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It’s just Sydney's luck that the week when the vibe is off is also the week they have to go schmooze with industry people. She knows, intellectually, that part of getting where she wants to be (successful, starred, solvent) is doing this kind of thing. Being a person in the world, not just in the kitchen. But the kitchen is where she feels safe and at home and confident. She's proud of what she’s achieved but she’s never totally figure out how to convey that to an audience in a way that hits the sweet spot between self-deprecation and arrogance. She knows that people like her, respect her even, but she still doesn’t feel like a natural schmoozer.
And it doesn’t help that Carmy isn’t either, although he has the benefit of coming across as mysterious and serious to people who don’t know him very well, the way lots of people who are both shy and good-looking get mistaken for being cool. Still, she can tell he gets antsy any time he has to do a lot of public-facing things, is just as prone to hiding in the kitchen where he’s comfortable as she is.
Still, they are only going to be doing more of this the more The Bear takes off. And it matters to her, a lot, that Carmy is invested in making sure everyone recognizes her contribution, her stake in things as much as his. If she told him that, though, he’d just give her that perplexed look of his, as if most other men in his position wouldn’t take the credit and run. Sydney once read (skimmed) an article about how many older male writers thank their wives for “transcribing” their work when that often actually meant writing a good chunk of it. Not that she is anything like Carm’s wife, of course. Workwife at most, a term she genuinely hates. Obviously, this comparison is, like, excessive. And Sydney is not trying to do the whole “the bar is on the ground” thing, give Carmy a cookie for being decent, but it does validate her decision to do this with him in the first place. He may have many – many – flaws but undervaluing her is not one of them.
One of his flaws is, however, trying to give people what he thinks they want the way he wants to give it to them. And this particular flaw is making her feel a bit stabby lately. He is constantly changing the menu, choosing the hardest to get ingredients, trying to recreate in a matter of months what it took Noma years to build. Any time she tries to tell him to slow down, he looks at her with his big wet eyes and says, “This is what you wanted.” Sydney does not grab him by the shoulders and shake him, doesn’t yell that it doesn’t have to be this way, particularly because he hasn’t yelled in months. He is zoned in and calm and mildly terrifying. She also does not ask why he is trying so hard to give her this thing she wants when he was the one who told her stars were bullshit. So rather than yell at him or ask questions she, at least, is emotionally unprepared to have answered, she is just kind of…mean to him. Snarky, sarcastic, contemptuous even. And when he reacts with a kicked puppy face that lasts such a short moment that sometimes she feels like she imagined it before he locks back down to his kitchen robot persona, she feels like shit. But she keeps doing it anyway.
So now two socially awkward weirdos whose working relationship is feeling off in a way that neither of them seems to know how to fix are expected to dress up and mingle amongst their peers at a beautiful rooftop bar. What could possibly go wrong?
*
He had insisted he’d meet her at her place and then they’d take an Uber together to avoid worrying about traffic and parking downtown. It was a Sunday night, sure, but Chicago traffic was still a pain in the ass any day of the week.
So Sydney is staring at herself in her full length mirror in her still relatively new bachelor pad trying to convince herself that everything would be totally chill. She’d recently befriended a cool local designer, Anique Walters, who’d come for dinner at the restaurant and then followed her on Instagram. Anique was, inexplicably, obsessed with Syndey’s figure, and in exchange for posing for some pictures for her website, gifted Sydney one of the outfits she’d had her model. It was a quirky little number, a baby blue tailored suit with short pants, a blazer, and a matching shirt meant to be buttoned all the way up. Modest yet playful, with minimal opportunity for Syd to embarrass herself in the way that a dress could facilitate. You only need to leave the bathroom with your skirt tucked into your underwear once to fear it for the rest of your life. She hadn’t done much with her hair because it was going right back under a scarf in the kitchen tomorrow and she wasn’t about to take out her braids for just one night of looking fancy, so they were pile on top of her head in a way that she hoped looked artful, with two left out on each side of her face to give her something to fidget with. Her make up was as good as she was capable of doing herself with the help of a couple of YouTube tutorials. “You look good,” she tells herself, and emphatically does not think about whether anyone else she sees tonight would agree.
