fic: What you eat, 2/4
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Pairing: eventual McCoy/Chekov ; mentions of past McCoy/Kirk
Notes: Part II of delighter's now quite tardy birthday gift. See her visual primer for an inkling of why our love is the truest love. And many many thanks to estei for her magnificent talent for making me feel less like a cheeseball. Part III is still scheduled for Friday.
Words: 3700.
Summary: The restaurant AU. Enterprise is a haute cuisine upstart in San Francisco, owned and operated by one Chef James T. Kirk.
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
PART II
McCoy wakes up to Chekov’s huge blue eyes and parted lips. And to Chekov’s wiry chef’s grip juddering him awake with all the ferocity of a terrier on a rat.
“I’m sorry!” Chekov whispers as he shakes him, “Please wake up!”
“What?” McCoy says, twisting away so he can prop himself up. A gunshot wound, he thinks. A car accident. “What is it?”
“It’s noon,” Chekov tells him in a hushed voice, like he’s still afraid of waking him. “And Chef Kirk never told me what time to go in.”
McCoy slumps back down onto the mattress. Chekov hovers worriedly.
“Go shower,” McCoy growls, “And don’t use my razor.”
They eat at the little Chinese-American diner across the street: perfect runny-yolked eggs and a bowl of sweet and sour soup are all McCoy ever wants on a Sunday afternoon. That, and sludgy black coffee.
Chekov orders a hamburger, because the sign outside actually reads "PERFECT HAMBURGER!" and it piques his professional curiosity. "It is not perfect," he concludes after two bites. "But it is delicious."
"That's the MSG," McCoy tells him.
By the time they're done, McCoy is ready to prescribe them both a cheap beer and an afternoon nap, but Chekov is getting more and more restless. He checks his watch three times while McCoy drains his last mug of coffee.
"He's not going to expect you there until two, I guarantee it," McCoy resists the urge to smack the kid's bony wrists back under the table. "After you've learned something about the ordering and the prep maybe then he'll want you in earlier."
"I could learn it now, though." Chekov insists, "If I was just there to watch."
McCoy sighs, more a grumble than an exhalation. He puts a twenty on the table and stands up. "We could wash that jacket of yours next door," is his last-ditch effort to distract the kid so he can go home and sleep the rest of it off. "You don't want to show up looking like last night's special."
Chekov frowns down at his jacket as they walk out onto the street. Its double-breasted front is covered in burns and faded stains, on top of being fairly oily with the house vinaigrette from last night, but Chekov opens and refolds it, covering the disastrous flap with a pristine one. "That is an excellent idea, sir, but I am very anxious to get to work," he confides, with a regretful glance at the laundromat next door.
McCoy doesn't even acknowledge the statement - he never listens to anyone who calls him sir, actually, not bellhops or telemarketers - and he starts trudging towards the next streetcar stop.
It's funny. When they get to Enterprise, Kirk is somehow actually worse than he was yesterday. Like he's used the night to decide he's actually pissed at McCoy, and not just ignoring him.
First, Kirk follows him into the wine cellar to give him shit about the wine list, which McCoy admits should've been updated a week ago. But while they're at it, McCoy takes the opportunity to hassle him about Christine's raise, and when Kirk says, entirely mockingly, "Christine who? You're going to have to be more specific, Doctor" it turns into a full-out shouting match.
About the wine list, about the bar, about Kirk's dictatorship and McCoy's insubordination.
The wine cellar isn't exactly soundproof, even though Kirk slams the trap door shut halfway through so they're standing there yelling with a 30 watt bulb dangling between their noses, probably raising the ambient temperature by a dangerous five degrees with their body heat. The humidity has them both sweating, and that makes McCoy even more irrationally angry.
"What is this?" he finally snaps, "What the fuck is wrong with you? You're being that asshole chef, Jim. Maybe you think I deserve it, but don't you dare take this shit back upstairs to the rest of them."
And he pulls down the ladder and stomps out of the cellar, trying to look a little less heated and harassed than he is, while Sulu and Uhura stare at him, eyebrows up. Even worse, Chekov looks terrified, with his mouth hanging open like he’s witnessed a robbery or an armed assault.
"I'm going to the printer's," McCoy declares, waving his clipboard. "I'll be back for five."
He goes to brush by Spock on his way through the back, but the man catches his arm, stopping him with a good deal of unspoken insistence. "Mr. McCoy?" he asks.
Goddamn, McCoy hates being called mister. He ignores entirely the sense of entreaty he can feel coming off of Spock, the help he's offering and asking for in that dark gaze and unnerving grip. Whatever the hell is wrong with Kirk, Spock's noticed it, too. And he wants just as badly to fix it.
