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1. MICHELLE AND STEVEN
Carmy is confused when he gets the invitation. He had thought his cousin and her partner had been married—married for a substantial amount of time, at that. But, alas, the card stock in front of him proclaims otherwise, proclaims he and a guest are invited in a few weeks to a small gathering to celebrate their elopement. He texts Nat: you get this? with a picture of the card amidst his cluttered kitchen island.
Yeah. Pete and I are looking at plane tickets. Are you bringing a plus one? she replies, wasting no time with subtlety.
He stares at his phone, rubs his chin once, twice.
*
It was Monday. He was on the brown line and resigned to leaning against the divider beside the doors, every seat filled with some Chicagoan probably more deserving of rest than him anyway. He was coming back from a donut hunt for Marcus that turned into him gallivanting around Lincoln Park mindlessly for hours. He had the donuts, though. Two bags loaded with blood orange-raspberry jelly-filled and Boston cream and coffee cake. The pastry chef had given him the honor of selecting the flavors and when he stood at the alleyway window he felt ridiculous, contemplating the flavors like it was his own personal iteration of Sophie’s Choice. He apologized to the woman helping him but she just smiled and said no problem like it really was no problem. It really reminded him that he could never be front of house, far too impatient for even his own deliberations.
But anyway, he had done it. Marcus would be happy the following day, and he could give his two cents on the flavors and textures he thought worked well, and how they could do something even better for The Bear. It was the little things like this Carmy clung onto lately, found small pockets of joy in.
At the Sedgwick stop, people filed in, filling the spaces between the seats and clinging onto poles that created a comfortable, inevitable, forced proximity with strangers. Then, Sydney followed suit, eyes wide and mirth creeping into her features once she saw him.
“Hey,” She said.
“Hi.” He replied, knuckles white around his paper bags of pastries. “What are you doing?”
“I had dinner for my friend Rachel’s birthday.” She stepped closer to him as the train announced the closing doors, infringing on his space in a way that made him want to cover her body with his own. She had on jeans and a backless top which was not at all distracting to him.
“Was it any good?” He asked. The train lurched forward and Sydney faltered in that way all standing passengers do. He instinctively reached out to her and caught her arm while she regained her balance.
“Thanks,” she said, spreading her legs to be part with her shoulders, steadying herself against the L’s movements. “It’s these damn boots, I’m not used to heels.”
He took too long to remove his hand from her. Once she had called attention to it, Carmy was very aware that their natural order of things is askew not just because she had on eyeliner and a fancy camisole, but because she had several inches on him.
“What are you doing?” She asked after a moment, and he forgot that his question to her had been left unanswered.
“Inspiration. On a donut hunt for Marcus.” He lifted the bags slightly, calling her eye to it.
She laughed quietly, shaking her head and reaffirming their eye contact. “He never stops, huh?”
“It’s summer menu time, he’s gonna throw down.”
Syd hummed, eyes dancing across his features. She smelt like pink pepper and something floral. Carmy willed his knees not to buckle.
“What about a Copenhagen-sundae-esque filling?” Sydney said after a minute.
“Like a play on a Boston cream?” He added, quirking his eyebrows in interest. Sydney hummed, smiling. “Huh. That’s something.”
They reached the next stop and Syd moved imperceptibly closer to him to let the surrounding passengers exit. He forgot to breathe, and she made eye contact anyway.
“It might just be.” She smiled. They hovered around each other until they reached his stop.
“Goodnight, Syd.” He said, struck that he didn’t say it very often to her, only because most nights he was beside her for—just not in the way he wished.
“See you tomorrow.” She replied. That was all he could ask for.
Walking to his apartment, the world caved in on its axis. He felt something irrevocable make way into his chest and set up camp there. Carmen Berzatto felt something he couldn’t begin to put a name to and, impossibly, the world kept turning.
*
He chews on his thumb and picks up his phone. This time, clicking on a different contact. What are you doing in three weeks? He types, attaching the picture he took earlier. He resorts to some half-formed pacing.
The response comes after a few minutes.
depends. what kind of Berzatto is this michelle?
He smiles despite himself, replies: the good kind. She’s not like any of us, really.
then to answer your earlier question, I’ll be in NYC with some italian guy and his family.
He replies with some quip adjacent to nonchalance, and returns to the text thread with Sugar.
Get me two tickets, please.
*
Three weeks hence, they’re on a plane. ‘They’ are not simply the couples of Sugar and Pete, Sydney and Carmy, but also Richie and his daughter; all six of them taking up two adjacent blocks of he plane aisles—all six of them silently thankful for not being forced to sit beside a sweaty stranger.
A fight breaks out before they even board the plane, Richie arguing with all of them about the seating arrangement, insisting it was cruel to separate him and Eva, and even crueler to seat them with Pete. Ultimately resulting in Sydney placating Richie by agreeing to sit with him and his daughter, his jokes about being thankful they have metal detectors being extinguished by her glare, and by Eva’s immediate interest in the woman.
“You’re really pretty.” Eva says as they file into their seats, readjusting around each other. Carmy tries to not blush when Sugar and Pete wordlessly leave him the seat that would configure him closest to Sydney, even if Richie acted as a human blockade between them.
“Thank you, but you’re prettier.” Syd replies, now situated between the two Jerimoviches.
Eva giggles and Richie smiles. She’s asking Sydney about Taylor Swift and the color of the dress she’s wearing to the wedding. Carmy is silently at some sort of peace, listening to Syd’s voice mingle with the little girl’s, warming in a way he hadn’t heard outside of her interactions with Lenny. Those of which had been few and far between, her time with Sugar and her daughter becoming something sacred and separate from him entirely.
“Hey,” Sugar snaps in front of his face.
“Yo, what?” He blinks and rubs a hand over his face.
“Is Sydney your date for this?” Sugar’s quieter than he can ever remember her being, and he glares at her because of it.
“What the fuck, Nat? No, she’s just my plus one.” He whispers, all harsh and snippy, incredibly reminiscent of their childhood exchanges.
“It was a valid question, dickhead.” She scoffs. They both glance at Pete, clunky wired headphones on with a matching neck pillow, blissfully immune to the bickering happening beside him. “You’ve been spending more time with each other outside the restaurant.”
“So?”
She rolls her eyes. “So, to be more specific, you two decide to spend every Monday—the only day you aren’t forced to see each other—going out together on a quasi-date.”
“Sugar,”
“Carmy.”
“It’s not like that.” He says simply. There’s not much to add, nothing to supersede it, because any excuse he can think of would be a thinly veiled lie. One Sugar could see through with ease.
She looks at him like she has something more to say, but is cut off promptly by Richie calling for his attention in a way that could only be described as a whisper-shout.
“Hey, Cousin, your woman has officially stolen my kid.” Richie gestures beside him where Eva was huddled next to Syd, watching in awe every time she shifted and her braids swayed. If it were someone else, he may have been annoyed at Syd being referred to as Carmy’s woman, but Richie had a habit of defining everyone via possessive pronouns.
“Everyone with a brain likes Syd more than you, I wouldn’t take it personally. Just means your kid got Tiff’s brains.”
Sugar laughs beside him and it makes Carmy bite back a smile. Syd’s head snaps up at the sound of her name and she smirks at him swiftly before returning her gaze to Eva. His heart nearly stops.
“Oh, you’ve got jokes today, huh?”
Carmy shrugs and Richie narrows his eyes at him. Eva steals his attention back, anyway, wanting him and Syd both to play some game she had been taught at school. And because Richie could never deny her anything and Sydney was quickly discovering neither could she, they did.
“Carm, please.” Sugar grabs his arm. “Before you zone out for the next two hours, just be honest with me.”
He looks at her, tired. Four blue eyes have an independent conversation; a plea and an acquiescence.
“What?” He sighs.
“You’re really not with Sydney?” Her voice is quiet, and she has a face filled with concern instead of the ridicule from earlier.
“No. No, Sug.” He rubs his chin and hears Sydney’s laugh ring out behind him.
Sugar nods, more solemn than before. It irritates him, a fact that makes him ashamed. He wants the plane to go down; but of course, he doesn’t really. The seatbelt sign goes off. Statistics tell him the rest of the flight will be perfectly safe. Syd’s voice carrying across the aisle threatens that completely.
*
The Bear is closed for dinner service for the next two days because, with two Berzattos and two honorary ones gone, no one felt confident in keeping everything up to speed. In turn, what the unofficial The Bear group chat receives is a poorly angled selfie from Tina. It’s of her and Ebra, in front of the sandwich window; the former grinning and the latter stoic with a simple thumbs up beneath his chest. Like old times!!!! she sends with it, receiving various emoji-filled replies from Richie and Sugar.
Carmy knows this because Sydney narrates it to him as he hauls their luggage into their hotel room. He's letting out chuckles every time her eyes flick up from the screen to see his reaction, but he’s mostly trying to remain normal at the prospect of sharing such a small space with Sydney. Sure, they have separate beds—yes, they are pathetically-sized twins, like some sleep-away camp—but with only a few feet separating them and a shared bathroom the next two days are going to be filled with Sydney in his periphery and in his brain. Though it’s not as though the latter would be entirely unusual for any other day.
Really, being attracted to your coworkers in the industry is merely an occupational hazard, a sad reality that comes with the erasure of personal space and exposure to so much sweat that it turns into something carnal. You’re a breath or less away, dragging fingers across backs, sharing tasting spoons. Sydney always smells like almonds and cherries even after a day of utter chaos in what feels like a thousand degree kitchen. He’s a chef, sure, but he doesn’t think that’s why this causes his mouth to water. Every night the garlic and oil and sea bass sticks to his hair, his clothes, and his after-service cigarette only makes an even less satisfying scent. But, sometimes, Sydney will stand beside him for a minute to breathe, to rest her eyes, he’ll put the pack away, and he’ll stand as close to her as she’ll allow, hoping the smell of her will consume him entirely.
It’s a small issue, really, not one he can’t quell through pathetic cold showers and counting backwards from ten. He sees her outline in the shapes and colors that appear behind his eyelids when he rubs them furiously, but it’ll pass. It has to.
Carmy places their respective bags on either bed, and is struck by how drab and worn his bags look juxtaposed with Sydney’s text-covered totes and bright orange duffle bag. They were similar, had more in common than Carmy could begin to fathom, but it was little things like this that dreadfully reminded him how much more she was; how bright and beautiful everything she touched became—he could only hope and pray she would do the same to him one day. Maybe she’s done it already, in a way. He doesn’t think he really existed before Sydney.
“So, rehearsal dinner tonight?” Sydney pulls him out of his thoughts and he watches as she begins to pull things out of her bags, organizing them assumably in an order she understands, but is completely lost on Carmy.
“Yup, the delay cut us close, it starts in two hours.” He opens his own, uglier bags, fishing for his corduroy suit that has doubtless accumulated wrinkles across the two hours on the plane.
“How bad will the food be?”
Their eyes meet and he fights a smile at the twinkle in her eye. “It’s fifty-fifty. Michelle’s in the biz, but Steven’s palate is absolutely fucked.”
“So what I’m hearing is it’s gonna be a fun night?” She asks, draping her dress across the arm and walking towards the bathroom.
His eyes track her movements. “Oh, yeah.”
He fumbles with his clothes, dressing as fast as humanly possible, knowing Sydney could exit the bathroom at any moment, and that, yes she is a woman, and women generally take longer to get ready (this isn’t a generalization, he grew up with Nat and his mother, both taking hours in the own way in their single bathroom. He and Mikey had more experiences pissing in the backyard than he would care to admit.) But, she’s also Sydney, scarily good at everything she does—he has no reason to believe that getting ready in record time would not be included in that fact.
He feels stupid after the fact, sizing himself up in the floor-length mirror next to the television. His hair’s a mess, but any attempt to fix it would make him look impossibly douchey and remind him of Eleven Madison Park. He hears the bathroom door creak open and he runs his hands through it fruitlessly anyway.
“What do we think?” Sydney asks, holding her arms out and looking at him dangerously. It’s a black dress, off the shoulder and floor-length. She’s so beautiful that he feels crazy.
