Bella

The bedlam in the kitchen was familiar and yet just as unwelcome to me as ever.

The heat was stifling, the steam uncomfortable and the bickering made my head ache.

And yet it was all perfectly normal for me too.

Jasper, my older brother, was right where he always was on nights like this. Hovering over his grill plates wielding his tongs like a gladiator's sword. Pressing, testing, and making sure that everything that came off those hotplates would be perfect.

Alice, his fiancé and my best friend since childhood, was right there too. Her back to his as she plated up what came off his grill with all the precision and flare of a plastic surgeon. She was a perfectionist just like he was and nothing would be served until Alice was one hundred percent sure it was one hundred percent perfect. For Alice presentation was key.

They were an unlikely pair to those who didn't know them well. They seemed to be polar opposites with Alice being outgoing and outspoken and Jasper being placid and timid. In reality they fit together like two Legos. The kind that refused to come undone and usually took a chunk of your skin with them if you tried to prise them apart.

Another unlikely pair were Mike and Jessica. They were as far apart in personality as a lion and a rabbit. How they shared the same parents and came out so different was beyond my ability for reason and well beyond my knowledge of genetics. But they did. And it was somehow worse because they were twins into the bargain. Mike was two minutes older than his sister and never let her forget it. Which of course made him feel superior and her all the more eager to prove that he wasn't. It made for some interesting squabbling as they cooked side by side, that's for sure.

The last member of the team that was Swan Catering was Lauren. Another two years younger than the rest of us and with the attitude of a pit viper she fit in about as well as a field mouse in a cattery. But Mike had been sleeping with her since he was a senior and she a junior in high school and where Mike went Lauren went. To have Mike onboard we had to have Lauren. In fact, to get Mike to do anything at all I had to pose any proposition to include her or he simply wouldn't do anything. If he wasn't so good at what he did I'd get rid of them both. But he was, so Lauren stayed on the books.

And that leaves me. Isabella Swan. Manager and smoother of tempers and all around dogs body. I took the bookings, ordered the ingredients, signed paperwork and made sure that everyone got fed at whatever function we'd been hired to cater for. At least that's how it had started out, this job of mine.

The idea had been Jasper's. Alice had been my friend since kindergarten but it wasn't until Jasper was in his junior year that he noticed she was a girl. A girl with breasts. A girl with breasts and a quirky, fun loving personality that made him happy and horny.

Alice loved to cook. Anything. Everything. If it was edible Alice wanted to know how to make it. So when she signed up for a cupcake decorating course over the summer Jasper enrolled too. I'd teased him mercilessly but he'd gone, done the course and gotten top marks.

And that, as they say, was the beginning of it all.

Jasper found two loves in that one summer. Alice and cooking. They were intertwined and nothing would separate his twin desires.

After he graduated he went straight to culinary school and the instant he had his diploma he used his inheritance from our grandmother to start what was known for a short time as Swan Catering but back then was called Jasper's Place. It was just a rundown diner that sat on the edge of the highway of our home town that he bought for a steal and sold for a considerable profit three years later when I came onboard and we took to the road.

I started working there in the summer, just a little something to give me some pocket money to go out with my friends if I wanted. I waited tables at first and once I'd mastered that in my clumsy state I started helping take orders and money behind the counter. The following summer Jasper got the flu pretty bad and Alice came in and took his place in the kitchen. She added her own flair to the menu and the actual diner – though the floral curtains didn't last long – and after Jasper's return she just stayed. So did I.

After graduation I went to university locally and I stayed on at the diner part time to help out as much as I could because he'd really made a serious go of the place and had even taken on more staff.

Once I'd completed my first year of accountancy I moved from the front of the diner to the back and spent my working hours making sense of my brothers chicken scrawl handwriting.

When the offer came for him to sell it was too good to refuse and so he took it and ran. He knew he'd never be happy doing anything other than cooking but the idea of diner food forever wasn't quite so appealing. He didn't have enough in capital to open a restaurant and even a cheap one that he could slowly renovate was out of the question so the idea was born that we take his talents in the kitchen and my talents for the books and we turned the profit from the diner into a fully fledged catering company.

We rented commercial space and turned it into a kitchen that we could do all the prep work in before transporting it to whatever venue the client had booked for their function.

We bought a van and as much equipment as we could afford and began advertising. It was slow going at first but within six months we had enough bookings to keep us busy for the rest of that year and a big problem. Every time we completed a job word would go around how talented Jasper and Alice were, and how good I was at planning and organising entire parties, and the jobs we were offered got more and more complicated.

Jasper advertised for kitchen help and found Mike and Jessica, who came as a team, and Lauren who came as a job lot. That rounded out the kitchen side of things nicely.

But I was still studying and as Jasper's business grew so did my list of responsibilities. Pretty soon I had no time for classes because I was haggling over table linens and trying to find a local supplier of seafood that wouldn't give the guests mercury poisoning. Something had to give. It was my degree.