But McCoy is in no mood to discuss the minute details of Jim Kirk's chapped ass. "Take it up with the boss," McCoy tells him, his voice bent sideways through gritted teeth. He tugs his arm away. "Maybe he’s more inclined to listen to you."
He doesn't set foot in the kitchen for the rest of his shift, and at the end of the night, as soon as he's sure Scott has things under control up front, he heads out the main doors. It's barely eleven, and the buses are still running, but he decides to walk. He needs to be away from other people’s body heat and vocalizations. He needs to think by himself for a while. He needs to not think, and to drink a lot by himself. He needs quiet.
Two blocks down he realizes that Chekov has managed to follow him.
"Mr. McCoy!" The kid calls, and when McCoy doesn’t turn around, he jogs to catch up.
"Mr. McCoy," he says again, insistent and happy and breathless all at once.
"Stop calling me mister," McCoy snaps, turning on him. "I don't want to fucking hear that word again."
Chekov blinks. "Forgive me.”
McCoy shakes his head, more at himself than Chekov. He is an appalling wreck. He needs to be alone. He keeps walking.
“I-” says Chekov, hopping sideways and then matching McCoy’s pace, “I hope that tonight you will let me repay your hospitality by joining me and my grandmother for dinner."
“No,” McCoy says.
“I realize our home is quite a distance away, but--”
“Not tonight,” McCoy repeats, trying to be more gentle and failing massively. “I’m busy.”
“You don’t work tomorrow, correct? Let me buy you a drink, then,” Chekov persists. He walks too close and gazes too intently.
“Kid,” says McCoy, “I don’t know if you noticed this, but it is my preferred habit to drink alone. Regardless of whether or not I’m going to go crawling back to kiss Kirk’s ass tomorrow, I don’t want company.”
Chekov falls silent, but he does not stop walking. Eventually, as they’re standing at a crosswalk too near to McCoy’s place for comfort, Chekov says: “I admit that I do not understand what happened today in the wine cellar between you and the Chef. And I do understand you when you say you’d rather be alone. But I think it is best for everyone if I at least cook you dinner.”
“No,” says McCoy.
“Yes. That is what I will do.” Chekov pats McCoy’s shoulder. “It’s alright, you can drink while I cook.”
Chekov gets his way. He raids the place underneath McCoy’s apartment, Salama Halal Meat, and fifteen minutes later unwraps his lamb kidneys on McCoy’s counter. He also got some sheep feta that came straight out of a wooden barrel, and a bag of picked-over produce that McCoy knows has seen better days.
“I don’t keep a pantry,” he warns Chekov, knowing it’s belated. He sits himself down on his couch, which backs onto the little kitchen, and cranes his head at an awkward angle. “You may as well have got take-out.”
Chekov doesn’t rise to the bait. He finds a forgotten half-bottle of cognac in the cupboard and pours McCoy a snifter’s worth while he soaks the kidneys and sets some water boiling for the couscous.
“I’ve never eaten kidneys, before,” he says contemplatively as he starts carmelizing a handful of withered shallots. “Have you?”
“No,” says McCoy. Kirk has tried to feed him a lot of weird shit over the years, but never kidneys. The cognac is good, a 30 year old XO he’d forgot he had. And here he’d been drinking gin at home for months. He scowls at Chekov. “How do you even know what you’re doing?”
Chekov shrugs, “One of my professors had John Rickey come in once. He did these for the class as a demo.”
McCoy makes a face at the famous name. “How kind of him.”
“Celebrity chefs like to come to the big schools because there they are treated like celebrities.” Chekov says, monitoring his pan with a heavy gaze and slight smile, “Do you blame them?”
“Celebrity chefs are more interested in themselves than their food,” McCoy replies, swallowing a sip of the cognac. Wood and leather, honeyed strawberry. He knows he’s just spouting Kirk’s kneejerk opinions about prettyboy chefs and their clean jackets and big hats. Opinions made all the less valid by the Chronicle’s feature interview this weekend: a huge color photo of Kirk standing beside his range and a clatter of gleaming pots with his arms crossed, looking for all the world like an Iron Chef competitor. The interview had barely even referred to his food. It had dwelled heavily on Enterprise’s ambiance, the design firm responsible for the white and chrome, and namedropping recent clientele. And then, belatedly, parenthetically, summarizing other glowing reviews. For a heavy-hitter like the Chronicle, which devotes more ink to its food section than any other city newspaper in America, it was a fluff piece. Kirk had been flattered until he saw the finished product yesterday morning: the number of ellipses through his quoted speech about his menu, the stains photoshopped off his jacket. He hated being portrayed as exactly the kind of chef he despised. Never mind that he’d started acting like one, too, somewhere along the line.
“I don’t think so,” says Chekov. “I believe they are simply playing a game the rest of us are ignorant of.”
“I’d prefer to stay ignorant,” McCoy says.