Carmy can’t speak, he’s just staring, unabashed and greedy. He nods, fervently and repeatedly and hopes Sydney can understand what he means by it. She smiles. She understands, of course she does. She nods too, still smiling.
“Let’s go.”
*
Their table is, predictably, filled with the very people they spend most days with. Michelle knows the lot of them are antisocial at best, hermits at worst without even being told. It’s a little frightening to be known like that.
Sugar gasps when her eyes find Sydney. She gets up from her seat beside her husband and Richie and moves to hug her.
“You look gorgeous, Syd.” Nat smiles, hands on her arms, caging her to maintain eye contact.
“So do you.” Sydney responds, and they dissolve into some other conversation point. Carmy pries his eyes away from the pair, accidentally meeting Richie’s gaze instead. His eyes are squinted at him, suspicious and ricocheting between him and Sydney.
Carmy squints his eyes in return, as if to say: what? Richie diverts his attention to Eva, moving on from whatever wordless conversation he had begun.
Sugar ushers Sydney to the free seat beside her, leaving Carmy to be sandwiched between her and Eva.
Richie reaches across his daughter to shove Carmy slightly.
“What the fuck?” He says, ears turning red after accidentally brushing Sydney’s arm in response to the unexpected movement.
“Cousin, help me get drinks.”
“I don’t drink.”
“Did I say anything about you drinking? Did I say one thing about you getting a drink? No.” Richie stands up and pulls Carmy’s chair out more forcefully than necessary before turning to address the whole table. “Can we get anyone anything?”
He’s put on his front of house voice and Carmy wants to roll his eyes, then feels bad about it. He doesn’t know whether he should feel badly about thinking these things at all, or proud that he feels remorse after they materialize. The point is, he’s getting better. That has to count for something. And as Sydney smiles and asks him to get her a French 75, he thinks it does—it is.
“What the fuck is a French 75?” Carmy asks as they’re waiting by the bar.
“No fucking clue, cuz. But I need to talk to you. I made you come with me because I need to talk to you.” Richie nods at the bartender as he sets down a bottle of Modelo and a Shirley Temple, the orders of two Jerimoviches.
“What, what’s up?” Carmy watches the assembly of a cocktail. It could be a French 75, it could be a million other drinks. His stupidity when it comes to this is astounding, really.
“Carmy, I need you to be serious.”
He looks at Richie now, sizes him up as if the wrinkle-free suit has the reason for this pathetic ambush.
“What?”
“How long have you been hopelessly in love with that girl?” He really looks at him. Four blue eyes, stronger than blood.
“What? What girl?” He sputters. He sounds angry because he’s afraid.
“You can’t play that dumb. Syd, obviously Syd.”
“It’s not like that,” Carmy rubs his eyes. Richie doesn’t tear his away. “It’s nothing to worry about. I’m gonna handle it.”
“Like you were gonna handle the fridge guy?”
“That’s low. That was months ago.”
“But it happened. You say a lot of things you don’t go through with, cuz.” Richie thanks the bartender as he placed the last of the drinks in front of him.
Carmy remains stagnant. Richie turns to him.
“I’m just saying, I hope you don’t eye-fuck someone like that at my wedding.”
“What? Bro, I’ve been to your wedding-”
“I resent that.”
“What do you mean eye-fucking, what is this-”
“I’m saying, you’re being obvious about it, Carmen. I don’t wanna say shit or get off the pot, but if you’re going to act like a lovesick idiot and never do anything about it, I need you to be more subtle about it. You have a restaurant with that girl, you know that, right? I need, you need, Syd needs, for this to keep working. Okay? So, do whatever you want, but know this isn’t something that can become a Claire redo. It’s a delicate fucking ecosystem.”
“I know. I know. I know.” The father, the son, the holy spirit.
Richie claps his shoulder and grabs half of the glasses waiting for them. They shuffle back to their table, greeted with obnoxious cheering and laughter that makes it apparent they’re all native sons of Chicago. It makes Carmy homesick. New York has always felt too clinical to him. Syd smiles at him and the knot in his chest unravels.
He hands her her drink, their fingers linger atop each other. He made sure to grab it off the countertop before Richie in order for this exchange to occur. Pathetic fucking underhand tactics. Her fingers are warm against his, his heart rams against his ribcage like a bear in a metal box. It’s transient at best. Like walnut oil, persimmon glaze, it’s flourished and frugal.
If all he had were these moments, slow and steady touches and looks in crowded rooms where nothing could be mistaken as anything else, he thinks he could live off them. He might be emaciated at the end of the day, starving for what’s not being said—but as long as Syd throws him a bone, he’ll return to her.
Sydney has an air about her that makes her magnetic. It’s like granules of sugar, the seaside, fresh linen. A constant comfort, one thats unattainable. Something sweet. Something delicate. She’s beautifully out of her mind. Pete and Sugar wear matching smiles every time she speaks and Carmy wants to shake them and say: I know, I feel the same way. I brought her into our broken and horrible world and now I would rather pull my fingernails out one by one than watch her leave it.
The dinner is bland. The fish is dry, the salad lackluster. Syd and Carmy share a look after the first bite, an entire conversation transponding silently across linen tablecloth. Sydney smiles into her fork. Carmy considers ramming his into his hand.
Stevie and Michelle materialize beside their table and Sugar is hugging them both and spewing congratulations before Carmy can get his head on straight. She’s always been the solid sibling, anyway. Tactile and feeling to a fault, where he’s a constant crumbling foundation.
He gets up and hugs them anyway, mostly because Sugar glares at him and he knows she’d be pissed if he didn’t. They’re both wearing pantsuits and it makes Carmy really, genuinely smile. He thinks he could’ve predicted it, and knowing people like that makes him feel good.
“Congratulations you two.” He says somewhere between Steven’s shoulder and Michelle’s left ear.
Carmy thinks they might be wearing the same perfume, like the minute they got engaged they really became one person. And that they became better for that.
“Thank you. We’re not married just yet. But thank you.” Michelle pats Carmy’s chest where his heart is.
“It feels like we’ve been married for years.” Steven says. Sugar beams at him because she’s always felt a sense of camaraderie with his awkward disposition. He’s Pete’s reflection, in a way.
“Well, it’ll be official. Mrs. Michelle Berzatto-Handler coming your way.” She raises her glass and takes a drink of it. The floor’s a yellow linoleum. If Carmy was listening, he might understand how Michelle’s connected to the beautiful building they’re in, but he’s not. Sydney’s pearl earrings swing back and forth and he’s entranced by them.
“Oh my God. We’re so rude. Is this the famous Sydney?” He jolts out of his stupor when he hears her name fall from Stevie’s lips. It’s only the rehearsal dinner and he thinks he’s already failed at being a respectable not-date, a courteous guest, a good person.
“Oh, shit. Yeah. Michelle, Stevie, this is Sydney Adamu, my partner and the Bear’s excellent CDC.” He thinks every time he leads with calling Syd his ‘partner’ without a business preceding it he’s leading his captive audience astray. He thinks that he doesn’t want to concede that ambiguity regarding what they are to each other is his goal, because he can’t call Sydney his girlfriend, but he can’t say his feelings for her are entirely platonic. It’s not a lie, but it’s not the truth either.
“Hi. I’m Syd, yeah.” Her cadence changes infinitesimally when she voices the greeting.
Her quiet awkwardness and her jarred smile exist even in a fancy outfit and over a cocktail Carmy’s never heard of. Constant, and to him at least—perfect.
“We’ve heard so much about you.” Michelle’s talking this time. “We all but begged Carmy to bring you out to come visit us, but you’ve been so busy with the restaurant. Which, congratulations on that. I can’t wait until we can finally try it.”
Sydney seems surprised at this notion that Carmy would talk about her. Maybe that he would talk about her to a cousin, a relative that barely matters, maybe that he would talk about her to a Berzatto at all. Maybe that in the few moments he isn’t with her, he spends the time talking about her. Either way, she smiles, she grins.
“Well, you’ll have to come out now. We’d love to make a dish for you, really.” For Sydney, that’s a declaration of love. Michelle seems to know this, somehow, because she rests her hand over her heart and nods, smiling, leaning into Steven whose arm is wrapped around her waist completely.
The dinner ends at nine, but Carmy’s up until eleven, wrangling a severely tipsy Richie to his room, willing him to be quiet for Eva, who retired to her room with Pete and Sugar before dessert was even served. Carmy’s shirt is unbuttoned; it was opened up more and more with every passing hour. He swipes the room key over the reader, the click of the mechanical lock satisfying and clean.
Syd is surprisingly awake, in grey sweatpants and a sea-blue t-shirt with the neck cut off. It looks like she did it with kitchen scissors, it’s sloppy and jagged and he wishes that he was there when she did it, that he could’ve helped her with the straight slope. He is decidedly not thinking about her bare shoulder, smooth and brown and free from even the single strip of coverage a bra strap would have provided. He almost stumbles into the wall with the built-in microwave when she waves her hand in a greeting, the TV remote still in it, still switching through channels during the moment of recognition.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hi.” She’s smiling. She stopped on a channel playing reruns of some teen drama from the two-thousands, but she doesn't seem bothered by it. Her eyes aren’t on the TV anyway. “Did Richie live?”
“Just barely.” He smiles back at her. When she turns back to the TV he leans one arm against the wall and takes his shoes off, black patent leather, freshly shined. “Are you ready for tomorrow?”
She shrugs, eyes still on the TV. A girl is yelling, slamming her hand against a door with names painted on it. Sydney watches it nonplussed. “I guess. I don’t have many feelings about it. Not my wedding. Not even my cousin’s wedding.”
“Yeah.” He clears his throat as he sits on his own bed. He looks at her slowly, like it’s something dangerous. “Thank you again for coming, by the way.”
“Of course. You asked.” The weight of that implication sits in his chest, but she continues like it’s nothing at all. “And it’s nice to see your good pockets of family. It’s nice to see a wedding at all. I can’t remember the last time I went to one.”
Carmy takes the hint, for once in his life, and let’s the sentence die on her lips. “The last wedding I went to was, uh, Richie’s, I think.”
“Yikes. Was it… good? Normal?”
Carmy watches the show playing in front of him passively, he has no clue what any of these characters are doing, what any of their names are. Not too much unlike watching his own life unfold, really. “Yeah, yeah. I know Richie is… Richie. But when he and Tiff loved each other, it was good. It was really good.”
“All weddings are, though, in the moment, aren’t they?”
“Aren’t they what?” He looks at her now. She’s already looking back.
“Really good. Even if they fall apart in a week, or in a year, or in ten, in that moment—there’s a whole lot of love.” She often says things like this as though they’re well-known facts. As if anyone with a pulse knows them like they know the days of the week and the color of the sky. As if Carmy has had anyone in his life before her that was made up of as much love as she is.
“Yeah. Yeah, uh, that’s true.”
They sit in the silence for a few moments, let it weigh on the shoulders like a hug, like a comfort. Syd powers off the TV and leans across their adjoining bedside tables to turn off her little lamp in one fell swoop.
“Goodnight.” One of them says. He can’t tell which of them it is. He can’t be certain that it matters, either.
He lays down still in his trousers, he can’t bring himself to take them off with Sydney a few feet away. He can’t imagine stripping off the few layers of protection against her he still has. He’s too tired to walk to the bathroom and change in there anyway.
Sydney only falls asleep when she hears Carmy’s breath even out. Carmy only falls asleep when he hears Sydney’s little wheezes. He thinks she’s asleep long before she is, and she thinks the same of him. They’re lost somewhere in between.
*
The actual ceremony is outside. It’s a warmer than Illinois has perhaps ever been in April, a breeze tickling his face and a temperature that feels like nothing at all. Carmy’s been waiting for the rest of the brigade to arrive for ten minutes now, sitting on the off-white folding chair and willing his hand to stop shaking.
He sees Sydney first, always leading the pack, one way or another. She’s in a strapless dress, bottle-green, swishing between her legs. Her hair is down entirely, a rare and flooring sight. He needs to stop being surprised that every time he sees her, she seems to get more and more beautiful.
