#tryquinn

This being a small portion of something glazed and carefully plated. It smells delicious. Citrusy. His voice is softly excited with the demand that’s not gruff at all. Just light and higher-toned in his rasp. God. 

You force yourself to make only a sleepy, annoyed noise with your throat and burrow deeper beneath the blanket. 

Grant smiles to himself. God, he loved that. He loves how softly stubborn you get with sleep, how you can look so peaceful while he’s practically vibrating out of his skin with a new dish. He wishes he could schedule his ideas the way you do. Giving you North and Vine’s kitchen to do that isn’t a completely selfless gift. He gets a certain way watching you work out your thoughts.

Although…he wouldn’t mind if you came to him in the middle of the night in nothing but your underwear to feed him an effort for his restaurant. Not at all. 

“Sous,” Grant says again, closer this time, before your actual name slips from his lips. “Sorry, but c’mon. I need your palate.”

You blink yourself awake in pieces, lashes fluttering and mouth pulling thin. 

“Grant, why can’t you be impulsively genius after sunrise?”

Your eyes fix on him, his grey-peppered hair mussed, and he’s awful, because he’s stupidly endearing with the spark that is him asking and waiting for your opinion. 

The Sous chef’s word matters. Yours, sweet kid. It’s why your flattery gets him so.

Grant’s mind is still obviously in the kitchen as much as it’s in whatever mess he’s about to make of you.

“I know I tired you out. Think of this…experimental fuel. C’mon, sit up for me.”

He sets the plate carefully on the nightstand, leaning over you with one hand braced beside your pillow. The other, warm and achingly gentle, slides beneath the blanket only far enough to find the curve of your thigh through the thin fabric of your cartoon-hearted pajama shorts. 

He squeezes, and it’s more to wake you fully than to tease. 

Though. Still teased. 

Your breath hitches. 

“There you go. I don’t charm my way into people doing whatever I want the way you do…but I’ve certainly been given the chance to practice.”

You squint up at him. 

“You’ve disrupted my beauty sleep, Chef Reilly. My expectations are heightened.”

“I woke you up because you’re my sous chef and one of the only people who tells me when I’m lying to myself.” Grant tilts his head. “You’re a little more sweet on me than Marcus, though. One of the many reasons he hired you to replace my old ways—”

“Stopppp—”

“Okay, okay. Do me the favor, then.”

His ‘okays’ are soothing. His hand stays warm on your thigh, thumb stroking once, twice, never rushing. Grant can be intense with his brigade, never before or after service, but often during. Although the intensity usually molds itself into a dominant guidance just for you. You don’t support the favoritism, you swear!

“Taste it. Tell me what you think.”

The point is, even though he can be intense with his work sometimes, here, Grant’s gentle in asking a question with every inch of you he touches. 

You awake? You with me? You gonna let me ruin your sleep for this?

You answer by parting your legs. 

Grant’s eyes narrow from yours to the movement. 

“Dangerous move, Sous.”

“You started it.” 

He bends farther and kisses you, messy and slow in the way his lips move against yours, noses brushing. The sounds between the two of you are a little sloppy—wet. He tastes like coffee and whatever he’d been reducing on the stove at a Godforesaken hour. 

You make a small sound against Grant’s mouth. Your fingers drag into his shirt, keeping him still and there. You whine when he pulls back just enough to breathe. 

“You waking me up infested with head-chef-brain like I’m not supposed to get turned on by it is so, so unfair.”

“Well…that wasn’t my intention, but it certainly suits me.” 

His hand moves higher with his forehead resting against yours, pushing his tongue past your lips after. His own sort of taste test. A wet, pink graze over your teeth as your mouths smash with puckered noises. 

His thumb brushes over the fabric that hides your clit, and that’s enough to make your fatigued body arch towards his with a gasp-ish inhale. 

You can wake me up at whatever hour if it’s done like this, Boss.

“Grant.”

His name is a whimper at his lips and against yours, needy. But you’re only betrayed when Grant ends the early morning makeout with a peck to the corner of your mouth. He sits up. 

“Dish first.”

“...You are evil.”

He takes the plate from the nightstand, lifts a bite of his glistening, rice-based meal with the fork, and holds it to your mouth. 

“Open. Please.” 

You have no choice but to obey, but you don’t let your head chef off that easily. You glare a little as your lips part, and Grant pushes the fork into your mouth. Your lips close. 

