Love & Other Disasters(5)

Tomorrow, the real Chef’s Special started. Face-Offs. Ingredient Innovations. Elimination Challenges where they didn’t have weeks to prepare. Real World Challenges. They had to get their mind in order, as soon as humanly possible, if they wanted to succeed.

And maybe they were only here because they got too drunk with Julie last Christmas, when they saw the ad about Chef’s Special auditions coming to Nashville. Julie had dared them to try out, and they had never once in their life said no to a dare from their twin sister. But now that they were here, it was real. And the more London thought about what they would do with that prize money, the better they felt about it.

London wanted to succeed at this more than anything.

So they spent the next two sips of bourbon clearing their head and preparing for tomorrow, for the next day, for every challenge to come.

And then a bag slammed into the empty chair across from them.

The surprising bag was followed by an equally surprising woman, whose wild dark hair framed a face that declared she had had quite enough of the day, thank you very much. She stuck her hands on her hips, visibly huffing, and glared at them.

“Dahlia.” London winced, recalling her spectacular trip on set, which had occurred hours earlier at this point but was still imprinted on their mind. Because how could it not be. It had been . . . epic. “I am so, so—”

“Oh, shut up.” She waved a hand. “Everyone is so sorry for me. I know. Believe me, I’m sorry for me, too. I don’t want to talk about that.”

London gripped their liquor, unsure what in the world they and Dahlia Woodson had to talk about, if they couldn’t talk about that.

But Dahlia apparently knew.

“Why didn’t you say good luck back?”

London blinked.

“Or even smile!” She continued, booming with anger when London didn’t respond. “You didn’t have to say anything, but you could have at least smiled back. Or said literally anything to me, after I embarrassed myself at the beginning of the day. All I was trying to do was be friendly. Look for a little reassurance before the most terrifying thing in my life commenced. Why be such a jerk?”

London was too stunned to reply. Or to even take another sip of bourbon. Which they sorely needed.

Dahlia crossed her arms over her chest.

“Did I do something to you?”

London could feel it now, see it in her eyes as Dahlia attempted to bluster on, how the heat was going out of her. Her anger was quickly giving way to sadness, or fatigue, or something else. And while the anger had been startling, no part of London had any room for this stranger’s sadness. By the time she pushed out her last question, she only sounded tired. “Or are you just one of those people who indiscriminately hates everyone?”

London frowned at this characterization, even if it had been weakly thrown. “I don’t hate you. That’s not . . . no.” They took a breath. Fine. They’d put an end to this thing. “I’m sorry I didn’t say good luck back.”

The truth was that London remembered Dahlia saying good luck to them. They remembered their brain registering that they should reply, and the command not quite reaching their mouth. They remembered pretty much everything about Dahlia Woodson from today, from the moment they walked on set and first got a glimpse of that hair.

It was mesmerizing. Thick, almost black, unkempt. But the thing that left London slightly gobsmacked was simply how much of it there was. It cascaded in waves all the way to her waist. It was ridiculous, was what it was.

The season eight cast had met last night for a meet-and-greet cocktail hour and dinner at some swanky restaurant in Burbank. There was so much going on, so many hands to shake and names to remember and fake smiles to plaster on, that London hadn’t kept track of the other contestants as closely as they knew others were, scouting each other out, looking for signs of weakness. But when London saw that hair today, they knew they would have remembered it. That hair had not been at the meet and greet. And now it appeared that it would be in their direct line of vision for the entirety of filming. Or, at least, until one of them was eliminated from the competition.

“Hey,” London had asked Ahmed, their tablemate, when they huddled behind the archway, waiting for the go-ahead to officially enter the set on camera this morning, right after she had run her face into their chest. “Do you know who that woman is, in front of us? Next to Jacob?”

“With the hair? Name’s Dahlia Woodson. I think.”

“She wasn’t around last night, though, right?”

“Nope. I only think that’s her name because I heard Janet say, ‘Where the hell is Dahlia Woodson?’ at some point.”

“Huh.”

London simply didn’t like being thrown off, was the thing. It was fine, of course, that Dahlia had apparently blown off the meet and greet, that she was stationed in front of them. But it was unnecessarily distracting, really, that all of that hair was down, completely untamed and uncontained. Like, was she actually planning on cooking like that? Because for starters, it was completely unsanitary. It would never fly in a professional kitchen.

But hairnets weren’t sexy on-screen. Maybe the producers had asked her to keep it down? But no, a quick glance around set had revealed several other people with their hair up. The more London had stared at it, the more infuriating it became.

London had been so distracted by it when they first saw it that they had simply stood there, like an idiot, as Dahlia whirled up to them under the archway, a tiny hurricane of energy, and smashed into them. And proceeded to be . . . adorable.