“Hi.” He says. It’s becoming the primary word exchanged between them the past couple days, and he’s kicking himself for making it weird. Richie’s words at the open bar from the day before ring somewhere in his hippocampus.
“Hi.” She grins, she really grins. Sugar trails behind her, Pete in hand, and she gives him a look. A look like she’s irritated, fond, and knowing.
Carmy gives her a look in return. It’s cocky and it’s annoyed. Sydney sits next to him. He doesn’t know if that’s because she wants to, because she’s his plus one, or because she simply greeted him first. He really doesn’t care; either way he’s in her proximity, close enough to brush elbows without the prerequisite of knives in their hands.
He watches the wedding in a haze. He thinks the vows are good because Pete starts crying and Sugar leans against his shoulder. Their love is gentle, solid. Carmy has half a mind to pick up Syd’s hand from where it rests on her lap, hold it in his own—finally steady his thrumming fingers. She moves them to clap before he can even register the way he was moving towards them, like a moth to a flame. He claps too, albeit belatedly.
Michelle and Steven pass them smiling largely as they walk down the aisle, hand in hand. It’s really good. Richie whistles and Eva laughs, and they’re all still clapping. He looks at Syd and she’s got a hand over her eyes, shielding them from the sun, still watching the couple walk away, even as everyone else is turning around and getting up. At last, she smiles up at him from where he’s standing, sun in her eyes and all.
*
Sydney’s had three bottles of Blue Moon—he’s counted. And if he understood the effect of alcohol, he would know that she’s not anything more than a little tipsy, but he doesn’t. He never bit the bullet and risked it all for the relief alcohol might give him. He knows drinking would probably make him feel good, and then he would never stop. He doesn’t want to be his mother’s child.
He’s worried because she tripped on a pebble earlier and now he’s holding onto her arm for dear life, like if he lets go she’ll crumble. A decidedly not-drunk Syd does nothing to push him away, and yet he’ll never know that.
They get back to the hotel late. Carmy stopped the death-grip on Syd’s arm an hour back, relaxing it to merely link their arms through each other. Sydney stops abruptly in the barren lobby, causing him to stumble into her, tiredly, embarrassingly. She steadies him with her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes are wide with some anticipation.
“We should go swimming.”
And Carmy, from to-gos to midnight escapades has never been able to deny Sydney Adamu of anything she asks for. He says: “Okay,” and they’re in the heated room in two minutes flat.
He gets in first—shoeless and sockless, bow tie and jacket long gone—still in pants and a white button-up that puff out in the water and simultaneously stick to his skin. His hair’s soaked and pushed back stupidly. It makes Sydney laugh, and it’s instantly worth it.
“I will fuck you up if you get my hair wet.” She threatens as she shucks off her heels and creates a precariously balanced bun of braids on the top of her head.
“Yes, chef.” He mutters into the water, bubbling it up, causing Sydney to splash him from the ledge. When she’s in the water, he watches her dress turn a darker shade, something almost turquoise against the blue of the tiles around them. He’s transfixed by the way it clings to her stomach, the way it flows and catches between her legs.
He refuses to say hi or any variation of it, so he says nothing at all. He just looks at her; which, admittedly, is likely much, much worse for him.
“I didn’t know how to swim until I was twenty.” Sydney says, treading water and making circles around him.
He stills, then realizing that causes him to sink, moves in smaller circles, follows Sydney’s movements with his own, smaller replications. “Why’s that?”
She blows bubbles, making some sound adjacent to pfft. “Well, my mom wasn’t exactly alive to teach me and my dad has a deep, deep fear of the water.”
Carmy bites away a smile at that. “Really?”
“Yes. And don’t tell him I told you that.” Sydney really smiles. “But I probably never would have learned if I hadn’t gone to the CIA. My roommate, Jiya, found out because her and some friends were going to Jersey City for spring break and they invited me, but their plans were primarily relating to beaches and tanning and getting drunk on sand, so I told her that I couldn’t swim. The next day she got us both YMCA memberships. She gave me a pool noodle and a shove and taught me to swim in a week.”
“Damn, go, Jiya.”
“Go, Jiya.”
“Did you go to Jersey City?” He asks.
“Fuck yeah I did. It was fun.”
“Good.”
“Good?” Her voice is accusatory in its way.
“I’m just glad that you had a better time in New York than I did. You deserve that.”
Sydney’s quiet. He is too. He watches both their hands move underwater, distorted and heavy.
“What was New York like for you?”
“Bad.” He laughs and its humorless. She frowns. “I was throwing up before work, like every day. Because of that I was barely eating. The head chef was a dick. Actually, dick doesn’t even begin to cover it. Mikey cut me out during all this and, I just internalized all the fucked up shit he said to me. I didn’t talk to anyone, I didn’t do anything that made me happy. On top of all of that, I think I was homesick, too. And I didn’t even know it until I came back.”
She moves marginally closer to him. He feels it like he’s been struck with a hot pan.
“Fuck New York.” She says.
He laughs—really laughs this time. “Fuck New York.”
“Can I give you a hug?” She asks, brows furrowed, breaking.
“Of course.” He replies, and his voice is completely wrecked, but he can’t will himself to be embarrassed.
She swims toward him, reducing the inches between them by the second. She smells like cherries, like chlorine, like compulsion. Her arms are around him and he could die happy right here, drowned and delirious at the bottom of this Hilton pool.
“Carm?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for inviting me to this. This part of your life—your family—is really beautiful.”
“You know you’re family too, right?”
She laughs into his neck. He has the urge to kiss hers.
“I’m serious,” He continues, wrapping his arms tighter around her waist.
“Okay.” Sydney relents, slowly pulling away from him.
They stare at each other—cerulean and mahogany. It’s like they’re equal and opposite, like they’re scanning each other’s faces for some reveal, looking under couch cushions and behind chairs for the truth. He senses that there are things she isn't saying to him. He can’t tell if she’s holding back a desire to be close or a desire to be even more distant than they presently are. He doesn’t know which he’d prefer anyway.
“We should get going.” Sydney says, already making her way to the metal ladder.
Carmy follows her. He always does.
2. AALIYAH AND TRACY
Vivian Adamu (née Brathwaite) managed a bar for the last five years of her life. Sydney’s memory of her mother’s role at Joe’s Place is imprinted on her, evident in the advice she heeds to even now.
While hand jewelry and nail polish are unsanitary and perhaps health code violations, they are details that do not matter in a shitty dive bar. (They are details that do matter when you are attempting to receive and retain a star, details that are vital when you must care about everything, more than anything. OSHA is legit.)
You can tell if someone has experience behind a bar by the way they cut citrus. They know their way around a bottle if they slice the ends off, flip it to the newly flat end, cut that in half, place the half moon where it’s flush with the cutting board, cut it down the center again, then start cutting slices. They make small wedges; little triangles that fit perfectly down the neck of a beer bottle. (Sydney keeps this habit even in the kitchen of her fine dining restaurant. Carmy asked her how to cut them like that, once. She felt dizzy over teaching him something for a change. It never dawned on her that these practices would be lost on Carmy because the proximity he had to alcohol from age zero was too close for comfort. She stopped herself from asking if he’s ever been in a bar. Sydney doesn’t drink much, but she still sees alcohol as an enhancement. With baked salmon and white wine, in vodka sauce, its power, its subtleties and flavors are too complex and coagulated for her not to on some level, love it. She sees alcohol as an occasional ambrosia. Carmen sees it as a poison. Either way, seared tangerine triangles make their way onto the summer menu as garnishes.)
A bartender is, on some level, a therapist. Customers do not want to hear your story, they merely want a pair of hands and eyes to listen to theirs. If you’re doing it right, you’ll make more in tips than you do hourly. Unbutton your blouse another notch if you must. (Your hospitality needs to be next level. You give away a part of yourself when you make someone a dish. Maybe that in itself is a mutual sort of therapy.)
If you get your beverages from a hose, run the club soda for at least ten seconds before serving your first customer. Carbonation settles overnight and you can hear the sputter of the bubbles from the spout once it's back to normal. Your regulars will thank you. (Beverages are important. When you eat food, you wash it down. You top it off. You soothe yourself. Wine bottles and pop service carts.)
You should always keep coasters. Not just in your place of work, but in your home, anywhere you like the tables, really. (A year into The Bear, Sydney asked Carmy if they could get custom-made coasters. He brought her a few sketches the next day; white and minimalistic with black outlines covering the circles. She imagined him hunched over his kitchen counter with a compass, making those perfect circles over and over, and was overcome with the desire to put her face to his neck. Sydney chose the third option, with a cartoonish bear in the center on one side and on the other, a smattering of little sketches: of fish, of forks, of cherries, of almonds, of Marina City, with The Bear, 666 N Orleans St. typed in the center, in Sydney’s handwriting. The coasters became something the diners took with them as a memento after their meal, cardboard and cheap little things, an alluring phenomenon that ultimately caused them to be praised and pictured in an Eater article the following month.)
In this profession, you’re allotting time towards spending time in bars that aren’t yours after hours of bartending. If you want to continue to get outrageously good tips from the bartenders down the street, you must visit them too, must tip them outrageously in return. (You always must extend your kindness to other chefs. Connections made in the restaurant industry are akin to golden strings. If you want to be successful, you need to immerse yourself in the community. The symbiosis Sydney has crafted for both her and Carmy has worked tremendously thus far, until she gets them both roped into attending the wedding of The Alcott’s CDC. She is her mother’s daughter, after all.)
*
The wedding’s in Highland Park, so Carmy picks Sydney up at her apartment, earlier than she’s used to, some wee hours she usually spends in crisis or cutting vegetables.
She’s put on nail polish, but it looks like Wite-Out and she feels stupid. She’ll have to take it off on the ride back anyway. Like most things Syd gets her hands on, it’s temporary. She has cotton balls and remover in her bag to prove it.
Also temporary: Carmy, unguarded. He’s beautiful in the morning. The sun makes him softer and there’s something vulnerable in his eyes, like he put on his clothes in a haze and forgot to put up the walls that surround his heart.
She begs him to stop at her favorite coffee shop before they get on the highway and he obliges. She thinks that he would drive them straight into Lake Michigan if she asked.
She gets an almond milk latte and he gets a cortado. Sydney wonders briefly if the barista thinks she and Carmy are a couple. She wonders if people think they are a pair that looks good together.
Carmy has a twinkle in his eye when he turns to her. Strands of not-quite blond hair are caught in his eyelashes and it’s quite possibly the most beautiful thing Sydney has ever seen.
He looks right at her, right into her, and says: “What do you think about this sourdough cinnamon roll?”
*
When they arrive, they’re quiet. There are empty coffee cups and a half-sticky pastry bag littered between them. If she was anyone else, she thinks Carmy would be annoyed at them. Thinks he would complain about them littering the car. She’s seen him say as much to Richie with his Arby’s cups in his own car, if she’s being honest.
For the past few years, Sydney has kept this idea of maybe in between the buttons of her chef’s whites, stitched it in between the embroidered initials of their cuff. Compartmentalizing these moments when they argued, less than a breath away from each other, wet heat making her dizzy and their shared volume never quiet enough to warrant the distance, the lack thereof. When Carmy would carve time out of their Sunday morning prep to go to the farmers market in Logan Square with her because she mentioned she missed going, even though he hated them. When he would linger on the small of her back for far too long. When, in the middle of service, or review, or any moment where they weren’t beside each other, she felt his eyes on her back, tracing her profile for minutes upon minutes. She thought maybe. Maybe Carmy wanted her.
But Sydney’s tired, now. She’s thirty and she’s tired. She knows that if her and Carmy were ever going to be something, they would’ve by now. That if he felt the same way about her as she did about him, he would’ve done something about it. She’s green and impatient, he’s refined and determined. She’ll run anything she wants into the ground if it’ll get her there faster, but she also has too much shame, too much awkwardness taking up space in her body for her to risk like this. To her, at least, Carmy has never had that problem.