He must have slipped in behind someone because he didn’t buzz, just knocked on her apartment door. One more steadying breath in the mirror before she went to open it.
He looks, unfortunately, incredible. He’s wearing extremely well tailored high waisted tan trousers, a subtly patterned button up shirt tucked in but unbuttoned all the way down, showing off what her grandmother would call a white singlet as well as his slutty collarbones and his customary gold chain.
She has never once in her life learned to shut up. “How dare you, with your Streetcar Named Desire lookin’ ass?”
“Fuck off,” he scoffs.
“I'm serious. You're giving young Brando and it’s making me upset.”
He laughs and blushes, shaking his head a little. His eyes skim over her body and she feels pinned beneath his gaze, assessed like a dish whose plating was still being workshopped. His tongue runs over his lips before he looks back up at her eyes.
“You look beautiful but also a bit like a child prince.”
This, of course, makes Sydney cackle long and hard. And Carmy looks so pleased with himself that she can’t regret it.
“Come on, we’re going to be late.”
He gets them an Uber and they wait outside, although it’s surprisingly windy even for Chicago. The car that arrives is a Tesla, and Carmy and Sydney both take an embarrassing moment figuring out how to get the door open before they can get in. They slide in, Sydney behind the driver and Carmy on the passenger’s side. The driver is a handsome, almost definitely Nigerian man in his 30s. Her dad was born in America, but his extended family is still largely “back home,” and this dude looks like the cousins she only knows from pictures. She can feel him appraising them in the rearview mirror. She wonders what he thinks he sees.
Carmy is, of course, oblivious. The driver double checks their location in a noticeably Nigerian accent and Carmy distractedly confirms it, obviously in his head about something else entirely. The sound system plays Afrobeats at a volume just short of too loud and Sydney would put down good money that he would have changed it if she wasn’t in the car. She doesn’t mind, though, lets the rhythm take her mind off of either her frustrating dynamic with Carmy in the kitchen or the amount of social energy she is about to expend.
At one point, the driver catches her eye in the review mirror, gives her a little smile. She smiles back instinctively. He must have decided that he didn’t think they were together, maybe because they’d been sitting a foot apart and in silence for the last ten minutes. She can’t imagine he makes eyes at coupled passengers like that on a regular basis. It is, admittedly, a little flattering to get checked out like this. Maybe she should get dolled up more often.
“Sydney.” Carmy’s voice startles her, and she drags her eyes away from the rearview. “Where are we at with getting those quail eggs in?”
Really? Now? She sighs. “I don’t know, Carmy. The supplier that you didn’t like was kind of the main one for this region and it’s taking a bit of time to find someone else.”
“If we scrap that dish, we’ll have to get rid of the lamb too. We have to have both or else the tasting menu doesn’t work.”
“Are you fucking with me?” All of the calm she’d accumulated over the last fifteen minutes evaporates. “I busted my ass on that lamb and there is not way I’m cutting it because you can’t get along with the quail guy.”
“You were the one who said the deliveries kept coming late and not as fresh as they should.”
“Yeah, but I expected you to, like, ask him to do a better job not cancel the contract!” Sydney can feel the curious eyes of the driver on them via the rearview and feels hot all over. “Why are you picking a fight with me right now?” she demands, leaning across the space between them to get in Carmy’s face.
“I’m not picking a fight! I just asked a question.” His cheeks are pink and his mouth rigid. She catches his eyes flit, ever so quickly, over to the driver.
She pulls back, faces front again. “Sorry about that,” she says to the driver in what she hopes is a calm and maybe even a little flirty voice. “My colleague” she pauses slightly after the word, “and I don’t usually argue in front of strangers. I don’t know what’s wrong with us.”
Carmy looks out the window, rubs his hand over his face. Stays quiet.
The driver smiles, says, “No apology necessary. I’ve seen way worse in this job.”
Syd forces a laugh. “I’ll bet.”
