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The wedding was held at a private Westchester estate, on a supernaturally green lawn overlooking the Hudson River. Three hundred guests sat in three hundred freshly painted white wicker chairs under the perfectly blue sky, all waving paper fans to try to keep cool in their “country club formal” attire. The couple recited their personalized vows and kissed to rousing applause, then everyone headed over to the other side of the property to where the reception tents were set up.
Around the far side of the house, behind a stone wall so that no one would see, was the catering tent, where Erik, Charles, and their crew were expected to prepare and serve a gourmet feast for three hundred people with what amounted to little better than camping equipment.
“Charles, I thought I told you set our catering fees high enough that no one would pay them.”
“I did, and they doubled them. It’s only one day, Erik; it’s not actually going to kill you.”
A few months earlier, Erik would have made a snippy comment at that. Then Charles would have been sarcastic back, and their bickering would have riled him up enough to coast through this nightmarish hellscape of a catering gig on the adrenaline from that alone. And through it all he’d know that even if it was a disaster, at least he would be in for a good fuck at the end of the day.
But as much as Erik wanted to snap at Charles, Raven was standing a few feet away with a lewd smirk on her face, watching their interaction with barely contained glee. So instead of inciting the argument they both longed for, he shut his mouth and patted Charles apologetically on the shoulder. Charles sighed and went to check on the serving staff while Erik went back to preparing the hors d'oeuvres.
Nothing had been the same between them since word got out about their relationship. For a week after the Valentine’s Day Incident they were bombarded with questions ranging from the most innocent (“Are you really married? Really? Really?”) to the most lewd (“So whose asshole is deeper? Have you measured them?”). By the end of February they could no longer remember a time when their marriage was not the primary source of gossip and entertainment for their employees.
At first they tried to convince themselves that it didn’t matter. They never intended it to be a secret, really; it had just ended up that way. Before they’d opened their own restaurant, they’d spent years working together in places where everyone knew they were a couple. There was no reason why they couldn’t do it again. Sure, that was different – they were employees then, not owners – but still they assured themselves that nothing had to change between them just because their staff knew that they were married.
But of course it did. They could no longer bicker and fight and flirt the way they had before – not with everyone watching, and not with everyone knowing. Those members of the staff who figured out that their fighting was more like foreplay had taken to watching them with knowing, leering expressions. The bolder amongst them would sometimes cheer them on. Worse, in Charles’ opinion, were the more innocent, usually younger staff members, who hadn’t yet figured out that arguing could be pleasurable. They tended to watch Charles and Erik argue with big, sad puppy eyes, as if they were watching their parents fight. Charles said it made him feel guilty, like he was scarring them for life. As a result, they started to feel too self-conscious to do anything but compromise and be nice to each other at work. It was awful. And now it was June and their sex life still hadn’t recovered.
Raven’s reaction was the worst, though. She’d apparently determined that the best way to get over her doomed crush on Erik was by deciding that he and Charles were the cutest couple she’d ever met. If that was true, Erik assumed she must be some kind of shut-in.
“I bet you and Charles had a beautiful wedding,” she cooed, her chin in her hands.
Erik refused to look up at her from the hundreds of stuffed mushrooms he was plating. “We got married at City Hall in Boston on a Tuesday. It was raining. Isn’t there something you should be doing right now?”
“I have time.” She sidled up closer to him. “What did you cook for your wedding? Something fantastic, probably.”
Erik sighed and still would not look up. He’d become a one-man assembly line and he would not let Raven’s inane questions break his rhythm. “We went to a restaurant afterwards. I wasn’t going to cook for my own fucking wedding.”
“Did you have a lot of people there?”
“No, it was just the two of us. Do you have any other questions or can I finish preparing thousands of tiny little appetizers that all have to go out in the next five minutes?”
That was the awful thing about catering – everything had to go out at once. It was one thing to serve three hundred people who were all coming and going and eating at staggered intervals throughout the night, but serving three hundred people who were all sitting down at once was a nightmare. It was chaos concentrated. Every minute was a potential disaster. Something horrible was bound to happen at every opportunity, and as soon as one problem was mastered, another was guaranteed to follow. He and Charles had worked for a caterer early in their relationship and it was hands down the worst professional experience of Erik’s career. He’d sworn he’d never do it again, but leave it to Charles to talk him into it “just one more time.”
Raven made an apologetic face and backed off for about half a second before asking, “Did you wear tuxedos?”
“Charles!” Erik screamed over his shoulder, “Would you get her out of here? Please?”