Carmen Berzatto is always humming with energy, with need and with desire. If any of that were to be directed towards her, he would’ve exploded with it. He loves her, she knows that. But she can’t believe he loves her as she loves him—as she’ll always, always love him. The words she’ll never say get stuck on the back of her teeth; soft, crooked, futile.
If he loved her like that, he would’ve kissed her already. He would’ve gotten a hard on when she hugged him, sopping wet in a strapless dress after his cousin’s wedding. He would’ve made it clear to her, somehow. He knows her, knows how oblivious she is, how overt you have to be with her in order for her to understand. She told Carmy about Marcus asking her out, how badly it had gone, how she hadn’t realized he had a crush on her before that very moment. He didn’t laugh at the story, even as she let out routine chuckles in telling it. He was serious when he asked her why she said no. She was a little confused when she responded: he’s like a brother to me. Carmy had laughed then. But that was besides the point. If he loved her, he would have shown her in a way she could understand.
She worries that soon, resenting herself for being inconveniently in love with her business partner will not be enough. That soon, she will end up resenting Carmy just the same, for making her into the mess she’s so pathetically become. Like Moby and Ahab—he’s taken a piece of her, she’s gone mad without it. Galled with the unquenchable thirst for revenge—for love. And that alone may be enough to kill her. Harpoons and ropes be damned. Sydney can only tread these waves of indignation for so long. She thinks drowning might just be a relief.
Aaliyah has put them in an Airbnb with turquoise tiles and persian rugs. It’s so quiet compared to what the two have grown up in, what they continue to live in. She often imagines that maybe, some moment in time before they knew each other, they shared a train—that they existed in the same space before he meant anything to her. Chicago has that sort of magic in its bone marrow. The red line (to Howard) of fate.
Maybe city kids consider this kind of silence a poison, but Sydney sits in it anyway. The harm is a comfort, in a way; she knows she never will have this. This being the troughs around the house. This being a space outside the city. This being a moment to rest her frenzied hands. She pictures Carmy in the backyard. She pictures a little girl in his arms, another on his leg, her heart in her throat. She sees for a minute, him looking at her through the glass. His hair’s a mess and he’s grinning unabashedly. His boyish charm is suffocating even in fantasy. This being Carmy.
It seems the majority of Aaliyah and Tracy’s guests are chefs, something that is unsurprising to Syd, but is solidified by the fact that when she received the invitation addressed to her and Carmy, it clearly states in its handwritten postscript that instead of bringing a gift, they should bring a homemade dish of their choosing. Aaliyah had told Sydney when they ran into each other at a bar during one of Nat and Sydney’s nights out that her and her fiancee had neither wanted to trust a caterer nor do all the cooking themselves. The solution thought up was to invite as many chefs as they could think of and trap them into a sort of captive potluck. She and Nat had thought it was devilishly smart and incredibly hilarious, each three margaritas in.
Sydney thinks that only she and Carmy would find themselves at a wedding that required them to pack flour, to pack herbs, to pack produce. She smiles about it, rifling through the shared tote bag she had bought him for his birthday last year. It’s from the Art Institute and is already dirtied from use—another fact that makes her smile.
So, they’re making focaccia in this Airbnb. It’s so domestic she could choke on it, so she ignores that fact and does what she’s best at: she starts talking.
“When I was at the CIA,” Sydney’s indenting the focaccia methodically, avoiding Carmy’s gaze. “I ate terribly.”
“Like real college student shit?” Carmy puffs out a breath like it’s difficult; it really might be. Their arms brush again.
“Like real college student shit, but worse.”
“Oh shit.”
“I ate so, so many unsalted pretzels and chunky salsa and drank pretty much only water mixed with Finest Call cherry syrup.”
“That’s…”
“Yeah, it’s…”
“That’s like the opposite of something.” He’s smiling like he shouldn’t be, like he’s chasing it away to the corner of his mouth. “How did that start?”
“Well, I was broke. And my mom… she would only eat pretzels and salsa as a snack. That’s one thing I really remember about her. She said it had no calories. I don’t think that’s true, but she wouldn’t eat tortilla chips because they had fat or salt or whatever. She had a very complicated relationship with food.”
“And you…?”
“No, no. I just… picked it up to feel closer to her, I guess. And pretzels are cheaper than chips.”
He hums, slices something beside her. Their elbows click together.
“The drink, though. Is that a Sydney Adamu original?”
Sydney smiles every time he says her name, the way the vowels of the patronymic warm his tongue, the way their Christian names both end the same way. Twin flames, through and through.
“Yeah, kind of.” She laughs before anything’s funny. “My mom was a bartender. She brought home a lot of stuff from work. Finest Call became a staple at my house. I’d put it on ice cream, in my dad’s seltzer, anything. I didn’t realize until just now that this was kinda all about my mom? But I guess subconsciously I was missing her a lot during that time. Fucking New York.”
“Fuck New York.”
There’s a lull, and suddenly the topic is done with. It’s one of those conversations that is heavy and still impossibly thin. Like ravioli dough rolled out too many times. The entrails of it spilling out before it can even be plated. Dinner is ruined.
The non-metaphorical food they’re making is fine, though. The focaccia rises like it should and she watches silently as Carmy places tomatoes and rosemary on the top of it. He makes it into some design; a heart in the center, garlic on the edges. He’s got flour on his left cheekbone and it takes everything in her not to wipe it away, to kiss it away.
Sydney Adamu did not fall for Carmen Berzatto. Falling implied velocity and a destination; what she was doing was loving him in the same exact place and same exact way she had since they met. What came over her was, instead, the mere realization that if anything, she was rotting.
Ever since her first day in the grimy kitchen of The Beef, she felt so still and so insignificant when she was with Carmy. If he was the light, she was like a dust mote, circling around him; oh so lucky to even be captured into his orbit. Wrapped up in his pull and yet never close enough to touch him. They go on and on. On and on. She doesn’t know how to stop it. She doesn’t know if she wants to.
*
A few months ago, she tried dating someone. His name was Jake and he had glasses and hair like a trigger—he liked when Sydney pulled it, always bit the bullet when she did. She didn’t tell anyone at The Bear besides Natalie. Nat, who had turned quickly and quietly into one of her closest friends following the birth of Leona “Lenny” Natalie Wangelin and the appointment of Syd as her godmother. Sydney would do anything for Nat, anything for Lenny. It’s a nickname that Nat implemented because she thought it fit perfectly amongst “Carmy” and “Mikey", a fact that makes Syd’s heart ache. She should’ve realized, that for all the gossip exchanged between the two of them, the woman’s weary, toddler-ridden mind would inevitably slip up and reveal her habits to her coworkers, to her partner.
Jake was really just some guy. They met because he almost ran into her outside The Bear when she was going into work, his cup of coffee sloshing over his hand. She didn’t even look at him, she was just staring at the coffee, thinking about how horribly depressed she would’ve become if some random jackass spilt an overpriced americano on her Thom fucking Browne whites. He apologized a lot. A lot of times. She insisted it was okay, but she had to get going, and he stopped her quickly, saying that he knew it was forward but thought she was really pretty and he kind of felt like he owed her a coffee for almost burning her on his, anyway. Sydney gave him her number, mostly because he ws direct, and because she knew that if he puts the ball in her court, she’d never make the move.
On their third date he took her to a Bulls game against the Lakers, and she hadn’t been to the United Center in at least a decade. She wore her vintage Bulls shirt and a red cardigan and he complimented her three times on the train, and four more times when they got to their seats. It was all very normal, and Jake was very nice. For a girl like Sydney, writhing and wilting under the gaze of a man who would never love her, she thought that’s all she could’ve asked for.
The day it all came to head, Natalie stopped her from walking into the kitchen, pulled her into her office like it was some dramatic play and there was a cane to pull her off stage.
“Nat! What the hell?” Sydney stumbled into the other woman, eyes wide at the flighty energy she was emitting.
“Don’t be mad.”
“That’s a terrible way to start a sentence.”
Nat scrunched up her face like she sucked on a lemon or taken a shot of bitters. She put her fist to her closed eyes. “So, I accidentally told Richie and Carm you have a boyfriend.”
“Natalie.” Sydney had sighed.
“Syd, if you get mad at me I will actually kill myself. I have a crying toddler at home and an empath for a husband. I have gotten maybe five hours of sleep this week. I will literally handle your disappointment worse than Carmy right now.” Nat was frantic, and despite it all Sydney held back a laugh.
“I’m not mad, Nat.”
“Thank God.”
“I just need you to help me shut it down when they give me shit, okay?” She moved toward the door, the creak immediately filling the room with Richie’s shouts. A suit could change a man, but before service, he was the same old Richie.
The thing was, Richie had his jokes, they were swift and stupid and if there was a woman in his vicinity when he said them she slapped his arm, hard. Carmy, though, was silent. Not just quiet in the pensive, deliberate, Carmy way, but actually fucking silent. Someone would say the words ‘Jake’ or ‘boyfriend’ and a hush would fall over his entire being.
It drove Sydney crazy. She knew she wasn’t a normal person, that she was awkward and off-beat and missed the memo on more than a few social cues. She also knew inherently that Carmy’s behavior was not normal either. And at least that’s just the way Syd was—this was a new development for Carmy.
She cornered him in the end. During prep in the morning, before anyone else is there. It’s one of those liminal spaces, those sort of moments you wouldn’t be sure are real if it weren’t for them repeating six days a week.
“What do you think about flowers?” She asked, dicing a shallot.
“Flowers?” He returned. His eyes were still glued to the garlic cloves in front of him.
“Yeah. Flowers. Those really pretty plants that smell good? You may have heard of them. You kinda have a hand tattoo of one.”
Carmy looked up, at that. Eyes bright, glared at her.
“I’m familiar.”
“So? What do you think about them?”
He sighed. He acted like talking about himself in this way was akin to pulling teeth. “I love ‘em, Syd. Obviously.” He raised his hand to punctuate that.
It made Sydney soft. She was quiet in hopes he’d continue this explanation.
“When I was a kid I got really into their meanings, Nat would bring me to the library so I could check out books and manuals on the language of flowers. In middle school, I had a tiny garden in my window. Just a couple of pots of stuff I could afford that I watered religiously.”
“I can see it.” She hummed.
“Of course you can.” He scoffed. After a beat: “Why do you ask?”
And Sydney had forgot, really. Reality came crashing down with that question, ricocheting off every surface of the kitchen.
“Oh, uh, Jake asked what I wanted for Valentine’s Day. I said flowers, he said they were stupid because they died quickly and had no real function. Just wanted to hear another opinion.” She shrugged, feigning nonchalance. The knife in her hand shook.
Carmy’s voice was almost sad. “You deserve someone who buys you flowers, Sydney.”
That was back when Syd still had her maybe. She broke up with Jake the next day.
*
Her dress is butter-yellow and linen. It has thin straps because it’s June, and falls just to her shins, again, because it’s June. June in Chicago is an unpredictable beast, and yet, predictably, it’s sweltering. She bought it a week ago with Natalie and Leona from a store she’s always too intimidated to go in alone. The workers are still rude with companionship, but less so when they have an adorably well-behaved cherub of a baby to shield themselves with. They moved from shop to shop, the little girl between them on the street, holding both their hands. Lenny is all but obsessed with Syd, something Nat fondly calls a deeply-seated Berzatto trait. That always makes Syd blush, makes her bite the inside of her cheek to stop herself from grinning. Syd thinks its inherent to her own being to be a little in love with every Berzatto she’s met in return.
The wedding’s in someone’s parents’ backyard, so Carmy’s toeing the line of business casual instead of bordering on black tie. She thinks Nat had some control in the outfit arrangement because he’s got on powder-blue pants and he looks slightly uncomfortable about that fact. Sydney makes a mental note to text her and ask later. Now, she’s focused on the focaccia wrapped in a tea towel in her hands, on Carmy’s quivering beside her.
They stand in the driveway for a beat, awkward and shuffling against the concrete. Sydney opens her mouth, desperate for any variation in sound between her and Carmy when she’s interrupted before she can begin.