“You probably will,” Chekov says sagely, “It requires a certain amount of narcissism to understand, I suspect.”
“Aren’t you wise for a seventeen year old,” McCoy says.
“Twenty-one,” Chekov corrects, unruffled.
But soon the smell coming off of the stove is so complicated and gorgeous that McCoy comes to stand and hover beside the skillet and watch Chekov finish braising the little kidneys with the cognac while he constructs the feta and couscous and shallots into a creamy bed for them.
“We should have a salad, but your produce is atrocious,” Chekov tells him, “You should at least go to the market once in a while. This would be much better if we had spinach. Cucumber. Any vegetables at all.”
He pronounces the word wedge-a-tahbles, though, and McCoy laughs. Maybe at the thought of himself peeling carrots at 4:00 a.m. after a long shift and a long binge, or maybe just at Chekov’s ridiculous accent. The sound makes Chekov startle up at him, and then relax with a quiet smirk. Like he knows that McCoy is probably laughing at him, but he doesn’t mind, because the act of laughing is valuable enough to forgive.
They eat the meal off their knees on the couch because there’s no room for a dining table in this place, and McCoy realizes as he gets up to pour them both another snifter of cognac that he’s enjoying himself.
He’s not alone, it’s not quiet, yet he’s enjoying himself. He even likes the food he’s eating. Food that’s been prepared in his kitchen, not in some ramshackle take-out place anywhere between Polk Street and here. It’s been five years since someone else has cooked for him in that kitchen. He can’t help but count.
“This was delicious,” he tells Chekov, as he takes the kid’s plate, trying to sound honest for once.
“I’m glad,” Chekov responds. He watches McCoy earnestly: “But you must still come and meet my grandmother. She is a lonely old woman who has traveled very far, and she worries about me and she will want to meet the great sommelier who granted little Pavel his first big city job.”
McCoy grimaces, swallows more cognac. “Is that how you described it to her?”
Chekov shrugs, “I called her before dinner service. But will you come? Please?”
McCoy puts the dishes in the sink, surveys the mess of the kitchen - less messy, perhaps, now Chekov has been through it - and retreats to the couch to ignore it all. “Yeah, sure,” he says, a little unconvincingly.
“Tomorrow,” Chekov prompts, turning to him. The couch is not that wide. Just a little love seat that he picked because it could fit up the stairs of the walk-up. Chekov brings his leg up, twists his whole body to face McCoy, who has had enough to drink that it takes him a moment to turn himself away, face forward again so their knees don’t touch.
Again, he thinks. How did he do this again? Two nights in a row with this kid.
“Yeah, tomorrow,” McCoy agrees, because that semi-drunken part of him wants to be agreeable, wants to have a good time.
But that makes three nights. What is he doing.
“Good.” Chekov finishes off his drink, and writes down the address on a piece of old mail that’s lying on the table. “Six sharp,” he orders cheerfully. “My grandmother, she does not wait for her dinners.”
“I’ll be there,” McCoy promises, wondering already if he means it.
To be polite, he walks Chekov down to the foyer. He regrets it immediately. He feels kind of sordid and awkward as he holds open the dirty glass door for the kid. The door and the dinner and the drinks make it feel like a date. Like a date with a question mark hanging over the goodnight kiss. It’s barely an hour into Monday morning, now, and Geary Street feels private and poorly lit and risky.
And there’s Chekov, smiling up at him from the first step down, and McCoy knows he would kiss him if he was just a little drunker.
Just a little.
“Goodnight,” McCoy says, not letting himself waver. “Thank you for dinner.”
“See you tomorrow,” Chekov raises his hand in a wide wave, and heads east, toward the train station.
For a minute, McCoy considers calling him back - double-checking that he knows which train to catch, if his line is even running after midnight, if maybe he should just take the couch again - but he keeps his mouth closed. And then to cement that decision, he closes the glass door against the fluttering, dusty moths, and goes back upstairs to close his apartment door, and his bedroom door. He even closes his eyes to sleep.
It’s that last barricade that he can’t maintain, though. He lies in bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling, eyes wide open.
By morning, he’s made a decision.
He gets up sometime way too early, and decides to get breakfast. He has to eat before he calls and cancels on Chekov. He can’t just do it. It should be easy, but it isn’t. How do you say, I’m sorry, I think I’m using you for my own emotionally fucked up purposes, I don’t want to meet your grandmother without sounding like an asshole?
So he goes across the street and gets his runny eggs and sludgy coffee. He lingers there for almost a full two hours, poking through the Chronicle and watching the Monday traffic limp by.
By noon, he wants a drink. And he knows this squalid little bar two blocks down on the corner of Jones and Ellis Street that doesn’t serve anyone but semi-catatonic middle-aged men on the best nights, so is sure to be a decent hiding place right now. He doesn’t want to see anyone he knows, or anyone from Enterprise to see him. This is always a vital consideration for him.