They finally arrive at their destination and Syd lets Carmy help her out of the car, says a swift thank you to the driver to avoid giving him the chance to ask for her number. If she’s honest, Syd is not actually interested. It had just felt, however perversely, good to remind Carm that some people do actually notice that she’s a woman and not just a chef. Even if she is reluctant to consider why it matters that he knows that.
“I was feeling so zen before you started riding my ass about the quail guy,” she gripes as they enter the building.
“I wasn’t ‘riding your ass.’ Christ. I was asking my colleague,” he pauses after the word too, petty, “a business question while we were on our way to a business party. What’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong is that there is literally nothing I can do about that particular problem right now, is there? So, what is the point in stressing about that tonight? Why can’t we just enjoy this evening and worry about tomorrow tomorrow?”
He scoffs at that in a way perfectly calibrated to get on her nerves. “Because what if worrying about tomorrow tomorrow is too late? If we want to operate at the highest level –”
She cuts him off as they get to the elevator, “Are you saying that I don’t want to operate at the highest level? You think I haven’t been –”
This time he cuts her off, “I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that I know what it’s like to do this shit day in day out and it takes attention and sacrifice and –”
She jabs her finger into the button for the rooftop bar perhaps more aggressively than necessary. If she wasn’t so distracted by her annoying ass business partner, she might have admired the beauty of the original early 20th century elevator. This building had been a number of different things during its century of existence but through all of its incarnations, its historical features had been preserved. Which meant that this elevator was both gorgeous and also janky as hell.
But Sydney is too busy being annoyed to think about architecture, is too busy telling Carmy off. “I’ve been sacrificing, okay? I’ve been giving this my all and I resent you acting like wanting to take two seconds to fucking breath before I have to go charm a bunch of strangers into checking out our restaurant is unreasonable.”
“That didn’t look like breathing to me,” he says almost under his breath.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“What. Is. Your. Fucking. Problem?” she asks, her voice getting quiet and sharp.
And then the lights flicker and turn off and the elevator stops decidedly not at the rooftop bar.
Fuck.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she says.
“Fuck my life to death,” he says.
Sydney presses the help button on the panel, the round red knob solid and old timey under her finger.
A crackly voice comes on over the little intercom. “Hi there.”
“Uh hi. This elevator has, um, stopped. Pretty abruptly. And we’d like to know what’s up?”
“Bad news: we’ve got a power outage down this whole block. Good news: this building has a generator. Bad news: something in the elevator’s electrical blew when the power went out so you are currently stuck between two floors. How many of you are in there?”
“Two. Two people.”
“Okay, that’s good.”
“Is it?” This voice is too cheerful and relaxed for being their one connection to the outside world while being trapped in a metal box.
“Well, not good but could be worse?”
“Look, man,” Carmy breaks in, voice tense, “do you know when we’ll be able to get out of here?”
“We’ve called the elevator repairman; he gave us an ETA of about 30 minutes.”
“Are you fucking serious?” Carmy’s voice is rising, and Syd puts a hand on his shoulder, firmly pushes him further away from the panel.
“Okay, um, please let us know as soon as there’s news? We would love to, like, get out of this elevator as soon as humanly possible.”
“Sure thing, ma’am. Really sorry about this.” Sydney does not bother to comment that he does not sound sufficiently sorry. The crackling stops.
Sydney sighs, long and loud. When she turns away from the panel, she finds Carmy pacing agitatedly in the tight space, arms crossed tight against his chest. She watches him for a moment.
“Carmy. Carm. You’ve got to chill out.”
He does not, in fact, chill out. He keeps pacing. He says, “I’m fucking cursed.”
She rolls her eyes. “What are you talking about?”
He finally looks at her. “What is an elevator but a less cold walk-in?”
This makes Syd let out a bark of laughter but this time he does not look pleased by it. “Carm, you’re being ridiculous. There is absolutely zero connection between what happened on Friends and Family and this. This is an electrical problem that it was in no way your job to prevent.”
He just looks more agitated at that. “Took you long enough to say ‘I told you so.’”
“Um, that is not what I said. I said your dumb brain is making a pointless connection solely for the purpose of making you feel bad.”
