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Three months, twelve days and ten hours after his final day at The Bear, Carmy slips into the kitchen after service and says, with equal parts pride and regret, “I think I… I did the right thing. Right?”
“Don’t start,” Sydney replies. “I mean it, like, please don’t fucking start.”
It’s late and she’s tired, and she can already hear the shake in his voice. She still traces that voice back to the night outside the restaurant, and it gets her seething with an anger she can already barely restrain, and an abrupt wave of nausea. As in she wants to throw up just thinking about it. But Carmy’s still here—still waiting for her to start, she supposes. So, fine, okay, guess they’re doing this.
“You know I keep replaying a scene in my head? Like, another version of it. It’s fucked up and—and it’s not even real, but I can’t stop doing it.”
“Another version of what? What are you talking about?”
“A version where you don’t leave,” Sydney spits out. They stare at each other in the wide open space, in the beat of a suspended silence. Something prickles in her eye. She blinks it away in time. “But you did, and there’s no changing that fact, so.”
“Syd,” Carmy says softly. She looks up to see his eyes already red-rimmed. “Sydney.”
“What?”
“I meant what I said that night. That I’m yours—I’m your—your friend, okay?” He mutters a quiet Fuck, and rubs his palms over his face. When he draws them away, his skin is raw from the rough contact. “That’s not gonna change, I promise. It doesn’t have to. And—and I want to start acting like it this time. I’m going to.”
Sydney watches him, watches the way he’s staring at his hands like they’re the ones at fault. And maybe after everything, she could grant them that. She pulls her chef’s whites a little tighter around her shoulders and drops her gaze down to her shoes, then Carmy’s shoes, and the small space in between.
“Yeah, I don’t really wanna talk about that night,” she mutters.
“Okay,” he says, nodding. “Heard. Chef.”
She snaps up to glare at him. “Mm, no. You don’t get to do that anymore.”
Carmy deflates under her glare. Sydney would be lying if she said she didn’t enjoy being the cause of it even just a little bit. She sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose, letting her eyes fall closed. There’s no part of her that knows how to look at Carmy again after that night, not after she’s been broken open like that—and forced to watch while he broke himself open—and she hates it. She hates that this is what they are now and what they’re probably always going to be, where talking feels like treading water and their sorries are laced with resentment.
“Are you gonna be pissed at me forever?” Carmy murmurs. “Be honest, Syd. Just—level with me. Are we ever gonna have a shot at being friends?”
“Depends.” Sydney leans against the back wall. Anything, he’d told her on that stupid, stupid night, if that's what you want, yeah, you got it. “Do friends promise not to leave you alone again and then, like, actually leave you alone again? Because if that’s the case, then sure, we have a shot. We’re doing amazing already, you know. Best friends, yeah, that’s us.”
“Fucking—don’t—” Carmy exhales, finally out of steam. He lets the rest of that go unsaid.
Sydney’s glad, at least, that he doesn’t try to say sorry again. He goes quiet for a moment and she doesn’t say anything either, just lets the silence spread itself out. It feels less like the comfortable kind that she wanted it to be and more like a wound freshly open, or left long enough to fester.
And she realises—in a rush of clarity that makes her throat close up and her whole damn body ache for something she can’t even name—just how much she’s missed him. She’s missed standing next to him in this kitchen with nothing else but the overhead light keeping them awake, hunched over their recipes or preparing for tomorrow’s service or tasting each other’s dishes. She’s missed trying to read his scribbling in the margins of his Moleskin and hearing the way his mouth explains them to her later, stammering through ideas only an untamed genius like him could think of.
“Tell me what you want me to do,” Carmy says instead, which is just so much worse. “Please.”
What she wants, more than anything, is to go back and tell him what she was actually thinking: I wanna do this with you, or not at all. She wants to grab Carmy’s face, to pull him close and look him so fierce in the eye and breathe the words into his body—to make Carmy understand that the only reason she ever gave a shit about getting the Michelin star at all was because they were doing this together.
(But that kind of thought is selfish as fuck, the kind of thought a good leader would be ashamed to have. So, maybe he was wrong and she’s not all that, you know, whatever.)