At Jonell’s, he gets two glasses of liquor down his throat, and orders a third. The only person in the place besides him and the bartender is a grubby old man in a straw fedora, asleep with his head against the wall. McCoy nods in his direction when the bartender swings by again, “How many’s he had?”
“Just a couple,” she replies, glancing at his drooped frame, “He’s just kicked out of his old lady’s place right now.”
McCoy doesn’t enquire further. He pays for another drink, and goes back to watching the silent talk show on the television, and trying hard not to think about what he’ll say to Chekov about canceling. Instead, he thinks about Jim Kirk.
It’s not really a better choice.
By two, he’s ready to appreciate Enterprise again. He thinks loving thoughts about the elegant curve of her bar and the sweep and fastidiousness of her liquor collection. The way the light travels over the white tabletops, the white place settings, right to the back of the restaurant so that even sitting at the bar, facing the back wall of jewel-toned liquor bottles, nothing feels dingy or dim. Arched ten foot windows and a plaster ceiling mean that she never feels too modern, too cold.
When he walks in, she always feels like home.
Kirk says, “You don’t work today,” like he’s personally offended that McCoy has shown up on his day off. On everyone’s day off, actually. Enterprise doesn’t open on Mondays. But Kirk’s here. Kirk’s always here.
McCoy shrugs, “Just can’t keep away from you, Jim.”
Kirk doesn’t think it’s a very funny joke. He’s the only one in the kitchen, and McCoy knows there’s no one up front, either.
“Have you been drinking?” Kirk asks. Of course he knows immediately. He would. How old were they when they met? Jim had been an arrogant and charming twenty-two. By then, McCoy had been well settled in his habits and not inclined to hide them from anyone except his supervisors or his professors. Ten years later, not much has changed. Except now Jim is the boss. And McCoy’s still drunk.
“It’s been a productive morning,” McCoy tells him, dodging the question, but only barely. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”
Kirk looks tired. “Bones. Go home. I don’t want to deal with you.”
It’s hard not to take that personally. “You’re going to have to deal with me sometime.”
Kirk’s face registers the point. He pretends to scan his order sheet, clipboard laid flat on a gleaming, empty counter. He braces his hands on either side of it and stares vacantly at it while McCoy waits.
“I’m not apologizing to you while you’re drunk,” Kirk says.
“I don’t want an apology,” McCoy returns.
“But you deserve one,” Kirk says. He still doesn’t look up.
It’s McCoy’s turn. He knows he should just clear his throat and ask for the sheet of paper with Chekov’s phone number on it. He should go home and clear that up right now. He should stop shoving his hands deeper and deeper into Jim Kirk’s hornet’s nest of a heart.
He says, “I still love you,” and regrets it immediately, painfully.
Kirk doesn’t even look up. He stands firm, braced with his feet on the floor and his palms on the countertop. “You should get out of here,” he suggests. “Please.”
And McCoy does. He goes back out the way he came in, through the open door into the sunlight and the alleyway’s stink of garbage.
He doesn’t call Chekov. He doesn’t have the number and he doesn’t have his phone with him and so he goes back to Jonell’s, and keeps his cheap bottle of whisky close at hand. It burns the palate, but it also clears the mind as he self-administers it in steady slugs.
He tries not to be, but he is very aware of the time. He watches as six o’clock comes and goes. Suzy the bartender offers him the dinner menu. He ignores it, hates that reminder, too.
The part of him that is drunk and cowardly tells itself that he’s made the right decision, he’s doing what’s best for everybody. Staying away from Chekov, who doesn’t know what he’s playing with. And staying the hell away from Jim.
But there’s an older part of him, a part that he only barely remembers from that one blessed year after med school when he was a resident at St. Luke’s and Jim was just a regular line cook at Avenue and the apartment wasn’t a pigsty because Jim is actually quite particular about garbage lying around his kitchen. That whole year where McCoy would come home off the late shift to runny eggs and bright black coffee at 7:00 a.m, with Jim standing groggy in front of the toaster, waiting up for him, and they’d eat and kiss and fall asleep while the sun came up. This is the same part of him that knows that he’s fucked up spectacularly. The part that knows Jim won’t ever come back. That it’s too late for that.
That is the part of him that tells itself that he needs to go home to bed and sleep this whole day off.
He listens to it. He does.
It’s just that when he’s standing in his bathroom washing his face, he notices the unused toothbrush that he took out for Chekov two nights ago. It’s standing beside his in the mug, and it looks so at home that it makes his chest hitch, his knees buckle with a feeling like drowning. He remembers this feeling, he thinks, as he presses his forehead to the cool porcelain of the pedestal sink. He feels entirely lost.
