One Date, One Man, Never Twice: My Rule After the Divorce novel · Chapter 7 of 24
Chapter 7: After Close
Luca locked the front door of the restaurant and flipped the sign.
He came back through the dark dining room with a wooden spoon held out in front of him.
"Open," he said.
"What is it?"
"My mother's sauce. Open."
I opened my mouth, and he fed me the spoon, and I closed my lips on it.
It was tomato, garlic, a little sweet, and warm all the way down.
I made a sound I hadn't planned to make.
"Right?" he said, and his whole face lit up. "Right? It's four hours. It's my grandmother's. Nobody gets it but family."
"Luca, that's incredible."
"I know. I'm sorry. I'm so proud of it that it's embarrassing."
He was twenty-two, five foot ten, with dark curls pushed under a bandana and olive skin gone slick from the line.
A gold chain lay in the open collar of his whites.
His forearms were pocked with small pale burns from the stove.
The kitchen behind him was dark except for the pilot lights and a strip of orange from the street.
He took me by the hand and led me through the swinging doors.
It was bigger than I expected, all steel and tile, with pots hanging in a row and a smell of onions and bleach.
In the middle stood a long steel prep table, scrubbed and empty.
A shelf above it held a canister of flour and a tin of salt.
"This is where I work," he said. "Eleven hours a day."
"It's very clean."
"I clean it nine times a day. Dee..." He turned to me and swallowed. "I've eaten lunch on this table every day since I was nineteen."
"And?"
"And I've been thinking about you on it since Sunday night."
I laughed so hard that I had to hold his arm.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of One Date, One Man, Never Twice: My Rule After the Divorce are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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