Calder was an
adept employee. While he was a bit sharp-tongued, judgmental, and catty on his own time, at work he was at least only harsh where incompetence was concerned. Otherwise, he was more mild-tempered than usual. A hot, busy kitchen was no place to get worked up unnecessarily, and no place to be wasting energy he'd need to get through an intense service. As such, he always
tried to mind only the kitchen, and leave the dining room to the hosts. If there was something he needed to know, he'd hear it from them; it was a rare occurrence that he'd have to go to a table himself.
...However. There were occasions when his eyes wandered. Even rarer occasions when they
happened to land on something particularly intriguing.
There was the tiniest round window on each of the kitchen doors. If Calder was in the
middle of something, his position at the counter wouldn't even allow him to see out of it. It was only when he rounded the counter, stood
precisely at the end of it that he could see anything beyond the window at all. There was so rarely anything beyond them of interest that half the time, he didn't even bother to lift his gaze.
Today he did.
Today Calder
happened to catch a flash of moppy black hair and green eyes seated at a table in the dining room. It caused him pause. Just a second. But a second was all it took to get a fuller picture. A head of moppy hair atop a scrawny, mousy boy, seated with some
man Calder didn't recognize, but had a
strong guess about who it was.
'I'm not wasting my time here, am I?'Well, that question was ******** answered now, wasn't it? And perhaps
completely unsurprisingly, he didn't really like the answer he got.
Not that it was any of his business. He shouldn't care. He had no reason to care. Cordell wasn't his friend, had never even called him back.But Calder found himself gravitating, almost trance like, toward the kitchen door.
A palm snatched at his elbow. "What- what are you
doing? Where are you
going? It's busy, Calder! And you're going to go wandering off? I think not!" Lexi, a hostess, glared him down with a ferocity he could usually rival easily. ...And perhaps now wasn't an exception, because when he turned to look at her, she tensed up like she was
ready for something.
"I just gotta go talk to that guy, we're
friends," Or something. "And it would be rude of me not to at least say hello."
"What? No-
What? Calder- Caldercaldercalder-!"
There was a very brief not-quite-tussle, where she tried to prevent him from leaving through the door and he just bullied his way by her anyway. Once he was out, she didn't follow, perhaps sensing that Calder was
not, in fact, going out to speak to a friend.
He approached the table as casually as he could, with a basket of bread and butter as an offering that he slid onto the table with surprising dexterity. "Welcome in!" His voice was bright, but oddly cutting. "Has anything from the menu caught your interest? What'll we be having?"