(Part III)
Pairing: eventual McCoy/Chekov ; mentions of past McCoy/Kirk
Notes: Part II of delighter's now quite tardy birthday gift. See her visual primer for an inkling of why our love is the truest love. And many many thanks to estei for her magnificent talent for making me feel less like a cheeseball. Part III is still scheduled for Friday.
Words: 3700.
Summary: The restaurant AU. Enterprise is a haute cuisine upstart in San Francisco, owned and operated by one Chef James T. Kirk.
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
PART II
McCoy wakes up to Chekov’s huge blue eyes and parted lips. And to Chekov’s wiry chef’s grip juddering him awake with all the ferocity of a terrier on a rat.
“I’m sorry!” Chekov whispers as he shakes him, “Please wake up!”
“What?” McCoy says, twisting away so he can prop himself up. A gunshot wound, he thinks. A car accident. “What is it?”
“It’s noon,” Chekov tells him in a hushed voice, like he’s still afraid of waking him. “And Chef Kirk never told me what time to go in.”
McCoy slumps back down onto the mattress. Chekov hovers worriedly.
“Go shower,” McCoy growls, “And don’t use my razor.”
They eat at the little Chinese-American diner across the street: perfect runny-yolked eggs and a bowl of sweet and sour soup are all McCoy ever wants on a Sunday afternoon. That, and sludgy black coffee.
Chekov orders a hamburger, because the sign outside actually reads "PERFECT HAMBURGER!" and it piques his professional curiosity. "It is not perfect," he concludes after two bites. "But it is delicious."
"That's the MSG," McCoy tells him.
By the time they're done, McCoy is ready to prescribe them both a cheap beer and an afternoon nap, but Chekov is getting more and more restless. He checks his watch three times while McCoy drains his last mug of coffee.
"He's not going to expect you there until two, I guarantee it," McCoy resists the urge to smack the kid's bony wrists back under the table. "After you've learned something about the ordering and the prep maybe then he'll want you in earlier."
"I could learn it now, though." Chekov insists, "If I was just there to watch."
McCoy sighs, more a grumble than an exhalation. He puts a twenty on the table and stands up. "We could wash that jacket of yours next door," is his last-ditch effort to distract the kid so he can go home and sleep the rest of it off. "You don't want to show up looking like last night's special."
Chekov frowns down at his jacket as they walk out onto the street. Its double-breasted front is covered in burns and faded stains, on top of being fairly oily with the house vinaigrette from last night, but Chekov opens and refolds it, covering the disastrous flap with a pristine one. "That is an excellent idea, sir, but I am very anxious to get to work," he confides, with a regretful glance at the laundromat next door.
McCoy doesn't even acknowledge the statement - he never listens to anyone who calls him sir, actually, not bellhops or telemarketers - and he starts trudging towards the next streetcar stop.
It's funny. When they get to Enterprise, Kirk is somehow actually worse than he was yesterday. Like he's used the night to decide he's actually pissed at McCoy, and not just ignoring him.
First, Kirk follows him into the wine cellar to give him shit about the wine list, which McCoy admits should've been updated a week ago. But while they're at it, McCoy takes the opportunity to hassle him about Christine's raise, and when Kirk says, entirely mockingly, "Christine who? You're going to have to be more specific, Doctor" it turns into a full-out shouting match.
About the wine list, about the bar, about Kirk's dictatorship and McCoy's insubordination.
The wine cellar isn't exactly soundproof, even though Kirk slams the trap door shut halfway through so they're standing there yelling with a 30 watt bulb dangling between their noses, probably raising the ambient temperature by a dangerous five degrees with their body heat. The humidity has them both sweating, and that makes McCoy even more irrationally angry.
"What is this?" he finally snaps, "What the fuck is wrong with you? You're being that asshole chef, Jim. Maybe you think I deserve it, but don't you dare take this shit back upstairs to the rest of them."
And he pulls down the ladder and stomps out of the cellar, trying to look a little less heated and harassed than he is, while Sulu and Uhura stare at him, eyebrows up. Even worse, Chekov looks terrified, with his mouth hanging open like he’s witnessed a robbery or an armed assault.
"I'm going to the printer's," McCoy declares, waving his clipboard. "I'll be back for five."
He goes to brush by Spock on his way through the back, but the man catches his arm, stopping him with a good deal of unspoken insistence. "Mr. McCoy?" he asks.
Goddamn, McCoy hates being called mister. He ignores entirely the sense of entreaty he can feel coming off of Spock, the help he's offering and asking for in that dark gaze and unnerving grip. Whatever the hell is wrong with Kirk, Spock's noticed it, too. And he wants just as badly to fix it.