Luckily Charles was only a few feet outside the tent talking with Emma Frost, the wedding coordinator (or in Erik’s words, the Head Bitch). Charles swept into their makeshift kitchen and shoved a platter of prosciutto-wrapped melon slices into Raven’s hands. “Go. Get out of here. Circulate,” he told her and pushed her out of the tent before turning to Erik. “How’s it going?”
“I fucking hate catering,” he muttered as he struggled to find his rhythm again, “I am not a caterer. I don’t know how you talked me into this. I am never doing this again.”
“You’re the one who said you couldn’t turn down that much money. It’s only one day.” Charles waited for Erik to scoff and curse before he continued. “The Head Bitch says she wants the main course in forty-five minutes.”
“Forty five minutes? Tell the Head Bitch to suck my cock. The chicken will be done in 56 minutes and not a second sooner.”
“Oh, wonderful. I’ll just go tell her that you couldn’t keep to the schedule she sent us months ago. That will look really professional.”
“I have my own schedule to keep! Do you want to serve them undercooked meat?” he snapped, and just as Charles was opening his mouth to say something scathing, Azazel chimed in from his station near the grill.
“Yeah, daddy, you tell him. I think he needs a spanking.”
Charles deflated and crossed his arms over his chest. Erik didn’t know what to do except pout and tell Azazel to shut up.
Hank wandered over looking a little woozy. “Uh, guys? I cut my… my finger’s…” he mumbled, and then promptly fainted.
Charles dropped to the ground and started smacking Hank’s face to keep him awake, while Erik rolled his eyes in frustration and started looking around the tent. “Oh great. What? Did he cut his finger off? Well, let’s find it so we can keep to the Bitch’s schedule.”
“No, he still has all his fingers, but I can see the bone.” Charles grabbed a towel and tried to wrap up the finger. “I think maybe he should go to the hospital. That might be a tendon there. He probably needs stitches.”
“The hospital?” Charles may as well have said Narnia. “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve sliced myself open or burned myself or dropped heavy pots on my toes? He’ll be fine.” But for all that he thought Hank was overreacting, he hated seeing Charles looking genuinely distressed, so Erik went and got the first aid kit to help bandage Hank’s finger.
Hank was coming to, so they propped him up against a cooler and gave him a glass of water.
“Are you going to be all right?” Charles asked, but before he could hear Hank’s answer, Emma was calling for him yet again, insisting that he’d “better get his ass out there PDQ.” Charles clapped Hank on the shoulder, told him he’d be fine, and went to see what Emma wanted.
Hank’s eyes were rolling around in his head. “Blood…” he mumbled, “That’s a lot of blood…”
Erik sighed and crouched down next to Hank. “Charles thinks you need to go to the hospital. Do you want to go to the hospital?”
Hank nodded desperately.
“Are the pastries done? The éclairs and the… poofy… cream things?”
“They’re done. And I was trying to help you with the appetizers, but then… the knife…” he looked at his hand and his eyes started to roll back in his head again.
Erik grabbed Hank’s head to keep it upright and smacked him on the cheek. “Hey! Get a hold of yourself! Fine, I’ll call 911, but you have to go down to the road and wait for the ambulance – you can’t let anybody in the wedding see an ambulance pull up, you got it?”
“Got it.”
“Okay, go.” Erik watched Hank stumble out of the tent and up towards the road. “And try not to bleed all over everything!” he called after him.
When Hank was out of sight, Erik pulled out his cell phone and called for the ambulance, asking the dispatcher to please tell the driver not to turn on the sirens or the lights if he can possibly help it, then went back to work. Though they definitely couldn’t have fit very many more people in the catering tent, Erik wished they could have spared one or two more cooks from the restaurant. There was too much to do and not enough time.
It could have been worse, though. Thank god Charles was able to talk the bride into Erik’s “farm-to-table rustic gourmet” concept. She’d originally wanted them to serve the Black Truffle Ricotta Gnocchi she’d had at their restaurant the night her fiancée proposed, but Erik refused. There was no way they would be able to do that for three hundred people under a tent in ninety-degree weather, and if the bride and groom wanted to impress everyone they weren’t going to do it with food that half the guests wouldn’t be interested in eating anyway.
So instead they talked her into rustic. The source farm for the restaurant was only a few miles north of the wedding locale anyway, so they were able to sell her on “fresh” and “local” and other words she’d heard on the Food Network. That way, nothing had to be fancy or fussy or precise, and if it looked like it was just thrown together, well, that was part of the charm.
While the chicken finished cooking, Azazel started in on the fish and Erik took a few minutes to throw together what he needed for the obligatory 16 vegetarians and the two vegans who apparently only existed to make Erik crazy. For a few minutes, everything was going smoothly.