“Carm, I—” Sydney lifts her hand, helplessly circling it clockwise over her chest. “I can’t do that. You know I can’t do that.”
Unexpectedly he buckles, dropping to his knees on the kitchen floor. He lets his head hang back and he presses both hands into his face, and then the most awful sound comes out of his mouth—something impossibly soft, between a groan and a whimper.
“Carmy,” Sydney says, and she feels everything inside of her plunging all the way down. “Jesus, Carm, stop. Don’t—don’t fucking do that, I’m not…” I’m not worth all this, I’m not God. And from some particularly bitter place in her mind, I’m not Claire. She gingerly plants her hands on Carmy’s shoulders and tries not to think about how beautiful he looks like this, desperate and pleading underneath her. “I’m not mad at you. Okay? I mean, obviously I was, and maybe I always will be, like a little bit, but—but I’m not mad right now. Okay? That’s the best I can give you.”
After a beat, Sydney crouches down next to him with her arms crossed at her stomach. “Carm. You’re a lot of things, but you are not pathetic. Not like this. So, don’t start now. Carm—God, just get up, please. Get the fuck up, man.”
By the time Carmy finally pries his fingers away from his face and they both get to their feet, the clock on the wall reads midnight. Carmy wipes his palms on his trousers. He lifts his head, and their eyes meet across the dim and hazy stretch between them. Sydney wishes she could become someone else—someone stronger, someone who can just let this go.
“I meant what I said that night, too,” she says.
“What?”
“That I’m sorry.” He’s about to cut in but she carries on before he can. “No, no, just let me talk for a second, okay? I’m sorry. I should’ve told you about Adam. There’s no excuse for that. You were the only person I ever needed to talk to, but I didn’t because—I don’t know, I got scared, and it got real, and then shit hit the fucking fan, and then my dad—and—” She takes a breath and squeezes her eyes shut so she doesn’t have to look Carmy in the face when it all comes out. “And then you said you didn’t love this anymore, you just said it like it was nothing. Like it was just a—a fact, no questions asked. And I had to just sit there and pretend like it wasn’t the saddest fucking thing you ever said to me.”
“It wasn’t nothing!” Carmy exclaims, voice rising by degrees. “What do you mean? Obviously it wasn’t nothing. It was the hardest fucking thing I ever had to admit!”
“Right, yeah.” Sydney scoffs. “Okay, well, good to know.”
“I mean it,” he says quietly. “You’re the only person I ever needed, too. I thought we were—fuck it, I thought we were good, you know, despite all the shit that was going on.”
“So did I.”
Now she’s the one out of steam, all her anger deflated. What the fuck is wrong with her? Can’t go five steps into a conversation without sticking the knife in, doesn’t matter how deep the cut?
Sydney sighs. “I turned him down, you know.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I know.”
“No, I mean, like, before.” She chuckles. “It was, uh, perfect timing actually. Joke of the century. Like, ‘fuck, I wish I wrote that joke, but the universe fucking beat me to it’? Yeah, so, I turn him down and then, like, four hours later Pete calls me and I find out you’re quitting.”
Carmy stares at her, and then he laughs too, shakily. “Fuck, Syd. Are you serious? No shit perfect timing.”
“I know.”
Sydney sniffs. The aching returns to her body and it catches in her throat, and it doesn’t subside. She can feel her eyes prickling again and she thinks, Fuck it. Might as well break herself open a little more. “I’m glad you’re here, Carm. I appreciate it.”
“Yeah, of course. Anytime you need me here, I will be here.” He shakes his head when she laughs at that. “I’m being dead fucking serious. No more bullshit. Not with you. I don’t even think I can do that anymore.”
“Oh, come on,” Sydney says. “Let’s not pretend like I have any kind of power over you.”
“Power. Control. Influence. Whatever you wanna call it.” Carmy shrugs, half-smiling. “Same difference.”
She wants to touch him—gently, drag him head first into her. She wants to punch him in the teeth.
“Just drop me a text whenever,” he says. “I’m getting better at that, you know. The texting back thing.”
“Yeah, okay, no need to be an asshole about it,” she hurls back, and keeps her arms crossed.