But McCoy is in no mood to discuss the minute details of Jim Kirk's chapped ass. "Take it up with the boss," McCoy tells him, his voice bent sideways through gritted teeth. He tugs his arm away. "Maybe he’s more inclined to listen to you."
He doesn't set foot in the kitchen for the rest of his shift, and at the end of the night, as soon as he's sure Scott has things under control up front, he heads out the main doors. It's barely eleven, and the buses are still running, but he decides to walk. He needs to be away from other people’s body heat and vocalizations. He needs to think by himself for a while. He needs to not think, and to drink a lot by himself. He needs quiet.
Two blocks down he realizes that Chekov has managed to follow him.
"Mr. McCoy!" The kid calls, and when McCoy doesn’t turn around, he jogs to catch up.
"Mr. McCoy," he says again, insistent and happy and breathless all at once.
"Stop calling me mister," McCoy snaps, turning on him. "I don't want to fucking hear that word again."
Chekov blinks. "Forgive me.”
McCoy shakes his head, more at himself than Chekov. He is an appalling wreck. He needs to be alone. He keeps walking.
“I-” says Chekov, hopping sideways and then matching McCoy’s pace, “I hope that tonight you will let me repay your hospitality by joining me and my grandmother for dinner."
“No,” McCoy says.
“I realize our home is quite a distance away, but--”
“Not tonight,” McCoy repeats, trying to be more gentle and failing massively. “I’m busy.”
“You don’t work tomorrow, correct? Let me buy you a drink, then,” Chekov persists. He walks too close and gazes too intently.
“Kid,” says McCoy, “I don’t know if you noticed this, but it is my preferred habit to drink alone. Regardless of whether or not I’m going to go crawling back to kiss Kirk’s ass tomorrow, I don’t want company.”
Chekov falls silent, but he does not stop walking. Eventually, as they’re standing at a crosswalk too near to McCoy’s place for comfort, Chekov says: “I admit that I do not understand what happened today in the wine cellar between you and the Chef. And I do understand you when you say you’d rather be alone. But I think it is best for everyone if I at least cook you dinner.”
“No,” says McCoy.
“Yes. That is what I will do.” Chekov pats McCoy’s shoulder. “It’s alright, you can drink while I cook.”
Chekov gets his way. He raids the place underneath McCoy’s apartment, Salama Halal Meat, and fifteen minutes later unwraps his lamb kidneys on McCoy’s counter. He also got some sheep feta that came straight out of a wooden barrel, and a bag of picked-over produce that McCoy knows has seen better days.
“I don’t keep a pantry,” he warns Chekov, knowing it’s belated. He sits himself down on his couch, which backs onto the little kitchen, and cranes his head at an awkward angle. “You may as well have got take-out.”
Chekov doesn’t rise to the bait. He finds a forgotten half-bottle of cognac in the cupboard and pours McCoy a snifter’s worth while he soaks the kidneys and sets some water boiling for the couscous.
“I’ve never eaten kidneys, before,” he says contemplatively as he starts carmelizing a handful of withered shallots. “Have you?”
“No,” says McCoy. Kirk has tried to feed him a lot of weird shit over the years, but never kidneys. The cognac is good, a 30 year old XO he’d forgot he had. And here he’d been drinking gin at home for months. He scowls at Chekov. “How do you even know what you’re doing?”
Chekov shrugs, “One of my professors had John Rickey come in once. He did these for the class as a demo.”
McCoy makes a face at the famous name. “How kind of him.”
“Celebrity chefs like to come to the big schools because there they are treated like celebrities.” Chekov says, monitoring his pan with a heavy gaze and slight smile, “Do you blame them?”
“Celebrity chefs are more interested in themselves than their food,” McCoy replies, swallowing a sip of the cognac. Wood and leather, honeyed strawberry. He knows he’s just spouting Kirk’s kneejerk opinions about prettyboy chefs and their clean jackets and big hats. Opinions made all the less valid by the Chronicle’s feature interview this weekend: a huge color photo of Kirk standing beside his range and a clatter of gleaming pots with his arms crossed, looking for all the world like an Iron Chef competitor. The interview had barely even referred to his food. It had dwelled heavily on Enterprise’s ambiance, the design firm responsible for the white and chrome, and namedropping recent clientele. And then, belatedly, parenthetically, summarizing other glowing reviews. For a heavy-hitter like the Chronicle, which devotes more ink to its food section than any other city newspaper in America, it was a fluff piece. Kirk had been flattered until he saw the finished product yesterday morning: the number of ellipses through his quoted speech about his menu, the stains photoshopped off his jacket. He hated being portrayed as exactly the kind of chef he despised. Never mind that he’d started acting like one, too, somewhere along the line.
“I don’t think so,” says Chekov. “I believe they are simply playing a game the rest of us are ignorant of.”
“I’d prefer to stay ignorant,” McCoy says.