And then a drunk bridesmaid wandered into the tent and backed into Erik’s prep table, knocking the vegan plates to the ground.
“Look what you did!” he screamed. The bridesmaid giggled and apologized and slumped into a groomsman’s waiting arms. “What are you even doing back here? Get out! Get out!”
Charles came running over and gently escorted them back to the reception before turning on Erik. “Are you out of your mind? You can’t yell at the bridesmaids!”
“She was making a mess! She ruined my plates!”
“I don’t care what she did! You can’t yell at the bridesmaids! Do you want her to go and complain about you to the bride?”
Emma Frost walked into the tent just as Erik screamed back, “Do you think I give a fuck what a hundred and fifteen pound white chick in a fluffy pink dress has to say about me?”
“Hey!” Emma interrupted him, “If you want to keep your deposit you better watch what you say about the wedding party. And don’t you dare talk to Charles that way! I don’t care how good your food is - you’ll never get anywhere if you treat your employees like that.”
She gave Erik a scathing look and escorted Charles back out of the tent as Erik called uselessly after her, “He’s not my employee!”
Not knowing what else to do, Erik scooped the food back onto the plates, muttering to himself, “Grass is vegan, isn’t it?” Serves them right for not trying his chicken, he thought. And speaking of the chicken, there went the timer – the chicken was done and ready to go. They were in the home stretch.
He was just starting to plate the chicken when Charles came running back into the catering tent with a frantic look on his face. “Where’s Hank?” he asked.
“He went down to the road to wait for the ambulance.”
Charles was furious. “Ambulance? You let him leave?”
“You said he had to go to the hospital!”
“Since when do you listen to me? You made Janos do a double shift with a concussion!”
“That was two years ago and he lived, didn’t he?”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Charles took off running.
“Where are you going?” Erik called after him.
“I’m going to see if he’s still waiting and get him back here!”
Erik dropped what he was doing and ran after Charles, down the garden path under the willow trees to the side of the house where there was a full view of the road. Hank had already gone.
“Goddammit!” Charles screamed and stalked around to the back of the garage. He pounded his fist against the wall.
“What the hell is going on?”
“There’s no cake!” Charles said.
“What?”
“There’s no wedding cake. The cutesy cakery they ordered from fucked up and now there’s no cake. We have to do something.”
For a moment Erik was too dumbstruck to say anything. His blood ran cold and he just gaped at Charles, his brain stuttering to a stop. “Well, but… what the hell was Hank going to do? Even if we had a real kitchen he couldn’t bake a wedding cake in, what—” He looked at his watch. “–an hour? Hour and fifteen minutes?”
“Well I don’t know!” Charles shouted at him. “He’s the pastry chef! I thought he might have an idea!”
“I told you not to let them go outside for the cake!” he shouted right back. “I told you we couldn’t trust those hippies to get it right! But did you listen to me? No, of course you didn’t!”
“Do you think this was my idea? Do you think I was the one who told the bride from the black lagoon she wanted a cake shaped like Cinderella’s castle?”
“But you didn’t talk her out of it, did you? Now what are we going to do? We can’t make a wedding cake in an hour!”
“We have to think of something!”
“I’m not thinking of anything! I have two hundred chicken plates to get out in the next fifteen minutes! I’ve done my job! Now you go back there and you tell Emma that if there’s no cake then they’re just going to have to deal with it.”
“There is no way I’m telling her that! It doesn’t matter that this wasn’t our fuckup – it’s still going to look like our failure. I am not going to tell her we can’t get a cake!”
“You have to!”
“Make me!”
Erik grabbed Charles by the wrists and pressed him against the wall. He looked around. They were well out of sight of the tents and were still far from the road. The willow trees curtained them from the garden path – not that anyone was coming.
“Make me,” Charles said again. His arms may have been pinned against the garage wall, but he was using his knee to rub at Erik’s crotch.
“There are a few other things I’d rather make you do,” Erik murmured, though his thoughts were so clouded with pure, urgent need that he wasn’t quite sure which of those things he wanted.
They hadn’t had an opportunity like this in months, and who knew when they’d have one again. He didn’t want to waste it. He considered the small container of lube he had shoved in his pocket in case he got lucky – this was a wedding after all – but then Charles licked at his pretty red lips.
“Get on your knees,” he commanded. Charles dropped to the ground obediently. “Put your hands behind your back.”
Erik was only half hard, but his cock was already slick with precome when he pulled it from his white chef pants. He grabbed a fistful of Charles’ soft brown hair and jerked Charles' head back to look up at him. “Tell me again what you’re going to say to Emma.”
Charles knew this game well enough to not answer, only opening his lips enough for Erik to push himself inside.