“Sydney-motherfucking-Adamu!” Aaliyah raises her hands, appearing before them with a wide grin.
“Hi!” Sydney grins when Aaliyah pulls her in. “Congratulations.”
“Please, it hasn’t even begun.” Her eyes flicker to Carmy, who is looking in between his own shoes and the guests around them. A precious goddamn embarrassment. “Is this the famous Carmen Berzatto?”
His head snaps up at that, like he’s just realizing where he is. “Hi.” He says. Stupid. “I’m Carmy.”
“Aaliyah. I’m The Alcott’s CDC over in Pilsen. It’s so great to finally meet you. I’ve heard so much.”
Carmy looks at Syd after that, like she’s the only person who could possibly talk about him. Which, somehow, doesn’t feel too far from the truth. “Some good things, I hope.”
“The best.” She responds. She’s got a puff-pink dress on and it makes Syd smile, especially when she recognizes Tracy a few paces away in a matching color and differing style. There was no dress code and yet it seems they were all on the same wavelength; a fucking pastel parade. For all their creativity in food, it seems they lack it completely in all else.
“We brought focaccia.” Sydney says before a beat of silence can fully pass.
“You two are angels.” Aaliyah responds. Her attention shifts to her fiancee when she materializes beside her. Tracy smiles, leaning into her. They look like matching pastries, and it gives Sydney a toothache. “This is Tracy. My soon-to-be-wife.”
“Hi,” Tracy looks at them, a snaggletooth poking out from under her top lip when she talks.
“This is Sydney and Carmy. They run The Bear in River North.”
And Sydney wishes her pulse wouldn’t quicken every time their names are strung together. She remembers the first time she saw them side by side in print she couldn’t stop grinning. Even when she sliced into her index finger during prep, she was smiling.
“Man, I’ve been dying to go there. Maybe that’ll be our honeymoon celebration.” Tracy laughs.
“Are you a chef too?” Carmy asks, because if Sydney knows one thing about him, it’s the fact he can only quantify meaning through cooking; which is, in turn, through himself. And she doesn’t think that makes him insensitive or selfish. It’s just that when he loves something, the only way he can understand the world is to go through it. He lets it consume him.
“No, no. I work in marketing. Aaliyah’s got enough creativity for the both of us.” She smiles as she leans in further to the woman beside her.
“Well, we should probably go greet some of the other guests. Thank you both so much for coming, we’re so happy you’re here.” She touches Sydney’s arm as if to exemplify that sentiment. “The dinner table’s in the back, help yourselves to anything. There’s homemade jasmine lemonade!”
The two women pull each other into a direction away from Syd and Carmy, waving wildly and smiling at them as they do so.
“They’re nice.” Carmy says as Syd puts down their focaccia and pours lemonade into crystal glasses.
“They are.” She smiles. “Which you would know, if you came with me to even one of my attempts to network.”
“I know.” He lets out a puff of air caught somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “I know.”
Then the conversation is done and they’re standing in silence, sipping sweet syrup and watching the people they don’t know talk to other people they don’t know.
“Did I do something?” Carmy asks after a minute of floundering in the crowd.
“What?”
“Are you mad at me? I feel like we’re off and I can’t stand it, Syd. So if you’re mad at me, if I did something, tell me how to fix it. I wanna fix it.”
If Sydney were the type of girl to voice everything she thought she would say: I’m mad at you because every day I wake up and I am faced with the horrible inconvenience of being in love with you. I’m too far gone to say anything gently; I love you so much that sometimes I feel like I could tear it with my teeth, rip out my own heart and shove it down your throat so maybe you could understand what I’m feeling here. The minor details include: I’ve loved you since before you knew I existed, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to stop loving you, I understand what every fucking love song was talking about. We’re off because I now realize you’ll never love me like that.
But Sydney is not that type of girl. So she shakes her head, she smiles, and she says: “No, Carm, I’m not mad. We’re good. I’m just tired.”
It’s not a lie so much as it is an abridged version of the truth.
*
Weddings, Sydney has noticed, consist largely of folding chairs and waiting.
It’s not that she’s complaining about that fact, it’s just that when she was a teenager and fantasized about getting to see her classmates and friends get married, she didn’t account for so much time being so aggressively unromantic. She’ll admit, the clinical aspect of it all may be largely of her own doing, attempting to construe this time with Carmy into something she can’t grow more fantasies out of, harness more maybes from.
Her hands are still in her lap as Carmy’s are frantic beside her. She watches him drum his fingers into his calloused palm. Somewhere ahead of her, Aaliyah starts her vows. They’re being officiated by the friend who introduced them. Another chef. It makes Sydney smile. When Tracy starts her vows, she feels Carmy’s gaze latch onto the side of her face. She doesn’t want to play this game. She almost forgets to blink, staring wildly at two brown and pink figures. She sheds a single tear long after they exchange rings. He starts clapping before her, this time.
Stemless flowers are thrown into the rows of seats as they run down the aisle, hand in hand. A daffodil lands in between the place where their thighs almost touch. Sydney laughs.
*
Somewhere in time after the first wedding, touch between them became tenfold, to the point where they could now stand in front of a single queen bed and not even pretend to entertain it as a problem. The inevitable contact that came with it was a nonissue, but one neither would admit to craving wholeheartedly.
Excuses have run thin over the years, and it’s become something else entirely; this way in which they have crafted another language as a subset to circled fists over chests and flickering gazes. Sometimes, after a particularly difficult day, Carmy will pull her into a hug, chef whites half unbuttoned, smelling of garlic and grease, and it’s perfect. Sydney keeps these memories of their embraces like they’re important reminders scribbled on the back of her hand. She wishes they were something tangible and heavy she could place into her mother’s old hat box or the front pocket of her backpack. Something she could carry with her, something that wouldn’t wash away.
They’re in bed, now. Sydney always has trouble falling asleep in beds that weren’t her own. There’s a TV in the bedroom, but neither of them could find the remote. She sees Carmy’s tossing and turning in the reflection of its blackness, just barely.
They’re facing away from each other. Or really, Sydney’s facing the wall and Carmy’s facing her back. He’s staring at it. She can feel it. She knows they both know the other is awake; she waits for him to do something about it.
“Syd?” He whispers like they’re kids at a sleepover past their bedtime. Like there’s parents down the hall waiting to reprimand them. Like either of them ever had parents, plural.
Sydney really wishes she knew him at thirteen. And at twelve, and forever before that.
“Carm.” She whispers back.
When he doesn’t respond, she flips over to face him. His eyes look preemptively sad.
“What’s up?” Syd puts a hand between her cheek and the pillow, scans his face for some understanding of what he’s thinking. She comes back with nothing. It’s a lot like trying to hold water in her hands. He slips through the seams.
“I just…” He squeezes his eyes shut. Sydney doesn’t move so as not to spook him. He’s not unlike a deer, in that way. “It’s been years.”
“What has?” She asks. She can’t remember the last time they were this quiet. His breath smells like her toothpaste.
“Mikey. The gut. The walk-in.” He gulps. The lack of Claire is noticeable, is heavy. The very lack of her name puts her front and center. “And yet I still feel it. I still feel like I’m coasting. Like everything is too good and yet it still is miserable. Like the minute I settle into it, the other shoe is going to drop.”
Sydney wades in that, for just a minute.
“There is no shoe, Carm. There was never a shoe in the first place, so there’s no second one to follow it. This is what it is and there won't be a big thing that makes all the negative click into place, which narratively sucks but is true despite that.” Sydney whispers back. Then she pivots. “Are you still going to therapy?”
He hums. He started going a year ago and still gets clammy when she brings it up. She only found out he was going in the first place because of Nat. “Yeah. Probably not enough, but yeah.”
“Good.” She sniffs like she has a runny nose, but she doesn’t. It’s just dry air, louder than usual. “Life is not a punishment, Carm. Sometimes good things happen for no reason. Everything just is.”
“Everything just is.” He repeats. She lets it sit on both their chests.
He continues before she can respond. “I think I’d miss you even if we never met.”
She shuts her eyes like he slapped her. She honestly thinks she would have preferred it. She starts shaking her head slowly.
“You’re my best friend.” He says, just marginally louder than before. Like it’s something to emphasize, something she has to beg her to believe.
“You’re mine too,” She’s breathless, her eyes are glassy when she opens them. “You know that.”
Carmy shakes his head. He’s mirroring her movements from minutes ago. It's like he’s lagging, like they could be identical and yet something is stopping him from ever knowing her completely. She doesn’t know if that’s her fault or his. They’re always on the same page but never in the same breath. And yet, they work.
Maybe.
“You’re an idiot.” She says. She can’t be sure if it’s directed at him or herself.
“I know.” He says anyway.
3. CLAIRE AND GEORGE
Sydney and Carmy are fighting. This is not unlike saying: the world keeps turning.
It’s Claire Cohen’s wedding day. This is not unlike saying: the world might just fucking explode.
Sydney agreed to go with him when he got the invitation months ago, insisting that you should never attend an ex’s wedding without a plus one, as if that was the only reason he asked her in the first place. And that promise sat dormant, fragile like a bomb, until December. December, because of course Claire would have a fucking Christmas-adjacent wedding.
The fight started because of fennel. It was stupid, according to Sugar and Richie and Tina and Marcus and just about everyone else caught in the crossfire; but that didn’t stop them from starting a cold war because of it. Sydney had a fennel soup recipe she wanted to put on the menu for winter because she loved soup, and so did the majority of people in the Midwest. She said she saw a poll on it. Carmy, didn’t particularly like fennel as a concept. Amongst the other dishes they had decided on, he didn’t think it worked. But Sydney was insistent, and he could never deny her. She could tell him to jump off the La Salle street bridge and he would in a heartbeat.
It was, decidedly, not his fault that the fennel did not get ordered in time and therefore the soup had to be 86’d and replaced with a sweet potato chowder. It had chili oil in it and Carmy thought it boded much better for the cohesion of the menu. He did not tell Syd that, though. Sydney was convinced that he had deliberately left fennel off of the ordering list to sabotage her dish. Nevermind that in the end Sugar did all of the ordering, that it was far more likely she misread his handwriting than anything else, nevermind that detail. According to Sydney, it was Carmy’s fault. That much had been made clear, stretched across a full week of shouting matches dissolving into, even worse, jilted comments and short responses.
The wedding is in Chicago proper, which is unsurprising because though Carmy and Claire disagreed about many things, their general disdain for the suburbs was not one of them. It’s specifically in the West Loop at some venue Carmy’s never heard of because why would he; and because Claire is not a sadist, their invite is only for the reception, the cursive font on the cardstock clarifying that the ceremony is some supremely intimate and small event. If that’s a lie tailored to his invitation, well, he can’t bring himself to care.
Especially not when he’s holding five years of love for Sydney like a cross. Not when she’s wearing a clementine-orange dress and he feels like he’s only seen the world in grayscale before this moment. If Nat could see his face now, he thinks she’d slap it.
*
Sugar, really, was responsible for most problems he’s encountered in his adult life. This was in part unfair, but he didn’t feel as though she deserved an amendment at the present moment.
They’ve had weekly lunches on Mondays when The Bear’s closed for the past four years. Sometimes Sugar will bring Lenny with her and she’ll sit next to her uncle and Nat’ll coo and take pictures where Carmy refuses to smile until he looks at Lenny and it happens instinctively. She’s got dirty blonde hair like the two of them, but eyes that are almond and dark, just like Mikey.
Lenny’s almost five and he knows Sugar has told her about Mikey because sometimes she’ll ask him for a story with Mikey in it and his mind will go completely blank. He wants to, he really wants to tell her everything she asks about, give her everything she asks for. For this, though, he really doesn’t know how. He gets her a doll instead, and a Rubik’s cube, and a lot of Fun Dip, and she seems satisfied with that, too. He’s got time to figure it out.
This lunch, though, it was just the two of them. A reality that they hadn’t known for most of their lives. They were born knowing Mikey, and here they were, half a decade later, living and aging without him at all.
