Addicted (The Addicted Series, #1)(110)

After my stomach was finally quiet, I thought about what I was going to do. Being fired from Alinea was not what I'd planned, especially the way it had gone down. While I might have been able to recover, the fact was that any chef that called Alinea to check my history would hear that I got fired for mouthing off to Shannon. It would keep me out of a lot of kitchens.

I was still pondering when my phone rang, and I saw that Kimberly was trying to call me. I picked it up. "Hey Kim."

My voice must have been a warning, because Kim didn't start with her normal cheery jibe or joke. "What happened?" she said, her voice heavy with concern.

"Would you believe that in the course of three days I've lost Julian, lost my job, and I don't even have a decent breakfast in my pantry?" I said, laughing hollowly. "So I've had pretty much the worst couple of days in the course of history."

"I'll be there in twenty minutes," Kim said, and my phone went silent in my ear. I knew better than to call her back and argue, Kim's stubborn and dedicated. There was no way I'd stop her; she was most likely out of her apartment already.

I was right. Kim was outside of my apartment twenty-five minutes later. I'd given her the security code to the front, so she only had to knock on my front door. "Tell me everything," she said after giving me a hug. "And tell me why I should get my b-tard friends on him now."

It was no idle threat. In addition to all of her legal hacking skills, Kimberly was an active member of the hacker group Anonymous, as well as the prankster subset of 4chan, known as the b-tards. She was well respected by both groups, and had turned them loose twice in the time I'd known her. Both times, the targets were utterly devastated both professionally and financially. One of them, a politician who'd done something to get on her bad side, had so much dirt unearthed on him that the Department of Justice ended up indicting him. So when Kim threatened to unleash the b-tards, she wasn't joking around. "No, he doesn't deserve that. Besides, Julian didn't get me fired from Alinea, I did that all on my own."

"Give me all the details," Kim said, "and take it slow."

I started with the morning of Gina's arrival, telling her as much as I could remember. Kim listened, pausing me only once to get her smartphone out and start typing a few notes. I didn't know what I'd said that caused her to do that, but she had me continue, right up to the point where I'd told Shannon to f*ck off.

"You were right about one thing," Kimberly said as she finished her typing. "You did get yourself fired from Alinea all on your own. Although I want to look into a few things before I say anything else. There might be grounds to challenge your dismissal based off of what Horst said to you at the end."

"I don't want to, even if you're right," I told her. "It'd just cause more poisoning of the waters. Getting a reputation as a disrespectful hothead in the culinary world can be bad. Getting a reputation as a disrespectful hothead who then whined and gamed is even worse."

Kim held her tongue, and nodded. "All right then, so what are we going to do on our day off? I've got no projects that can't be put off until tomorrow, and I'm not letting you sulk and brood around this apartment all day. You're no fun when you're broody."

I knew she was serious, and I thought about it for a bit. "Wanna grab our gi's and get an extra training session in?" I asked. "I'm feeling the urge to work off a lot of angry energy. Hell, I'm feeling lethal, honestly."

Kim smiled. "That's the spirit! Tell you what, go shower and get your stuff while I make a few phone calls, and you can run me over to my place in your car. We're splurging today, no mass transportation for us. And after that, we're getting chocolate and Mexican food."

"Okay, sounds good. I'll be ready in fifteen minutes." I headed off into my shower, rubbing the exhaustion from my body vigorously. Have you ever seen the old musical South Pacific? Mom took to it once, and there's a song from it, with the line "I'm gonna wash that man right out of my hair." I didn't really like most of the musical, but that song, yeah, they got it pretty right. Lathering and working the shampoo through my long black hair helped a ton, and I came out of my bedroom only five minutes late, but feeling about a thousand times better.

Kim was nodding and talking on her cell phone with someone when I came out. "Yes. I'm surprised you guys didn't see that yourselves. Yes. Okay. I know, I'm just telling you because I can't do anything on my end. Okay. Thanks. Good-bye."

"Who was that?" I asked, as Kim put her phone into her backpack. I had my jiu-jitsu bag ready to go, and was dressed simply in a t-shirt and shorts. "Business?"

"Yeah, kind of," Kim replied. "Let's go."

The jiu-jitsu gym I train at is pretty famous, having produced multiple black belts and quite a few high level competitors on the national and even world stage. That morning, the instructor was Roberto, one of the older Brazilians who had helped found the gym back in the late 1990's. Kim and I arrived only two minutes late, so we didn't miss anything as he walked everyone through the setups for the leg locks he wanted us to drill and work on. Honestly when it came time to partner off, I felt bad for the guy I worked with. I mean, is it fair to work with a woman when the name of the maneuver is called the "banana split" and the variation called "make a wish?"