…Okay. This is a dish worthy of waking you up at three in the morning for. 

Your glare disappears as the taste seeps into your tongue, and Grants watches you a little too intently as your eyes close, chewing slowly. Your hand bunching his shift loosens, but just so you can point at him. 

“Is it good?”

You think this man, so much older than you, the one almost always in command, is nervous to hear your opinion. 

Your heart swells as quickly as the inside of your cunt. 

With everything he’s taught you, the way he teaches—Grant should never doubt himself. That much you know. 

“That brown butter?”

He nods once.

“Citrus at the end?”

He nods again. Your hand slides from his shirt to his rounded, river-veined bicep. Your other hand finds his wrist. You make it so he keeps his palm where it was, right between your thighs. It leaves very little room for ambiguity. 

“Chef….”

You try to keep your voice stern, although you think you fail by the time a grin breaks out on your face. 

“This may be the bestest thing you’ve ever put in my mouth.” 

Grant laughs, and his laugh is a little more gruff than it usually is. Maybe from the lack of sleep, maybe from the relief of your word. You’re the most flattered sous chef in the world if it’s the latter. 

“Okay, well—second best, if we’re counting your—”

Grant kisses you again, and now you taste like his food. 

That always does him in a little.

“Keep it clean, Sweet. I have to perfect it now, meaning I need notes.”

“It’s already perfect. I’m not going to pretend it needs more or less of an ingredient, especially when you promised the dish first, kissing after.”

“Is it…I don’t know, innovative?”

Oh lordy. 

“Yes, very! You don’t need me to tell you that—”

“I think I do.”

Grant sounds like he’s telling a vulnerable truth in the form of a tease as his control snaps with his kissing down your jaw that sinks you back into the bed. His hand finally slips under the fabric of your shorts, and the warmth of his thumb is brutal as he runs it over your slit. 

Your head tips back into the pillow as you throw one leg around his hip. Tonight—or this morning, there’s no clumsy urgency in needing him inside you or him needing to be inside you. Although it is always almost always the most important thing. 

“I think I do, little Sous.”

Grant’s thumb finds your clit. Heat can only ripple through you as he presses down, down, down.

“That okay?”

He asks you, voice low and buzzing against the skin of your throat, with the resentfully competent patience that he brings to everything he cares about. 

Your body included. 

“If I were to sink my hand up inside you right now, that’d be okay?”

You don’t think you’ve come up with a dish to be worthy of that title. Not yet. 

You clutch his shoulder, somehow pulling him closer. 

“Yes, Chef.”

Grant sighs a high breath before it lands as a groan. 

He remembers the time when the new grill heard you say that and just had to tell everyone that you sounded like Hell’s Kitchen porn parody when you did. He gave the guy hell then. Still would.

But, sometimes, Sweet, you are a little ridiculous with it. 

Sometimes it’s a Hell's Kitchen porn parody when you say ‘Yes, Chef’. Sometimes it’s Heaven. It doesn’t have to be just one or the other. 

He drops his forehead to your collarbone. 

“Don’t start with that.” 

“Why?”

“Because I need every bit of you awake for what I’m about to do, can’t rush into sinking my hands anywhere.”

“And?”

“And? You’re making it very hard not to.”

You usually try. And even when you don’t, you’re flattered and in love when Grant fails, but his fingers— 

His middle and pointer brushes and pokes your asshole. 

The touch, as your heart picks up with the slight, tight burn as he almost pushes inside, is more than enough proof of what he just last said. 

“Shouldn’t say yes, chef, if you don’t know where I’m putting my hands. But I’ll ask you again.”

“Grant.”

His two, thick fingers pressed against your second fuckhole while his thumb runs quick circles on your swelling clit is also more than enough to draw trembled breaths from you. You press your face into his neck. 

Your food’s going cold. All of Grant’s noble and innovative culinary intention is lost to the way he keeps touching your cunt and whole like he’s learning something secret and delicious. If you taste, he tastes. 

“Grant…”

Grant lifts his head. 

“Yeah, Sous?”

“The dish is perfect.” 

Grant blinks a few times before he scoffs, his stubbled grin coming onto his face slowly. 

The dangerous type of grin that caught you in the first place. Uh oh—

You yelp when he flips you over, hooking the waist of your shorts with the fingers that were just teasing your hole.