They were at a Chinese place Syd would take him to every once in a while. There was chili oil in everything on the menu, which had Sugar salivating because she was in her third trimester again and craved absolutely anything that was spicy.
She was slurping on soup when she asked him, point blank: “Are you ever going to start dating again?”
He took a minute, fiddling with the chopsticks in between his fingers and considering his options in this conversation.
“Sug?”
“What?” She responded with a noodle hanging out of the corner of her mouth. He really did love his sister.
“I’m in love with Sydney.” He said.
She was quiet across from him, wiping her mouth with a napkin before placing it back in her lap. She looked at him, puzzled.
“Adamu?”
He almost laughed. “That would be the one.”
Sugar sighed. “Carmen Berzatto if we weren’t in a public setting right now I would be beating the absolute shit out of you.”
Carmy blanched. “What?! Why!? I’m your brother, Natalie, I just bared my soul to you and you threaten me?”
“Yes, I do, you absolute idiot, because that girl has been in love with you since the day she walked into your goddamn restaurant and I–” Sugar stopped abruptly. It was like a car crash. She moved her hand to her mouth.
Carmy felt like he had tinnitus, like he was delirious. “What?”
“Oh, no, no. Pretend I didn’t just say that, okay? Forget I said anything.”
“Natalie, what did you just say?”
Her elbows were on the table and her head was in her hands. Soup be damned.
“Nat.” He said, loud enough to force her to look at him. “Did you mean it?”
“Fucking duh.” She said, her head shaking in the way it always does when she’s annoyed.
They were both quiet.
“You can’t act any differently, okay? You can’t act like you know anything.” She continued like Carmy was listening at all.
“Did she tell you?” He asked, so quiet that Natalie softened.
“Yeah. But she didn’t exactly need to.”
“What, it’s obvious?” Carmy ran his hand through his hair, stress seeping out at all ends.
“Extremely, bear.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah.” Sugar went back to her soup at this, savoring the now-lukewarm spoonfuls with a sigh.
His older sister was eating soup like she hadn’t just blown up his world completely. Like this wasn’t fucking DEFCON 1.
He asked the waitress when she passed them: “Can I get a to-go box?”
*
“Are you okay?” Sydney asks, because even when she’s mad at him, she’s so, so good. She has dark eye makeup on and it makes her eyes even more beautiful. “We don’t have to do this, you know.”
“I know.” He says like his knees aren’t buckling. “I want to do this.”
He forgets to breathe. Sydney nods at him, looking him up and down as if to confirm his stability. Then she’s walking in front of him into the building. Her dress is shorter than the other ones he’s seen her in, her legs long and elegant just as the rest of her. Carmy’s dizzy with want, with love, but he walks forward anyway.
It’s by far the most expensive wedding he’s been to. That becomes clear almost immediately. He’s heard from Fak that her fiance—or her husband, now—is a plastic surgeon named George, so the opulence of it is on some level, expected. There’s an open bar. Sydney orders another cocktail he hasn’t heard of and he orders a Sprite.
When Sydney isn’t talking to him, he feels like the walls are closing in everywhere he goes. When Sydney isn’t talking to him and he found out a week ago that she’s been in love with him too, been in love with him for possibly longer than he has with her, he feels like he’s on fire. If he loses the one good thing in his life before he’s even really got it, he may lose his mind entirely. Sydney gets her drink and she turns away from him, moves to some conglomeration of people and starts talking to one of them. It might be a Fak; he doesn’t know how else she would know anyone here. He barely knows anyone here.
He’s coasting through the crowd for an hour, Sprite long gone, the glass pressed firmly to his chest like it’s a reminder he’s alive. There’s a hand on his shoulder and he whips around like it’s a threat. It is, instead, his fifth grade teacher Mrs. Mahone. Fucking Roosevelt.
“Carmen.” She says with a smile. She’s got retro glasses, salt-and-pepper hair, and that kind of energy that makes it impossible to pin down her age.
“Mrs. Mahone.”
“I’d tell you to call me Laurie, but I know you wouldn’t listen.”
He smiles, sheepish.
She tuts. “You’re a good kid, Carmen. I met your wife just a few minutes ago.”
“Oh yeah?” He tilts his head but this has happened enough times where he’s not really confused at all.
“Yes. Sydney. What a beautiful girl. You found a good one.”
He nods. “Yeah, I really did.”
Mrs. Mahone smiles as she places a hand on his forearm. “I’m really glad to see you happy, Carmen.” The unspoken is still there: you were such a sad child.
“Me too. Yeah, me too.” And it hurts, because it’s true.
*
A month ago, something almost happened. They were in Carmy’s apartment, something that was inherently dangerous for them. Years had passed and the space had grown more and more in Sydney’s presence. In whose presence even Carmy had bloomed out and out and out. It could be seen in: the mugs with playful designs on them, the bookshelf Sydney had practically begged him to get, the slippers he had bought her (the same style as his black ones, but green), three framed pictures in the hallway (of Nat with Pete and Lenny, of the entire crew of The Bear, of him and Sydney, back in the days of The Beef, sitting outside it in their matching blues with opposite expressions), the bag she had gifted him several birthdays ago hanging on a door handle, the extra pillow he kept with a silk case that they did not talk about.
They were trying a recipe Sydney thought up on the pink line. Cajun sweet potato ravioli with brown butter sauce and thyme. It was mostly wordless, this dance they had known for so many years. He played Cat Stevens on the bluetooth speaker Sugar had given him out of concern, mostly. Syd was humming along over the sound of the food processor and he smiled at that.
Carmy was rolling out dough with his handleless pin. It was clinical, really. Sydney was spooning the filling methodically. Then she did one of his favorite things in the world; she talked.
“I’ve been, like, terrified to make ravioli since the soft opening.”
“Why?” He asked, scanning her face as it was hyper-focused on the act in front of her.
She tutted and worried her bottom lip into her teeth like she was really thinking about what she was going to say. “After my restaurant tour I got really inspired to make, you guessed it, ravioli. I had a vision and a flavor profile and a plating technique, all of it. And then… I made it and somehow I fucked it up and I failed. It tasted horrible, like really and truly horrible. I really thought that was the sign that I shouldn’t be doing any of this.” Sydney waved around generally. Then she laughed. “But I did it anyway. It worked out didn’t it?”
Carmy was quiet, considering. “I’m sorry, Syd.”
She sighed. “See this is why I knew I shouldn’t have told you that. Obviously it wasn’t your fault. It was years ago, Carm. It’s okay.”
He shook his head. “But I am sorry, I should be sorry. I know I’m always apologizing for something, but I don’t think I ever apologized for that.”
She was quiet. Her hands still. “Well, unnecessary apology accepted.”
He chuckled when she smiled. They had both paused the work at hand, spoon half-full, dough half-rolled. Carmy really looked at her, then. He could feel the heat of her breath: clean teeth and paprika. He edged his fingers towards hers. They were cold against the heat of his own.
Sydney’s mouth was ajar, like she was going to say something, like she was choking on it. Her phone alarm went off somewhere behind her, for God knows what, and she whipped around to silence it.
That was that.
*
He actually almost runs into Claire. Headfirst, clumsy, literal. Nothing melancholy or romantic about it.
“Oh, you’re so lucky that glass is empty.”
“Claire.” He says, steadying himself and then the glass in his hand.
“Hi, Carm.” She smiles in a way that makes her seem more comfortable than she probably is, or at least more comfortable than she should be. She holds herself like she knows she’s better than him. He knows that’s probably true, but he’d prefer some subtlety in that fact.
“Congratulations.” He says simply because that’s what you’re supposed to say.
“Thanks. It’s kind of a lot.”
“It is. But it’s good, I think.”
She smiles again, differently maybe. More genuine, at least on some level.
“I saw you came with Sydney.”
“Yeah.” He shoves his hands in his pockets to keep them from vibrating.
“What took you so long?” Claire asks, and the flute of champagne she’s holding sloshes against its side.
“I’m sorry?”
“To get with Sydney. What took you so long?”
“Oh, uh, we’re not together like that. She’s just my plus one.”
Claire laughs wholeheartedly, shaking and coughing on her own spit at the tail end of it. She has pink lipstick on and it’s started to wear away at the center of her lips. Carmy thinks this is the first time he’s not felt even an inkling of attraction towards her. He doesn’t know what that means. She stops smiling once she sees he’s not laughing with her.
“Man, I thought falling in love maybe made you funny. You’re not joking, are you?”
He looks at her, his brows furrowed. A hand flies to her mouth.
“Carmy, it’s been years!”
“Years since what?”
She gestures vaguely with her hands like that’s an adequate answer. It kind of is. She takes a long sip of champagne.
“Yeah,” He sighs. “I’ll get there.” Because there’s no use in trying to lie to Claire, not when he was enough of an asshole five years ago to still feel badly about it.
“I say this with love, Carmy, because even after everything I still feel some sort of affection towards you. Make a fucking move. Do something. You never do anything you want unless someone forces you into it, and I can tell you that girl is waiting for you to prove it’s her you want.”
“You’re very wise.” Carmy laughs, even though it’s only a half-baked joke.
“It’s what married life does to you.” She nods like it’s something serious.
They stand there for a minute, saying nothing at all. And it really is uncomfortable. Claire moves first, puts a hand on his forearm and tells him: good luck. Then she walks away and becomes nothing more than a blob of brown hair and a white dress. Truly in the rearview mirror.
Carmy moves back to their table. Syd’s sitting there, a vision in orange, looking caught somewhere between annoyance and boredom, sipping on her drink of grapefruit and tequila (Carmy looked it up.)
He sits down next to her, and because she refuses to look at him, he really stares. She’s always beautiful, yes, and he hates to admit it, but something about her anger is ethereal in another way. He loves to watch her anger, but the second it’s directed towards him, he would get on his knees and repent, nail himself to a cross, to get her to smile instead.
“What.” Sydney bites out, and it’s not a question at all.
“Nothing.” He responds. His voice is soft against the rough edges of her own, and the contrast makes both of them bristle.
“This bartender sucks.” She spares him a glance as she says this. It’s not unlike a hand-sawed olive branch. Or a third of it.
“I’ll leave a Yelp review on your behalf.”
He can tell she thinks that’s funny because her nose twitches. Her eyes flick to him, almost uncontrollably.
“Syd, thank you for coming.” He moves his head as she shifts her gaze away, forcing her to keep looking at him.
She nods, pressing her lips together in an unimpressed line.
“I couldn’t have done this without you.” He tries.
“Because you’re lonely.” She says, suctioning liquid through the straw of her Paloma with her pointer finger, still avoiding his gaze.
“Because I can’t really do anything without you.” He laughs, but it’s more of a breathy exhale than anything.
Sydney glares at him. It’s loud around them, people cheering and singing about anything, their table completely barren at this point in the night, because of course, they’re isolated and stoic in the middle of all the mess.
“You know you don’t deserve any more chances from me, right?” Her voice is louder now, but gets caught in her throat anyway.
“Oh, yeah.”
They are both quiet. A Pet Shop Boys cover comes on.
“Will you dance with me, Sydney?”
She rolls her eyes. It’s stupid. He holds out his hand and she takes it. He feels good again.
They’re hand in hand, following no real rhythm or pattern. He knew how to foxtrot, once. Natalie, at twelve, had decided her future career was to go on Dancing with the Stars, and spent hours learning as many ballroom dances as she could manage. Carmy would oblige to be her partner because he loved her, and because Mikey never would. He loved those days because that was when Carmy was her favorite brother instead of her only option.
He’s closer to Sydney than he ever was to his sister, now. He can smell cherries on her neck and tequila on her breath. He moves his fingers over her waist absentmindedly, like a tic.
He kisses her quickly. It lands on the corner of her mouth, more than anything. She’s expressionless, searching his eyes for something; he doesn’t know what. They both have ridiculously big eyes, really. His mouth is ajar, half-open, half-ready to start an apology he doesn’t know if he can mean, when she kisses him.
She kisses him, slow and stupid. He’s never been more hungry, more simultaneously satiated. He wants to analyze every niche and cavity, every liminal space that stretches between their stomachs and lips.