“You probably will,” Chekov says sagely, “It requires a certain amount of narcissism to understand, I suspect.”
“Aren’t you wise for a seventeen year old,” McCoy says.
“Twenty-one,” Chekov corrects, unruffled.
But soon the smell coming off of the stove is so complicated and gorgeous that McCoy comes to stand and hover beside the skillet and watch Chekov finish braising the little kidneys with the cognac while he constructs the feta and couscous and shallots into a creamy bed for them.
“We should have a salad, but your produce is atrocious,” Chekov tells him, “You should at least go to the market once in a while. This would be much better if we had spinach. Cucumber. Any vegetables at all.”
He pronounces the word wedge-a-tahbles, though, and McCoy laughs. Maybe at the thought of himself peeling carrots at 4:00 a.m. after a long shift and a long binge, or maybe just at Chekov’s ridiculous accent. The sound makes Chekov startle up at him, and then relax with a quiet smirk. Like he knows that McCoy is probably laughing at him, but he doesn’t mind, because the act of laughing is valuable enough to forgive.
They eat the meal off their knees on the couch because there’s no room for a dining table in this place, and McCoy realizes as he gets up to pour them both another snifter of cognac that he’s enjoying himself.
He’s not alone, it’s not quiet, yet he’s enjoying himself. He even likes the food he’s eating. Food that’s been prepared in his kitchen, not in some ramshackle take-out place anywhere between Polk Street and here. It’s been five years since someone else has cooked for him in that kitchen. He can’t help but count.
“This was delicious,” he tells Chekov, as he takes the kid’s plate, trying to sound honest for once.
“I’m glad,” Chekov responds. He watches McCoy earnestly: “But you must still come and meet my grandmother. She is a lonely old woman who has traveled very far, and she worries about me and she will want to meet the great sommelier who granted little Pavel his first big city job.”
McCoy grimaces, swallows more cognac. “Is that how you described it to her?”
Chekov shrugs, “I called her before dinner service. But will you come? Please?”
McCoy puts the dishes in the sink, surveys the mess of the kitchen - less messy, perhaps, now Chekov has been through it - and retreats to the couch to ignore it all. “Yeah, sure,” he says, a little unconvincingly.
“Tomorrow,” Chekov prompts, turning to him. The couch is not that wide. Just a little love seat that he picked because it could fit up the stairs of the walk-up. Chekov brings his leg up, twists his whole body to face McCoy, who has had enough to drink that it takes him a moment to turn himself away, face forward again so their knees don’t touch.
Again, he thinks. How did he do this again? Two nights in a row with this kid.
“Yeah, tomorrow,” McCoy agrees, because that semi-drunken part of him wants to be agreeable, wants to have a good time.
But that makes three nights. What is he doing.
“Good.” Chekov finishes off his drink, and writes down the address on a piece of old mail that’s lying on the table. “Six sharp,” he orders cheerfully. “My grandmother, she does not wait for her dinners.”
“I’ll be there,” McCoy promises, wondering already if he means it.
To be polite, he walks Chekov down to the foyer. He regrets it immediately. He feels kind of sordid and awkward as he holds open the dirty glass door for the kid. The door and the dinner and the drinks make it feel like a date. Like a date with a question mark hanging over the goodnight kiss. It’s barely an hour into Monday morning, now, and Geary Street feels private and poorly lit and risky.
And there’s Chekov, smiling up at him from the first step down, and McCoy knows he would kiss him if he was just a little drunker.
Just a little.
“Goodnight,” McCoy says, not letting himself waver. “Thank you for dinner.”
“See you tomorrow,” Chekov raises his hand in a wide wave, and heads east, toward the train station.
For a minute, McCoy considers calling him back - double-checking that he knows which train to catch, if his line is even running after midnight, if maybe he should just take the couch again - but he keeps his mouth closed. And then to cement that decision, he closes the glass door against the fluttering, dusty moths, and goes back upstairs to close his apartment door, and his bedroom door. He even closes his eyes to sleep.
It’s that last barricade that he can’t maintain, though. He lies in bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling, eyes wide open.
By morning, he’s made a decision.
He gets up sometime way too early, and decides to get breakfast. He has to eat before he calls and cancels on Chekov. He can’t just do it. It should be easy, but it isn’t. How do you say, I’m sorry, I think I’m using you for my own emotionally fucked up purposes, I don’t want to meet your grandmother without sounding like an asshole?
So he goes across the street and gets his runny eggs and sludgy coffee. He lingers there for almost a full two hours, poking through the Chronicle and watching the Monday traffic limp by.
By noon, he wants a drink. And he knows this squalid little bar two blocks down on the corner of Jones and Ellis Street that doesn’t serve anyone but semi-catatonic middle-aged men on the best nights, so is sure to be a decent hiding place right now. He doesn’t want to see anyone he knows, or anyone from Enterprise to see him. This is always a vital consideration for him.