He shakes his head at that, resumes pacing.
“Carmy, you have to fucking stop pacing; it’s making me dizzy.”
He stops. Leans against the back wall of the elevator. Syd watches his left foot tap incessantly. She wonders if this is actually better.
“It’s about vigilance,” he says, and it feels out of nowhere.
“What?”
“The quail eggs. The chemistry of the menu. The fucking consistency of the bowls. It’s about vigilance.”
“Are you for real right now? Are you trying to restart our argument while we are stuck in a goddamn elevator?” It’s getting hot and Syd takes off her blazer but, with nowhere to put it, ties it around her waist like she did her windbreakers in elementary school. Better to have it be slightly creased at the sleeves than to be sweat through.
“I’m not trying to argue with you. I’m trying to tell you what it fucking takes for me to get you what you want!”
This makes Syd body start to vibrate with frustration. “Oh, so you’re acting like this for my benefit? You’re driving everybody nuts and burning through your stomach lining and stripping yourself down for parts for what? To please me?”
“Yes! Can’t you see that I’m doing all of this for you?”
“I don’t want you to do it for me. I want you to do it with me!”
Carmy paces again, jams his hand through his hair like he forgets his fingers will now be tacky with gel. “Maybe I’m just not good at loving people up close, okay? Maybe it’s hard for me to do things with people. Maybe I’m so used to being pushed away that I don’t know what to do when that isn't happening!”
Sydney is frozen in place. “What do you mean, loving people up close?” Her voice feels unnaturally soft.
He looks at her, stricken. “Syd, you have to know that I...I...”
“Carm, I don’t have to know shit because you haven’t told me. You haven’t said anything.”
He covers his face with his hand, arching in on himself. “This is...this isn’t the part of me you want. You want Carmen Berzatto, accomplished executive chef, not Carmy Bear, needy little bitch.”
She winces at her own words coming back to haunt her. But she doesn’t back down. She walks towards him, gets in his face, but her voice is soft when she asks, “How do you know what I want?” The face that he makes would be funny under other circumstances; he looks simultaneously affronted, hopeful, and terrified. He doesn’t say anything. “How do you know what I want if I don’t tell you?”
He shakes his head but still stays quiet.
“I told you I want you to listen to me. I told you I want us to get a star. I told you that you’re not alone. Is it that you don’t think that all of those things can be true at once?”
This close, she can see how hard it is for him to make eye contact with her. How much he wants to retreat but somehow manages to force his eyes up to hers. It gives her courage.
“I want all of you. I want you even when you’re being a little bitch. I see you trying. I see that you want to give me what I want but if that’s the case, then you need to hear me when I say this: we can’t do this if you keep holding out on me. Because executive chef Carmy and little bitch Carmy are actually the same dude, dude, and I’m in love with him.”
Carmy finally – finally – gets his hands on her then, cups her face and kisses her like he means it, like a speech that included calling him a bitch twice was the most romantic thing he’s ever heard. A distant part of her brain points out that this is crazy, that making out for the first time while trapped in an elevator after an emotionally intense argument/love confession is not the way that grounded, normal people behave but no reasonable person would have described them with those words anyway.
Sydney is still shocked that Carmy loves her. Respect, sure. Feel affection towards, why not? But she had never really let herself imagine that word. She pulls back. “You love me?” she asks, her need to confirm it only slightly more powerful than her embarrassment at asking.
He lets out a mildly hysterical little laugh. “Yes, Syd. I feel like I was so obvious.”
“You and I have wildly different ideas of what constitutes obvious.”
He shrugs at that, goes back to kissing her. Gets his hands on her hips, drags her between his spread legs. She gets her arms around his neck; the way that he’s leaning against the wall makes her need to dip her head slightly to kiss him, lets her feel him hard against her thigh.
When he kisses down her throat, letting out an annoyed grunt at the high neck of her blouse, she asks, “Were you hard when we were arguing?”
“I always get hard when we argue,” he says into her neck and she lets out a choked sound that is about 40% laugh.
“You’re such a fucking weirdo. I love it.”