Just before he yanks them over the now arched curve on your ass. They bunch up at your knees.

“Good.” 

Grant kisses the first knob of your spine before you yelp again, just because the first thing he does with your naked bottom is smack it. Once, twice, thrice before he takes a fat handful to grope. 

“Still need your notes.”

Grant’s weight is halfway over you, some of his man-thick heaviness held by the forearm beside your head. His body curves into yours in a way that makes you pinned. The experimental meal is now something incidental.

An odd, culinary sort of foreplay, if you want to be creative as he is.

He nibbles on your shoulder while his three fingers slip in and out of your wet, clenching heat. Fittingly, cornily, you’ve somehow become the dish. 

“Say it again.”

It’s Grant’s murmur against your teeth-marked skin. You smile into the pillow. 

“Please, Sweet. I know you’re a little dazed right now, but tell me again.”

“...Fuck me, boss?”

By his lashes, you can feel Grant’s eyes shut. 

“I meant what you said about the possible incorporation of lime.”

“I was just making that up so you could shove your fingers inside of me.”

His sigh is warm on your flesh, but the soft laugh you give when you feel it breaks apart into a gasp when his thrusting fingers curl in between your walls.

They pulse themself into a grip around his cruel tease. You can only think of reaching for him, so you do, flinging your hand behind you. You find the sturdiness of his waist. 

“Brat—”

Grant pauses in his pseudo-insult when your phone buzzes. Two dings! from the nightstand, and because of the angle, because you’re on your stomach and he’s leaning over you, he sees the name before you can even lift your head. 

DAD Hey bub, just an early morning check-in. 

“Why is he up so early—”

You feel the way his whole body seems to pull tight in freezing, like he’s cinched from the inside, although he doesn’t exactly pull away from you. 

Your phone buzzes again, and you couldn’t care about what your dad is saying, not when Grant’s just staring at whatever it could be. 

He texts you too early, too often, lovingly about stupid things—restaurant recs, if you’ve been eating enough, if you’re gonna come by on Sunday. This sudden check-in is no different. You can’t think of a reason as to why Grant would be so still in place due to what he’s reading.

Unless your dad has messaged you something along the lines of “I know you’re fucking and living with your 50-year-old head chef, I’m disowning you.” 

…Maybe that’s what he is seeing, in a way. 

The world’s intruded all at once and has reminded him what this looks like from the outside. Him bent over you in the dark, the things he’s bought for you, decorating this room that was once sad and empty. Him much older. Him being your boss before anything else. 

Grant’s fingers slip out of you, and when you turn, you can see the indulgence draining from his face in under five seconds. 

“Grant.”

“You should probably answer him.” 

He sits back just enough to put space between the two of you, rubbing his palm along his neck. He’s bracing himself on the mattress like he’s actually gotten dizzy or something. 

“Hey, what’s wrong?”

You push yourself up on your elbows, and your heart’s still beating way too fast for the bummer mood he’s suddenly dropped you into. 

“Your dad’s texting you, I don’t wanna keep you from him.”

“Yeah, he does that sometimes. So does my mom. They can handle not being replied to.”

Grant only gives a small nod before getting up, jaw clenching. You sigh. 

The other half of him has snuck in while you weren’t looking, the one who gets quieter the more he feels. This is the half that follows the one who comes into bed with a plate in his hold and a filthy gleam in his eye, calling you sous like it’s your actual name. 

Claiming you proudly. 

You guess…maybe, something in the last twenty seconds has made Grant very aware of himself, because he seems to distance himself from you like he’s just caught himself doing something shameful. 

This other half of him, you still love. You hate the villainous inches he puts between you, though. 

“Grant, look at me.”

He does, and you see his expression has darkened in the intimacy that remains. You can still smell the citrus from the forgotten dish as you realize what the downturn of his mouth and the twitch of his brows are while he tries to force himself to smile. 

It’s that look that almost makes him look younger than he is, and you assume that that’s because of the guilt that seeps in from when he has to confront the labels placed onto what the two of you are. 

When he builds a private little world with you, and is thrust right out of it. 

Older. Boss. Chef. Hers. Not supposed to be hers. Wouldn’t be well if I wasn’t. 

“It’s the middle of the night, you’re sound asleep in bed, and your…person, with whom you are very much intimate with and is nearly three decades older than you, wakes you up to make you taste his food and finger-fuck you.”