At Jonell’s, he gets two glasses of liquor down his throat, and orders a third. The only person in the place besides him and the bartender is a grubby old man in a straw fedora, asleep with his head against the wall. McCoy nods in his direction when the bartender swings by again, “How many’s he had?”
“Just a couple,” she replies, glancing at his drooped frame, “He’s just kicked out of his old lady’s place right now.”
McCoy doesn’t enquire further. He pays for another drink, and goes back to watching the silent talk show on the television, and trying hard not to think about what he’ll say to Chekov about canceling. Instead, he thinks about Jim Kirk.
It’s not really a better choice.
By two, he’s ready to appreciate Enterprise again. He thinks loving thoughts about the elegant curve of her bar and the sweep and fastidiousness of her liquor collection. The way the light travels over the white tabletops, the white place settings, right to the back of the restaurant so that even sitting at the bar, facing the back wall of jewel-toned liquor bottles, nothing feels dingy or dim. Arched ten foot windows and a plaster ceiling mean that she never feels too modern, too cold.
When he walks in, she always feels like home.
Kirk says, “You don’t work today,” like he’s personally offended that McCoy has shown up on his day off. On everyone’s day off, actually. Enterprise doesn’t open on Mondays. But Kirk’s here. Kirk’s always here.
McCoy shrugs, “Just can’t keep away from you, Jim.”
Kirk doesn’t think it’s a very funny joke. He’s the only one in the kitchen, and McCoy knows there’s no one up front, either.
“Have you been drinking?” Kirk asks. Of course he knows immediately. He would. How old were they when they met? Jim had been an arrogant and charming twenty-two. By then, McCoy had been well settled in his habits and not inclined to hide them from anyone except his supervisors or his professors. Ten years later, not much has changed. Except now Jim is the boss. And McCoy’s still drunk.
“It’s been a productive morning,” McCoy tells him, dodging the question, but only barely. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”
Kirk looks tired. “Bones. Go home. I don’t want to deal with you.”
It’s hard not to take that personally. “You’re going to have to deal with me sometime.”
Kirk’s face registers the point. He pretends to scan his order sheet, clipboard laid flat on a gleaming, empty counter. He braces his hands on either side of it and stares vacantly at it while McCoy waits.
“I’m not apologizing to you while you’re drunk,” Kirk says.
“I don’t want an apology,” McCoy returns.
“But you deserve one,” Kirk says. He still doesn’t look up.
It’s McCoy’s turn. He knows he should just clear his throat and ask for the sheet of paper with Chekov’s phone number on it. He should go home and clear that up right now. He should stop shoving his hands deeper and deeper into Jim Kirk’s hornet’s nest of a heart.
He says, “I still love you,” and regrets it immediately, painfully.
Kirk doesn’t even look up. He stands firm, braced with his feet on the floor and his palms on the countertop. “You should get out of here,” he suggests. “Please.”
And McCoy does. He goes back out the way he came in, through the open door into the sunlight and the alleyway’s stink of garbage.
He doesn’t call Chekov. He doesn’t have the number and he doesn’t have his phone with him and so he goes back to Jonell’s, and keeps his cheap bottle of whisky close at hand. It burns the palate, but it also clears the mind as he self-administers it in steady slugs.
He tries not to be, but he is very aware of the time. He watches as six o’clock comes and goes. Suzy the bartender offers him the dinner menu. He ignores it, hates that reminder, too.
The part of him that is drunk and cowardly tells itself that he’s made the right decision, he’s doing what’s best for everybody. Staying away from Chekov, who doesn’t know what he’s playing with. And staying the hell away from Jim.
But there’s an older part of him, a part that he only barely remembers from that one blessed year after med school when he was a resident at St. Luke’s and Jim was just a regular line cook at Avenue and the apartment wasn’t a pigsty because Jim is actually quite particular about garbage lying around his kitchen. That whole year where McCoy would come home off the late shift to runny eggs and bright black coffee at 7:00 a.m, with Jim standing groggy in front of the toaster, waiting up for him, and they’d eat and kiss and fall asleep while the sun came up. This is the same part of him that knows that he’s fucked up spectacularly. The part that knows Jim won’t ever come back. That it’s too late for that.
That is the part of him that tells itself that he needs to go home to bed and sleep this whole day off.
He listens to it. He does.
It’s just that when he’s standing in his bathroom washing his face, he notices the unused toothbrush that he took out for Chekov two nights ago. It’s standing beside his in the mug, and it looks so at home that it makes his chest hitch, his knees buckle with a feeling like drowning. He remembers this feeling, he thinks, as he presses his forehead to the cool porcelain of the pedestal sink. He feels entirely lost.
(Part III)