“Is this real?” She asks when she pulls away. The kiss turned into a hug seamlessly. Her arms are around his shoulders, her face in his neck. He still can taste her spit on his lips. He tugs her waist closer to him, somehow. They sway.
“It’s very real.” He whispers like a litany.
The music and the murmur continue, like the train in Carmy’s heart hasn’t just derailed: maybe I didn't hold you / all those lonely, lonely times / and I guess I never told you / I am so happy that you're mine / if I made you feel second best / I'm so sorry I was blind.
Sydney laughs into his shoulder, then quickly presses her lips into his again. It’s spit and teeth and every second up until this very moment.
It’s all really, really good.
4. CARMEN AND SYDNEY
On the morning of her wedding day, Sydney Adamu wakes up to the fire alarm going off.
There’s a vase full of gardenias and bluebells on their bedside table. She smiles. She had fallen asleep in heaven: with Carmy’s head on her lap and her fingers carding through his hair.
Vivian Adamu’s wedding dress is hanging in the closet, and in a few hours it will become Sydney Berzatto’s. It’s a simple slip of a dress, clotted cream and thin-strapped, not quite full-length. Her dad tells her they had bought it together from the discount section of the Younkers in Moline. It cost one hundred and thirteen dollars and is the most beautiful dress Sydney has ever seen.
But for now, the love of her life and James Beard award-winner has just burnt toast in the kitchen.
She pads next to him in her green slippers quiet enough that he doesn’t notice until he turns, and he jumps, dropping the blackened bread onto the countertop.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Syd. You’re like a Prius.”
She laughs quietly and wraps her arm around his waist, rests her head on his shoulder and stares at the failed attempt at toast in front of them.
“Carm?”
“Yeah?”
“How did you manage to burn toast?”
“Okay-“ He starts.
“Because I don’t know if you remember that you were, like, the best CDC at the best restaurant, and retained a little fucking Michelin star, because that description doesn’t sound like someone who would burn toast.”
“I’m off my game.” Carmy rubs his face with both hands, like he’s checking to see it’s still there, or maybe seeing if he can rip it off.
“Why?” Sydney asks, softer now.
He scratches the bottom of his nose, thinking. She waits. For him, she always waits.
“I woke up, just utterly convinced that you were gonna realize that you’re making a huge mistake and call the whole thing off.”
“Carmy,” She says, “There is nothing that could stop me from marrying you today. I’ve loved you for so long, I couldn’t stop it if I tried. You have got to know that by now.”
“I know. It’s just hard.”
Sydney doesn’t ask what, in a way she knows. She knows, on some level, she will be spending the rest of her life convincing Carmy that she loves him as much as he loves her. That they live in a universe where what he feels for her is undoubtedly requited. That she wasn’t going anywhere.
“I love you, Syd.” He says because he can. It’s a rush neither of them seem to get sick of.
“I love you better.” She replies because that’s what her mom used to say, and she likes it a world more than just a ‘too.’ Then she throws the burnt toast away. “Now let’s try this again. Together this time.”
She unplugs the toaster and grills the bread instead. He’s making homemade jam like that’s normal and not incredibly endearing, incredibly overzealous.
And it’s better. It’s always better, like this.
*
The first time he went down on her, he did it was the highest honor and privilege. Like he was born to do it. She finished and he rested his chin on her bare stomach, watching her heave above him, watching her unravel at his lips. When she finally came down from it and looked at him, with slick on his mouth, he said: that was the best meal I’ve ever had.
She shoved him and they laughed and laughed and laughed. She thinks if she had to name it, that was the moment she realized she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him.
*
It’s funny, really, they placed an order with Marcus as if he wasn’t someone the pair saw at least once a week. They navigated his website like any other engaged couple would, laughing at the little notes they wrote on the form. He had left The Bear a year ago, opening his own spot with Luca, who had moved to Chicago two years prior. Sydney doesn’t fully understand what they are to each other, but doesn’t think it’s her place to ask. Glass houses and stones and all that.
Number 33 is beautiful. It’s on Division Street in Wicker Park with about thirty-leven other restaurants, and yet it sticks out all the same. They’ve got blue and white checkered floors and elaborate decorations from various antique shops. It’s all of what a bakery should be: classic, original, impressive.
Marcus texted them both: Are u 2 for real?? with a picture of their order form on one of his work tablets, Luca’s tattooed forearm in the background. They laughed and laughed and Marcus said he’d make them a cake only if it was free of charge, and they agreed so long as he took full creative control of it.
They pick it up on their wedding day in sweatpants and matching t-shirts. The wedding isn’t until later, and the party even after that. They’ve got all the time in the world. Marcus all but cheers when they walk in, and Luca follows suit. There are hugs and no one can tell where one arm ends and another begins; it’s perfect. There are a few customers at the small French tabletops but they don’t even pay the small crowd any kind. That’s something Syd will always love about Chicago: everyone is loud and loving and no one cares, because everyone cares.
The cake is beautiful. Marcus tells them it’s an almond batter with Door County cherry frosting. Carmy looks like he might cry and Sydney can’t help but feel like this is all fate—everyone, all of it.
*
She gets ideas, sometimes, when she and Carmy babysit Lenny. They’ll be on the L and she’ll watch the little girl lean into him with every jolt and turn and she’ll think, yeah, this could be good. This could be really good.
It’s not that she thinks they’re old, or that they’re running out of time, but you don’t realize how valuable time is, or how fast it passes, until you have a baby in front of you at least twice a week, growing in it for the first time. Lenny was almost five now, and most of those years Sydney had spent silently lusting after her business partner, as if that were an at all respectable thing to do as a woman in her late twenties and early thirties.
Sydney asked him once, in bed, after a particularly good night, her hand in the curls on the nape of his neck.
“Do you want kids?”
His eyes remained closed at the question, but he hummed.
“I don’t know. I never really considered it until recently. I think I’d be terrible. I’m too… I’m too terrible for that.”
He was still not looking at her. She moved her hand to cup his cheek.
“Carm.”
He opened his eyes to look at her, finally. They were tragic like the saints, depthless, and somehow, home.
“You would be a great dad.” She whispered. She was nodding, to emphasize the point.
He laughed quietly, and there was nothing funny about it. She squeezed his hand beneath the sheets tighter, and he did the same to hers.
*
They get ready in separate rooms, because even though almost nothing about this wedding is traditional, they’re adhering to their own backwards kind of superstitions.
It’s quick: chapstick, mascara, necklace, dress, and clogs—which look a little ridiculous, but she likes that she and Carmy are the same height. She’s got a picture of her parents taped to the little round makeup mirror she’s had since she was a teenager. It’s of their wedding day, Vivian holding out her arm with a small grocery store bouquet in it, grinning and closing her eyes, Emmanuel staring right at her with a soft smile, his arms around her. Sydney really loves that picture.
When she closes the bedroom door, Carmy’s already in the living room. He was looking at the ground, but as the handle clicks, his head whips up. He looks lovestruck, he looks like he might faint, he looks like he might vomit, and if Syd is honest, she feels a lot of the same. His hair’s a mess because it always is, and that makes her smile. It’s the fact he’s got on a white button up, freshly ironed and sleek that reminds Syd this is really happening. They’re about to get married.
They stand in front of each other for a few minutes, both of them just wanting to look. So much of their lives before they were them consisted of just looking; whatever secret glances they could swing. Now, they look so much, so often, for so long, that the people around them are somehow even more disgruntled than before. Carmy goes red, and it’s so endearing, Sydney feels like a girl again, seeing her homecoming date in a setting other than science class for the first time. Except, she’s a woman, and she sees Carmy everywhere, and in a hundred lifetimes before this one.
Eventually, he clears his throat. “Are you ready?”
“Yeah. Are you?” She asks.
He nods. His eyes flicker across her face and her body. Then in a few strides, he’s clutching onto her. His arms around her waist, and hers around his neck. His face fits perfectly in the space between her neck and her shoulder, and he breathes into it. As if it’s the first time, Syd gets goosebumps, then holds Carmy tighter.
“You smell so good.” He whispers, and if it wasn’t so earnest she would laugh.
Instead, she inhales his hair, weaves her fingers through it, and says in return: “You do too.”
“We should get going, I think.” They’re still pressed chest to chest.
“Yeah.” She breathes.
They detangle and let their fingers intertwine, sweaty palm against sweaty palm. Then they leave.
With them are Emmanuel, Tina, Nat, Pete, Lenny, and Richie. They all ride the train together. Somewhere between the tracks and the sky, Mikey and Vivian are with them too. Sydney is grinning, because she’s on the brown line with Carmy like so many times before, but her whole family’s here, and she’s wearing her mom’s wedding dress and she’s about to get married. When she looks at Carmy, he’s already looking at her, entranced in his usual way, like she’s a goddess. She leans into him and his arm is around her waist, delicate and constant. She thinks they deserve this, after everything.
Some kind of wonderful, some version of perfect.
*
Against all odds, they were still learning about each other. It’s almost like they were so in tune with one another that they forgot history is not something that can be explained with nods, with touches, with the mere desire to know it.
It happened after service—a night where they actually ate dinner, actually made something simple and fast and even drank water with it. Carmy was picking up the dishes, holding both their shorty glasses in one hand with an ease that only comes with spending your teenage years waiting tables. And somehow, Sydney didn’t know if that was even true.
“Did you wait tables at The Beef when you were a kid?” She asked, running the faucet. It used to be his but now that it was hers as well, the things in the apartment had been freed of possessive pronouns altogether. They simply are ‘the’, as if they were the only version of those things to exist in the world. In a way, they were.
He looked at her, only marginally surprised. They’ve played this game too many times for it to be truly out of the blue. “Uh, no. I was a busser, though. That’s all they let me do. I served sodas and picked up plates. That was about it.”
Sydney hummed. It’s unspoken, but it was her turn then. “I was a busser, too. From ages… fourteen to seventeen.”
“Twin flames?” He said, because it’s a joke that exists between them mostly because it’s true.
“You know it.” She covered a sponge in soap. When she rinsed it, Carmy would be there to dry it. There was nothing more romantic than reliability. “But, whereas I’m sure you were born talented at juggling dishes-”
“That’s just very incorrect.”
“-I was so, so bad at it. You and all of the Chicagoland area know I am a clumsy person, so I would be carrying plates and juggling glasses and thankfully I never broke anything, but I would drop silverware a lot. And fucking hell is that shit loud. The entire restaurant would look at me and I would feel like I was about to pass out. I just don’t belong anywhere in front of house under any circumstance.”
“Did you start because of your mom?” And it hurt to be known like that. It made her smile.
“I think, probably. Her being a bartender, in a way, I think was a catalyst for a lot of things in my life. It made me see the service industry as the only option for work, and when my dad tried to undo that way of thinking, I just sort of went through it instead. He didn’t want me to work for a kitchen so I fell in love with the idea of working in one. I don’t know. It feels like it was all I was meant to do, I’m sure you get that. But I think that’s also why it took my dad so long to accept; not only because it’s so unpredictable and doesn’t amount to much, but because it’s so adjacent to her. I think we both resented her a bit, for a while. I’m missing so many memories of her because she would work the minute I got home from school, and then go out after that. And I feel bad about that fact too.” Their fingers brushed when she handed him a spoon.
“I get that. Growing up around it, in any shape or form, I think it does something to you. You either fall in love or you want to get as far away from it as possible.”
“You still love to cook, right?” She asked.
He laughed and reached across into the sink to flick suds at her, smiling. Then she laughed.
“Yeah. I do.” He said anyway.
“Then that’s all that matters in the end, right? Love?” Syd handed him the last glass.
He dried it, then kissed her temple. It was an answer in itself.
*
They get married at City Hall. It’s quick and clinical and when Carmy kisses her she doesn’t think she’s ever been happier. Her dad takes a Polaroid of them with their marriage certificate against the wall of the Cook County office building. She doesn’t think she’s had a prized possession until now—watching the picture develop.
It’s the best wedding Sydney could have possibly asked for.