Grant sits on the edge of the bed with his hands wringing each other. Big hands. Capable, big hands and thick fingers.

The same hands that had been death-gripped by your cunt a minute ago, and now he dares to behave as if they belong to someone boring and respectable. 

“The least he can do is like you talk to your pops.” 

“...Was everything you just listed not the hottest sequence of events ever?”

Grant scoffs, and your chest tightens when he turns his head away, only pushing your hand towards you to grab. 

That is it, isn’t it? You didn’t even have to hook up with him for every long to realize you have a much easier time bearing the age gap.

You can hold the contradiction of his wanting more easily. You can lie in bed fucked with a mouth swollen. This can be, obviously, what you need for the rest of your life.

Meanwhile, he’s busy trying to decide what category of sin his feelings for you belong to, the most sinful thing of all being the fact that he ends up wanting you even more despite them. 

“You work for me. You’re—”

Grant stops. You wait. You can argue against each bullet point. 

She’s so much younger than me? Sweets will eat you alive with that, she’ll ‘pfffffft’ and name that too inadequate a reason. She’s my sous chef? Too clinical. Been there, done that. She’s the daughter of a man who’s the same age as me? Too revealing, and a little weird, right?

She’s the one thing I want and the one thing that makes me occasionally disgusted with myself for wanting? 

Too much of a truth. Big ol’ fucking pill to swallow.

“I’m what, Grant?”

He laughs once, and it’s slightly bitter in its light-throated nature. You squeeze his hand. His fingers are a little sticky.

You don’t know how you’re not supposed to smile, noticing that. 

“I think that’s the issue here, Sous.”

It takes a moment of silence to help you guess what he’s referring to. 

The word technically has been living between you and Grant almost since you’ve gotten together. You’re technically committed. Technically exclusive. Technically together. But the only reason that word has to be used in the first place is that you and he haven’t named what your relationship is.

Which is fine by you, but maybe the reason behind that isn’t. 

“Do you think saying it out loud makes it worse? Us—whatever this is?”

Grant’s able to indulge being someone proud to want you when you and he aren’t lit by labels. Labels are as heavy as his guilt. If you called it something, then you think it becomes more of a fact rather than a private weakness, maybe? Being with you, with a name like boyfriend, partner, other half, makes it a choice he’d made. 

“What are you talking about?”

And if it was a choice, then he had to own wanting it. Wanting you. Can he do that without this being unnamed? When it feels a damn lot safer when it feels less deliberate, less filthy that way? 

…When it doesn’t feel like he has walked straight into the thing that he judges himself for? 

Grant doesn’t know, Sweet. He’s sorry you have to deal with the technicalities and mysteries of your fifty-year-old boss.  

“Do you think that if we don’t name what we are, which we don’t have to, but are you only not because you think whatever you’re feeling stays manageable? Like it means less?”

Grant’s jaw flexes before he throws a thin smile on. He brings your hand up to his lips to rest a kiss or three on your knuckles. 

“You could’ve probably gone into therapy with that type of observation. But no, that’s not what I…I think—it’s not less. Never could be less.”

His head tilts down as you wait for his answer, and when he finally speaks, his voice is much quieter. 

“When I can forget I’m your boss…when I can forget that I like being your boss while having you, I can forget what this might look like to other people, to your parents. I can forget what I’m supposed to do.” 

Stay away from you. Sorta impossible, but should’ve tried harder. 

The emphasis Grant puts on the word like kinda scares you with how much it sounds like he hates what he just admitted to. 

His hand smoothes up and down your arm. 

“I can want you. I can be with you. I can stop thinking.” He scoffs again, but there’s not much humor in it or his thinning smile. He blinks fast, nodding to himself. “Then your phone lights up with a message from your dad, or I hear you talking to someone your age, or when someone looks at us when we get a little too into it in the kitchen, I remember what this is.” 

And when he remembers, when reality intrudes, he takes it out on his want. He’ll become slightly colder. Decency catches up to him occasionally, Sweet. It’ll put a hand on his shoulder to put him back in place. 

If you truly want all the guy the way you claim you do, he’s sorry about that too. 

“You’re not the only one in this.”

You reach up and lay your palm against his cheek, thumb running soft over his peppered stubble. You feel the muscle move under your touch as his smile thins out into nothing. He shrugs. 

“I know.”