His tongue slides along the hinge of her jaw. “I like having the full force of your attention. When you argue with me it’s like there’s no one else around.”
She wants to be able to judge him for that but she can relate. She is also way too distracted by his mouth to pursue this line of questioning any further.
When he brings his fingers up to undo the buttons of her blouse, she lets out a pleased little sound, gives in to her desire to slide her fingers into his curls, gel be damned.
“You smell so fucking good,” he says into the valley between her breasts, runs his nose along where her breasts rise above her bra.
“Do enjoy this brief moment when I don’t smell like onions.”
“I’m still going to want to do this when you do.” His voice is too earnest for her to bear. She pulls his face back to hers, kisses him again to stop herself from blurting out anything she isn’t ready to say. She can’t tell if she’s dizzier from the whiplash of this moment, the feeling of his kisses, or the slowly decreasing air in the elevator.
She yanks his shirt and his tank top out of his pants, gets her hands underneath. Feels his stomach muscles tremble under her hands. He’s kissing her neck and chest again but his hands are still chastely resting on her hips, on top of her blazer. “What did I tell you about holding back on me?” she prods.
“We are in an elevator, Syd,” he’s panting a little, “that might have cameras in it. I’m trying to not get us arrested for public indecency.” Still, he must feel compelled by her challenge because he slips one hand past the waistband of her pants and underwear. She spares a moment to wonder if it’s embarrassing how wet she is but when he gets his fingers on her he groans like he got tackled, whispers, “fuck, that’s so hot,” into her ear as he strokes her.
For a guy will absolutely no game, Carmy is surprisingly good at this. She rests her head against his shoulder, let’s his clever fingers work while she skims her hands wherever she can reach, maps his body out for future exploration.
“I want to give you everything, Syd. Will you let me?” His free hand is resting, gently, on the back of her neck, his thumb drawing soothing circles on her jaw.
“Yes, fuck, but only if you let me help you.” She cups him through his pants even though she’s mostly talking about their lives in general and not this particular moment.
“I can work with that,” his voice tinged with both arousal and amusement.
The combination of his fingers inside of her, his thumb on her clit, his voice in her ear makes her shudder against him and it takes very little time for her to come, hard, her legs giving out so that he has to shift his hand from her nape to her butt to help her stay upright. At first she’s so lost in the feeling that she doesn’t realize that the movement she’s feeling is the elevator jolting back to life.
Carmy’s incredulous laugh vibrates through her before he switches their positions, leans her back against the wall to keep her on her feet as his slides his hand out of her clothes. He considers his wet hand for a moment before shrugging and jamming it into his mouth to clean it. Sydney almost chokes on her own spit, and he makes eye contact with her, gives her a cheesy wink.
“Fuck you, dude,” she says, no heat in it.
He pops his fingers back out of his mouth. “Would like nothing better.”
It is, regrettably, very hot. She drops her eyes away from his pretty little mouth, notices how obvious it is that she’s the only one who got off already.
The intercom crackles to life. “Hi folks, as you can feel, we’ve got you moving again. Everything alright in there?”
“Yes, yeah, everything is, uh, just fine in here. We are very happy to be rescued.” Syd wonders if her voice sounds as manic over the intercom as it sounds in her head.
“Great! So sorry again for the inconvenience.”
They both quickly and quietly try to make themselves presentable in the brief time they have before the elevator doors open on the rooftop. The event is still in full swing, presumably because it’s not like anyone wanted to walk down all those flights of stairs into the dark street below. By silent agreement, Syd and Carmy head to the bathrooms to finish the job of not looking and smelling like they just fucked in an elevator.
When Sydney emerges, Carmy is standing outside waiting for her. She smiles at him, a shy little thing.
“I feel like we have, uh, a lot of stuff to talk about,” he says, rubbing his hand over his mouth as he speaks.
“Yes, absolutely. But maybe we could just, like, enjoy this evening and think about tomorrow tomorrow?”
How has she never noticed before the way that he looks at her? “Yes,” his says, voice soft and fond, “yeah, we can do that.” Then he takes her hand and they head out into the crowd, side by side.