clear it. Stop perving on your students, that's number one. Number two was that she knew better than to give into the deeply self destructive attraction to dirty bad boy line cooks and chefs. They're hot as fuck, burns all over their arms bisecting shitty tattoo covered hairy arms. They always looked like they were hungover and hadn't slept in days. They kept their nails short and clean, for work, but it was also a rarity in men Casey found. A shame since being fingered was one of her favorite sexual activities but most men kept their hands in such a state that she shuddered at the thought.
She wasn't entirely sure where Josh worked, but she knew he was already working in kitchens. He was one of her non traditional students, which made her feel a little less creepy for ogling him but only slightly. He had a butcher knife and chef knife skull and crossbones tattoo on his forearm and chop chop tattooed on his knuckles. He was fucking exactly her type and her taste in men was absolutely terrible so she'd mostly stopped dating altogether. She'd see a line cook at a burger place and immediately think "I'd let him raw me" and then upon dating him find out that he was a workaholic loser who really had no bedroom game who amazingly would dump HER because he was scared of a commitment that she would never in a million years make with him.
Watching Josh scrub the bench down had immediately made her think about how it would feel to have him finger her and maybe even fist her. Something she'd never done but always thought about. He'd caught her staring right at the moment she'd been thinking that and she wasn't proud of it. Fuck, maybe it was time to break this celibacy streak if she was having such graphic and inappropriate thoughts in the middle of her class.
Or maybe she just needed to relax a bit. She'd been going really hard lately, teaching two classes because the demand for her course was so high and doing a lot of consulting work with some new bakeries opening around the city. She'd honestly only taken on the job to sub for a friend that was on paternity leave and then she'd gotten asked to start a class of her own.
She'd spent her 20s and early 30s working in New York and had gathered a lot of experience job hopping through every bakery that interested her. Now that she was back in the Midwest where she'd grown up there was a lot of demand for her expertise and knowledge gained working in a major city. She was happy to not have a steady boss and a ton of flexibility but she had taken on too much work for too long because she had been scared of the instable nature of the pay from consulting. Now that she felt secure that she could pay her bills month to month she had finally been able to cut back but she hadn't done much of anything but work since moving back to Kansas City. Maybe a night out on the town would keep her from thinking about fucking her students.
Everything since getting to work had been kind of a shit show. New people working a heavy Friday night shift, a new special that no one seemed to be able to get right, the servers almost seemed to be encouraging people to make substitutions. Josh could handle it but he preferred calm. As his shift was ending and he was headed out through what he internally thought of as the servant's entrance he heard a familiar laugh and peeked out at the bar area.
He was surprised to see his teacher at the bar. In part it was so surprising because she had been on his mind throughout his whole night. The memory of her face flushing when he caught her staring had kept popping up in his mind. He might have been reading too much into it but as his hands worked and his brain led him on autopilot through an intense shift he let his mind wonder whether she was attracted to him. He was passingly attracted to her, in the way you're attracted to someone who isn't an option or a consideration. If he'd met her under different circumstances then it would likely be a more serious attraction but she was like a sexy nurse or librarian, an archetype that was inaccessible. Sexy teacher. That way of viewing her would change dramatically if she was interested in him and in considering the idea it was already starting to change.
Sitting alone at the bar but chatting animatedly with the bartender she was dressed in normal street clothes and not kitchen wear. It was late summer and she was wearing a kind of sun dress that revealed a huge back tattoo he had not expected and she had her hair down and uncovered, curly and wild. She looked really fucking sexy and a little tipsy.
Technically he wasn't supposed to be on the floor in his whites, the hotel was pretty traditional and servants were supposed to be neither seen nor heard, but after the day he'd had this would be the least of the mistakes made by an employee here today so he threw caution to the wind and walked over to where she was sitting. He put a hand on her shoulder and said, "Hey teach. Fancy seeing you here."
A little corny, but it was casual, he hadn't actually walked over to be a suave playboy and seduce her. She'd been on his mind today but honestly anything outside of a brief flirtation was probably not in the cards for them. She turned wide eyes on him, they were just glazed enough that it was clear she had been drinking tonight but she wasn't wasted. The bartender raised an eyebrow at him but then he walked away to dry glasses. Industry bro code.
"Josh!" He hadn't removed him hand from her shoulder and she didn't seem to have an issue with that. "I didn't know this was where you worked." She seemed really surprised.
"You thought I was a hole in the wall line cook, huh?" She shook her head but he could tell by the look in her eyes that she had. "Don't feel bad. I used to be a hole in the wall greasy spoon line cook. But I'm the sous chef here."