He says it high in the gruff of his voice, like you’re odd for not. Like you’re ridiculous for not seeing past the self-loathing on his face. 

Pfft. Yeah right, Chef.

“No, I don’t think you do when you get like this.”

“I’m insecure sometimes, that doesn’t mean I’m not aware—”

“You’re acting like there’s something messy or morally weird about us, and okay! Let’s say there is, then it must be all you and you dragged me into it. Like, I’m just here being young and helpless while you’re corrupting me. You’re not. I’m not.”

…He is. He’s corrupting you. But it’s the most beautiful, hottest thing ever. You’d rather be here than anywhere else. So, your point still stands, but you’re sure Grant won’t see it that way. A little white lie of comfort, it must be. 

The lines of his face twitch into something severe—furrowed brows and another smile slipping that you’re sure doesn’t portray happiness, but rather humoured, old-man melancholy. 

Your thumb brushes under his unblinking eye. He watches your lips. 

“I’m here because I want to be. In your bed. With your hands inside of me. At your restaurant. In your life, and when you pull away like this, you make it feel like you think I don’t know what I’m doing. I do. I am an adult.”

And I can be more freaked-out and in love with you than you, Grant. You wouldn’t be able to have me if it weren’t for me. Deal with it.

Your hand slips from his cheek to the back of his neck. He swallows hard, but you think the smile on his face has curled into something genuine with the softening of his all-colored eyes. 

He looks to where he’s holding you by the wrist. He squeezes. 

He may not be aware, probably will never be. But his heart is. Fed by sweets, in a way. 

“This sudden psychology skill is unfair.”

“Sure. But you also know what's not fair? You getting to want me until something reminds you that I have parents who could’ve been in your graduating class and a birthday with a couple of decades from yours isn't very noble of you."

You could roll your eyes at the guilt you feel when Grant flinches at your jab. You thought it funny. 

“Grant, I’m not ashamed of you.”

…You think his whole body stills around those words. You can feel it in his neck. 

He can desire you easily, but he has such a hard time tolerating tenderness. Is that just his old-guy fear of vulnerability? Is it because it’s your tenderness? Who knows? You’ll fuck the fear out of him someday, and he can be greedy about you with all the pride in the world. 

Grant finally moves, lifting his hand to hold your wrist where it rests against his neck. 

“I don’t know how to do this in a way that doesn’t feel like I’m taking something from you.”

Well. Kay, maybe it’s not his fear of vulnerability, because that was very vulnerable, beautifully genuine in the softness of his voice. 

Your heart stings a little, actually. 

There’s no world where he wants you so badly and doesn’t translate his desire and care for you into theft, Sweet.

Being loved by your head chef has to cost you something. The only morally clean version of this would be one where he keeps himself away, which is not happening. So the closest is one where he wants less. 

He looks at the cold dish on the nightstand before pressing down on your wrist that so much smaller than his. He noticed that the first time you were whisking away in front of him at North and Vine. 

That one doesn’t seem to be happening either. 

“Would you feel better if you gave me something instead?”

Grant’s hand slides from your wrist to your palm, pulling you away from his neck, letting his fingers thread through yours. 

“Like what?”

“Like…a label.”

You’re about to give him the label of old asshole with the way he lets out a faint, genuine laugh. The first real sort of happiness you’ve seen since he slipped out of you. 

“Nice to know you find the idea of commitment so laughable that it cheers you up.”

“Don’t get dramatic on me—”

“What have you been doing these past five minutes—”

Grant takes your head in his hands, both palms engulfing the sides of it. He picks something from your brow, his almost full-tooth grin full of smarm. At least you did cheer him up. 

“You live in my apartment. I wear a chain with your name on it. Commitment’s not an issue for me. Just…using the word girlfriend seems a bit juvenile to me at this age.”

“What then? Partner? That’s classy. 'Other half’s' a bit corny.” You manage to kiss his wrist in the way he holds your face. “Could always stick with sous chef. It’s basically a multi-use name.”

Grant thinks on, eyeing your smile, and for some reason, what you were asking him about the other day slips back into his idea slot. 

“So, why is it that every other night you fuck me, that you suddenly have all these new, fancy ideas of dishes?”

“...I don’t know?”

He blinks slowly, not caring to take his eyes off of you.

It's an even cornier name idea, but pretty fitting. The first thing that came to mind when you asked him why.