Page 23 of Under the Table

“What’s the text?”

“I told you.” Hope rolled her eyes even though she tried to resist the urge. “It’s a text of what plates I’m making for the game.”

“Why? Why would you need to text Angelica that?”

“Because she’s allergic to half the food in the dishes, Rex!” Hope scowled, her voice biting and sharp. “And she needs to know what she can eat and what she can’t eat.” She put her hands on her hips and glared. That was Angelica’s story to tell, and she was ticked off that she felt forced into sharing that information with him.

But she also knew him. And he wasn’t going to give up pushing her for an answer until he got one. And this was a rather benign story.

“A-allergic?” Rex stuttered.

“Yes, allergic. If you paid half as much attention to shit, you’d know that.” Hope wrinkled her nose and went back to making one of the plates, but her movements were stiff, and instead of dropping the flower petals in a pretty pattern around the outside of the dish, she managed to get them all over it instead. “Damn it.”

Rex was still silent. Perhaps she’d finally stunned him into a state where he could get hold of himself.

Hope took a breath and then took tweezers as she started to pull off the petals one by one so that she could redo them. If she had to do this more than once, she was going to boot him out of the kitchen faster than he could sayfinger licking good.

“She should have told production if she was allergic to something.”

“It’s foods that aren’t hard to avoid,” Hope mumbled under her breath. “Unless you’re cooking upscale food, in which case, I use a lot of them in my dishes.” She threw him another glare and plucked off one more flower petal. “Now, if that’s all you needed to complain about?—”

“You two can’t just decide to go off script like this. Not without talking to me first about it.” Rex crossed his arms, pushing his side into the countertop as he watched over everything that Hope was doing.

“I think we can, and I think we have. More times than just this.” Hope flicked him a glance. “Isn’t this a reality television show, Rex? The goal is to have a foundation and a basis for what we’re doing, but the idea isn’t to have every single line scripted out so we have to memorize it. And let’s be honest, it’s fucking hard to play a script when the hotels often lie to us about thedisasters they’re running. Probably because if they were to tell us the truth and the whole truth, they wouldn’t have been picked for this show.”

“This one would have.” Rex pursed his lips and stared down at the plate.

“What do you mean?” Hope furrowed her brow and gently plucked the next petal off the plate with a sigh.

“This one would have been chosen. They invested in the show.”

Hope’s shoulders tensed. “You mean they bought their way in?” she whispered that accusation under her breath, all too aware of the fact that it was very damn likely every person on the other end of the microphone had just heard what was being said.

“Sort of? It wasn’t a requirement of the investing.”

“Wasn’t a requirement…” Hope said slowly “…butwasan expectation?”

Rex gritted his teeth and shrugged slightly, which was as much of a confirmation as Hope needed. She rolled her eyes and finally pulled the last petal off the plate. Now, before she made a mistake like that again, she needed to center herself and relax her body. She knew better than to try and cook like this when she was all riled up.

“I’m not sure that it was. That’s above my pay grade.”

“But not above Angelica’s,” Hope muttered under her breath. They both heard her, and she knew it was a low blow, but she couldn’t stop the thought from leaving her head. She’d thought that she and Angelica were doing so much better. That they were actually working together on this show instead of against each other, and then something like this threw a wrench into all of that.

“I’d hope not.” Rex scowled and stared at the counter and the food Hope was making. “Is she really allergic to a lot?”

“It could be considered a lot of foods. Some she’s more sensitive to than others.”

“How did you figure it out?”

Hope pressed her lips together hard and risked him a glance. “Remember when she got so ticked off about the game last season?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s because every single dish I made had something that she couldn’t eat in it, and she didn’t want that splattered across the show. So she made a fuss to avoid it.”

“Be a bitch instead of admitting she has a weakness?”

“An allergy isn’t a weakness.” Hope furrowed her brow at him, confused as to why he’d even say that. “Angelica is an extremely private person, and she doesn’t like her personal information splattered across the internet or television for the world to see.”