Next: the party. From the preparation of which they are banned from. They get married on a Monday. They’ve spent a year mixing business and pleasure, but never so much so that it interfered with the restaurant, really. Talk of a honeymoon has been, at best, controversial. But that’s a worry for a different day.
They sit across from each other in the barren parking lot of The Bear on cinder blocks. A two-top forevermore. Sydney takes out her little notebook, and Carmy mirrors her. Hers opens horizontally, his vertically, but they’re from the same shop, a stone’s throw away from where they are now.
“Do you want to go first?” She asks.
He hesitates. “Is that a question or a demand?”
“The latter, mostly.” She laughs. “I think I’m owed one.”
“You think you’re funny.” He flips through the pages anyway.
“So do you.”
“Yeah.” He grins, honest-to-God grins at her. She’ll never get tired of it. Rare, unguarded Carmy. Then he starts and she feels her heart fall out of her ass.
“Sydney, I want to cook with you for the next hundred lifetimes. By which I mean, I love you. I love you more than everything. When I first decided I wanted to become a chef, Jimmy told me that I had to find myself a lady that would come and be hungry for me. I think I spent so much time looking for someone to serve that I didn’t realize you had come into my kitchen and started a seven-course meal by my side. I didn’t realize how much more I wanted someone to cook with instead of someone to feed. This is a convoluted metaphor that probably doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s why I am a chef and not a poet. Here’s what I know: one, I think I thought I was hallucinating some sort of angel the first time I saw you. Two, a year into knowing you, I became convinced Mikey sent you to me. Three, I don’t think I knew what love was before you, really. I knew I loved Mikey and I loved Sugar, but I never knew how much love could exist without any obligation. You are the first and the only person I have loved entirely on my own. I mean that you are the person who has stood by me while I fixed what was broken and hugged me when it was better. You, Sydney, have taught me the value in love that exists simply because you want it to. And I want to love you today and tomorrow and forever after that. I love you.”
At some point, Sydney starts crying. It could’ve been forever ago. He was crying before that.
“I love you better, Carm. I can’t beat that shit. Are you crazy?”
“Our vows are not a competition, Sydney.” He wipes tears away before dissolving into a chuckle.
“Whatever. I refuse to add to that. You’ll get mine tomorrow.”
And that—the promise of tomorrow, tipping into tomorrow, into tomorrow—makes them both smile into a kiss. Carmy’s hands are on either side of her face, as if he’s holding her down, keeping her from floating away. When she pulls away and looks at him, really looks at him, she thinks that it’s a very real prospect. There’s nothing borrowed, it’s a very old story. Impossibly—something blue.
*
Tina very quickly became somewhat of a mother figure to Sydney. The way she loved was how she imagined Vivian did—hard and ever-present and unrelenting. Syd loved her just the same.
They went to a cafe for breakfast. It was a Monday because anything and everything that wasn’t related to The Bear happened on a Monday. They both got overpriced mimosas and some refined miso scramble. This was a life Sydney could be happy with: breakfasts and lunches with people she loved, again and again into infinity.
“Mama, how are you feeling?” Tina asked, twirling her fork. Tina had more grey hairs than when Sydney first started working at The Beef. Sure, she would get her dye jobs once a month and it would be all sleek and black in a few weeks, but at the ends of the months like this, Sydney’s heart would ache, ache at her beautiful crow’s feet and laughter lines, all worn and happy in her skin, and wish she could’ve seen Vivian like this too.
“About the wedding?” Sydney wiped a splotch of sauce from the corner of her mouth.
“What else?”
That made Sydney laugh. “I’m good about it, mostly. I’m a little nervous, but I’m always nervous. I’m definitely not as bad as Carmy.”
“It’s so obvious in the kitchen. He’s been so overly gentle with everything. I saw him burn his hand last week and he didn’t even say a word about it. Not a scream or a yelp. Nada. I was impressed. And worried.” The older woman shook her head.
“I wish I could make him understand that I’m not leaving. After however many years, you’d think he’d understand.” Sydney was exasperated, in love, desperate.
“With a family like that… with a history like that… I don’t know if you can, Jeff. I think all you can do is just not go anywhere. You staying, you proving that to him. He’ll understand eventually.”
What a woman, Sydney thought, what a woman that was brought to me through some semi-pathetic fangirling over an up-and-coming chef around her age from her hometown, through a shitty sous job, through blood and vomit and tears, through Carmy.
“You’re a wise woman, T.”
“Don’t I know it.” She replied, leaning across the table to take a piece of Sydney’s dish off her plate.
“What’s new with you? I feel like we haven’t properly caught up in a minute.”
Tina kissed her teeth and shook her head. “Nothing. Louie’s doing good. He’s got a girlfriend at Loyola now.”
“Really? Is she nice?”
“I haven’t met her. He told me he didn’t have her phone number when I asked for it to make plans with the two of them for a lunch or something. Can you believe him? I said, Louie, I don’t know how old you think I am, but I will never believe you don’t have this girl’s number. No way you’re only texting this girl through Instagram two months into a relationship at your age. No way. But he says I can’t meet her until they hit four months, now.”
Sydney just smiled and rolled her eyes. “Kids these days.”
“Oh, shut up.” Tina had smacked her hand playfully. “You’re still a kid yourself.”
“I feel like it sometimes. That’s why it’s bizarre that I’m getting married in a week. It’s like I’ve been eighty-six and ten my entire life. Just never completely right in my body.”
“Baby, I think we all feel that way. None of us knows what we’re doing. You’re doing better than most of us. Following love and letting the world do the rest.”
“I don’t know. I hope so.” Sydney whispered at her mimosa.
“I know so.” Tina had nodded. Then she cleared her throat. “I have something for you.”
“Oh, you never have to-”
“Shut up.”
And Sydney did laugh then.
“I love, Louie, I don’t have to tell you that. I love that kid so much. But I’ve always, always wanted a girl. And I know you don’t believe in all this, but I want you to have this.” She dug through her purse in the middle of this all, keys jangling and Ventra card spilling out onto the booth.
She pulled out a small red jewelery bag, velvet and just slightly stained—some proof of being loved. Syd looked at it, then to Tina, who nodded. Inside is a silver necklace, a small oval pendant at it’s end. Her fingers were wrapped in it, she caressed it with her thumb, silent.
“Saint Anthony.” Tina offered quietly.
“Patron saint of lost causes.” Sydney laughed wetly.
Tina reached across the table and put her hand over the necklace, held Sydney’s through it.
“You and Carmen…” She shook her head. “I don’t know how you two made it through before each other.”
“I don't think we did.” Sydney laughed again, even though she was really crying now.
“Saint Anthony always used to remind me of Mikey but that kid was beyond helping, I knew that by the end. He’s a very Berzatto figure, preaching to the fishes and all that. Really, I should’ve been thinking of Carmy. I think that boy had to have been praying for you every night, Syd. To come back to him in this life.”
“Thank you, Tina.”
They were both silent after that, just wading in it all, hand over hand. A glass broke a few tables over, and they were half a world away.
“I love you, Jeff.”
“I love you,” Syd wiped the stains on her cheeks with the back of her free hand. “So much.”
She put the necklace on right there, patting it to her collarbone once it was in place. Tina smiled at her.
Like every other day, she went home to Carmy. He was already in the kitchen when she opened the door, shuffling from the island to the stove, making some sort of pasta. She loved him cooking like this: slow, methodical, loving. Lately it seemed, he had a lot more peace in his cooking. Sydney walked to him, put her whole body against his.
“Hi.” He kissed her temple. “How was Tina?”
“Amazing. Tina.”
“That sounds right.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” She pulled him to face her, so she could really look at him. He smiled.
“What’s this?” Carmy touched the pendant delicately. He notices everything, all the time—at least about Syd. “Converting to Catholicism for me with a week to spare?”
She snorted. “Yeah right. Tina gave it to me.”
“She trying to convert you?”
“I’d like to see her try.” Syd laughed and put her hands in his hair. “No, she just said a lot of nice stuff about us.”
“Us and… Saint Anthony.”
“Patron saint of lost causes.” She parrotted again.
“Are you and him tight?” Carmy asked, like it was weird for Sydney to know saints. Which, to be fair, it kind of was.
“Me and Tony. We’re like this.” She showed him her middle and index finger crossed and he laughed.
“I love you.” He said.
“I love you better.”
“Will you find me in the next lifetime?” Carmy asked, like he too was at the table, like he shared her brain, like he knew her, in every way, at every moment.
“I’ll love you in every lifetime, Carmen Berzatto.” And then she kissed him.
*
The party is a little bit ridiculous. Marcus’ cake is in the middle of The Bear’s dining room along with small plates Tina and Ebra had spent the day assembling. Lenny’s got everyone throwing little white confetti hearts that they’ll be finding in the floorboards for the next decade. Natalie put up string lights all over the ceiling that makes Sydney gasp a little—at how beautiful the restaurant is, how beautiful these people are. In attendance, they’ve got everyone who has ever meant something to them, from the dishwashers to Chef Terry. Daniela has a film camera, and takes what feels like a thousand pictures, and Sydney can’t even pretend to be annoyed, already knows she’s going to treasure those images into death.
At some point, Nat stands on a chair, precariously held down by Pete, banging a butter knife against a champagne glass with her signature Sugar smile. R.E.M. is playing a little too loudly in the background and yet she’s unbothered by it. Richie yells: speech!
“Yeah, thanks, Rich.” She laughs, raises her glass to her intoxicated cousin. “I just wanted to say something, really quick, because it’s my baby brother’s wedding and I think I have that right, right?”
The crowd cheers and Sydney smiles because Carmy’s already pinkening.
“Carm, I love you. I’m so so happy for you. Syd, I love you, you’ve been my sister for some time now, but thank fuck we can make it official. I’m sure all of you know that Carmy and Sydney met for the first time in this very building, in that very kitchen, but I’m sure a lot of you don’t know just how obsessed our dear Carmen was with Syd from day one. And somehow, Syd one-upped him there by being obsessed with him before they even met. Here’s dating advice from these two for all you single folks out there: become Food & Wine’s Best New Chef and let God handle the rest. No, I’m kidding. I’m not, because that’s all true, but that’s not really my speech.”
Everyone’s laughing, everyone’s the perfect level of buzzed, and Jesus H. Christ is Sydney obsessed with Natalie Berzatto.
“Really, I’m thankful every day that these two found each other. You are mirrors of one another in a way I have never seen before. You make each other better in every sense of the word, and it’s been a beautiful thing to watch over the years. While also making me debilitatingly angry about how long it took you to get your shit together, you have made me fall in love with another person’s love. Something I didn’t know was possible, before. Thank you to The Bear, for making Carmen and Sydney Berzatto as much as they made you.”
Nat’s barely finished talking before she jumps down and walks to them, engulfing them in a hug and peppering the faces with kisses. Once again, there are three Berzattos.
Fak passes out on her dad’s shoulder as he’s talking about the Camaro he fixed earlier today, which is how Sydney knows it’s been a successful event. She had two tequila sunrises and she honestly giggles when she feels Carmy’s hand over her own, tugging her to the makeshift dancefloor—the open space where dining tables where shoves into the corner to make.
“I love this song.” She says, and she won’t remember what it was, in the morning. She’s not drunk, she’s so happy, she’s delirious.
“Me too.” Carmy replies, and in the morning he’ll admit he’s never heard it.
They waltz merrily like they’ve done it a million times before, and they have. Four weddings in their back pocket and a thousand more in front of them.
If you ask Sydney, here’s what a marriage is: laughter even if it’s not that funny, a permanent plus one, coasters, giving up the olives in a martini not because you don’t like olives but because you love them more, matching notebooks, two Gray Kunz sauce spoons, really having the person you look for in every room, hitting ankles with a shopping cart over and over, a Polaroid Frog-taped to the space above the kitchen sink, doing laundry with your clothes mixed in with each other to the point where you don’t know whose grey sock that ever was, consolidating cookbook collections, loving because, loving despite, love, love, love.
Just those things, in any order.