They started slow, Charles keeping his hands behind his back and allowing Erik to set the pace – in and out, in and out. Charles used his tongue to lap at the head, sucking until his cheeks hollowed and Erik was fully erect inside his mouth. The harder he sucked, the more desperate Erik's rhythm became.
Erik’s grip on Charles’ hair became tighter and tighter, he jerked Charles forward and back, forward and back, pulling Charles almost completely off his prick before pushing Charles back down so that his entire mouth was full of Erik's cock. Erik worked him like this until his nonsense mumblings of “I’ll tell you what you’ll say,” turned into nothing but moans and shouts, and he came with a jerking release, straight into the back of Charles’ throat.
Erik’s shoulders relaxed and he pulled his cock out of Charles’ mouth with a wet pop. Charles stood and wiped at the corners of his mouth.
As Erik caught his breath, he noticed Charles gently massaging at the back of his head. “Did I hurt you?” he asked.
Charles shot him a wry smile. “Quite all right, darling. I didn’t need that clump of hair.”
And with that comment, Erik couldn’t believe he’d spent the past four months letting a bunch of assholes – assholes who worked for him, no less – let him feel ashamed or embarrassed of their relationship. There was no one else in the world for Erik – no one else who could match him the way Charles did; who could so happily and serenely bear the brunt of his bullshit and not only survive it, but enjoy it; who could not only take it but just as easily dish it right back to him. There was no one else who could match him toe-to-toe, and no one he loved more. He couldn’t believe he ever let a bunch of pseudo-literate, drug addled, barely-paroled kitchen trolls come between them, and he never would again.
For a moment he almost wished they hadn’t found such a secluded spot, because when he pulled Charles close and kissed him with more love and passion than the newly wedded bride kissed her new husband, he wished everyone was there to see it.
Their lips parted with an audible smack. “I love you,” Erik said.
A surprised smile spread across Charles’ face. “I love you, too.” He kissed him again and leaned into Erik’s shoulder as Erik pulled him close. They stayed there for only a moment; the clock was still ticking. “What are we going to do about the cake?” he finally asked.
Erik sighed and pulled away. “We passed a supermarket a few miles from here. Do you have the keys?”
Charles pulled the keys to their rental car out of his pocket and they headed off to the makeshift parking lot. As they walked, Erik called Azazel and let him know that he and Charles had an emergency, and asked him to handle things from there.
“A sexy emergency?” Azazel asked.
“Yes, it was a blow job emergency,” Erik snapped as he jumped into the passenger seat. Azazel started to say something else, but Erik just told him to get it done and hung up.
The supermarket was a bit farther from the house than Erik remembered, and they ended up running through the parking lot and into the lobby. They each grabbed a cart. Erik looked at his watch – there wasn’t much time.
“What’s the plan?” Charles asked.
“Just go get all the white frosting they have. Just all of it. Buy all of it. Whatever they got. I’ll meet you at check out.”
Charles bolted down the aisles and Erik headed for the bakery. There wasn’t much selection, and even less time to think it over. He just started loading up the cart with as many square Entenmann’s cakes he could get his hands on: lemon, marble, chocolate, vanilla, anything. Anything square. Everything square.
When he got to the checkout, Charles was already paying for his cart of frosting, and Erik was right on his heels. They were in and out and back in the car in all of ten minutes. Charles zipped back up the winding road at such speed that Erik actually had to close his eyes on one of the sharper turns. When they got back to the house, Charles backed the rental right up onto the lawn, as close to the catering tent as he could get.
With the help of as many members of the serving staff as they could spare, they started to assemble a cake. Everyone grabbed a knife and a tub of frosting, and cake by cake they stacked up the cheap, mass produced cakes and spackled them into something approaching the traditional tiered wedding cake shape.
They had just finished frosting it when the Head Bitch marched into the tent wanting to know what was happening with dessert. Her jaw dropped. The frankencake was enormous and barely holding together; it looked like a kindergarten project.
“That’s the cake?”
Erik crossed his arms over his chest and glowered at Emma. “It’s rustic,” he told her, and out of the corner of his eye he could see Charles biting the inside of his cheeks to keep from laughing.
Whatever she may have thought of their creation, Emma had no choice but to roll it out and present it to the bride and groom.
And with that, for better or for worse, they were done. All they had to do was cut and serve and clean up and go home. They’d survived the day.
Erik was standing at the edge of the wall blocking the catering tent from the reception, swigging at a bottle of champagne, watching the bride and groom cut the frankencake when Charles walked over and stood beside him. “I hate weddings,” he said.
Erik put his arm around Charles and kissed the sore spot on the top of his head. “Me too.”