At first I deferred for a year, which turned in to two, which turned into me abandoning it altogether when Swan Catering started being booked by groups upwards of two hundred guests every weekend of the year. That was when we changed the name to Swan Catering and Events and I became the full time events coordinator.

So here I am. A full time party planner and unqualified accountant, who paid wages, dealt with unruly clients and managed the bookings and the kitchen of each and every function we cooked for.

While I couldn't say I loved it, and I couldn't say it was my calling like Jasper and Alice could say it was theirs, I did like it. And I was good at it. But I missed my classes and the thrill of the accounting problems from the lectures.

I'd swapped math problems for personality clashes and that was getting old. Seriously old, seriously fast.

The heat of the kitchen never did much to soothe the conflicting personalities and, in fact, it usually helped to keep the adversarial tempers present at odds with one another for the entire job.

My job was to make sure those tempers didn't collide until the last plate was served and all of the guests were happy.

And then, and only then, it was a free for all.

As soon as that last plate went across the pass aprons would be pulled free and slapped down onto counters and benches and the bickering would start.

Jessica had been too slow on the carving line. Mike had been three plates behind. Lauren was too fast. Alice too fussy. Jasper too surly.

It was always the same and it never ended. Each job was the same.

Everything would go like clockwork during service but the instant it was over everyone would find fault with everyone else and they'd argue about it until the function was over, the last plate returned to the kitchen and cleaned and stowed away and even after everything was back in the van and we were trundling along on a highway they'd still be fighting.

And for some reason I'd had enough.

This particular function had been a killer. Three hundred and seventy five people to feed four courses to in two hours which would have been bad enough but for this one I'd been asked to find a live band, organise all the floral centrepieces and to hire and manage coat check girls and the waiters and waitresses as well. The fee I'd charged had been astronomical and well worth the trouble in monetary terms but the hassle of this one job had rammed home for me just how far away from my own personal goals I'd strayed.

I didn't want to be a party planner.

I didn't want to be a kitchen manager.

I didn't want to source 'just the right height stems for the tables to not stifle conversation, dear'.

And most of all I didn't want to spend the rest of my life working for my brother. As much as I loved him I'd had plans of my own. Goals of my own. And none of them had revolved around him, or his business.

So, as the aprons hit those stainless steel benches and the first rumblings of tonight's argument began to pass over lips I made my escape.

Right through the middle of the steam filled kitchen I marched. I turned left out the door and went down the long, dirty dish filled hallway and right out through the delivery bay doors and out into the grounds.

As the cool air hit me I let out a long, satisfying sigh and made my way further and further away from that kitchen.

I followed the stone path until I came to a tree with a bench under it and then I closed my eyes and let out the breath I'd been holding.

"How did I get here?" I asked myself out loud, which was stupid because I'd put myself right where I was, hadn't I?

"How in hell am I going to get myself out of this?" I asked the night stupidly.

I had no clue how to change anything because I had no clue how I'd gotten to the point where I was in the first place.

No degree. No goals of my own. Certainly there was no man in my life because I didn't have time for one even if I did find one I was attracted to, which had only happened once in my twenty six years and even that had ended badly, I was never home enough to work at a proper relationship anyway.

My week days were filled with ordering and taking receipt of everything we'd need for functions held on the weekends. And then, at weekends, when everyone else my age was out socialising, I was still working. Functions like we catered for were usually held on Friday or Saturday nights, so that's where I always was. At work. Working to further my brothers business.

I lived in an apartment in a complex with twenty other apartments with twenty other people who had no goals. I wasn't doing the job I wanted to do. I didn't have the social life I wanted to have. And all my hard work was putting money in my brother's pocket and making his business a success when I should've been working hard making my own mark.

I didn't resent Jasper for that. He'd never asked me, or told me, to take on the role I was working at, it had just happened. Like everything else in my life it just happened.

Deep in thought, lost to the depths of my own self made problems I began to sway to the soft sounds the band I'd hired were making upstairs in the function room. They really were quite good I thought as I swayed.

I closed my eyes and began to imagine the conversation I was going to have to have with my brother.

"I'll train a replacement," I whispered to myself, forming out loud the words I was going to lead with when I told him. "I won't go until I'm sure I've found the right person for you and they're good enough to do what you need them to do."

Yes. I'd find someone to take over most of what I did for the business and then I'd re-enrol in my course. I could work part time at the bookwork for the business and that would pay my mortgage while I went back to school. I had enough in savings to pay for the parts of my course I still needed to complete my degree and after that, when I was finally done with school, I could open my own accounting firm and take Jasper's business on as a client. Yes. That's what I wanted to do.

"Hey, sis," I hear shouted from the delivery doors.

I take one last deep breath of the clean, cool night air and then I go back inside and finish the job I'd started.

The others could bicker and argue all the way home if they wanted. I wasn't going to listen anymore because I'd come to a decision.

I was going to change my life.

A/N: And there you have Bella's story.

Onward and upward now.

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