Chapter 9 | Team Building

The bus stopped in front of the hotel with a small mechanical sigh.

No one applauded, which is always a good sign.

I got off among the last ones, bag over my shoulder, legs slightly numb from three hours spent trying to look normal beside a saleswoman who sleeps on you as if you were official company furniture.

The air was different here.

More humid.

Calmer too.

The lake stretched out just behind the hotel, huge and perfectly smooth, like a large sheet of glass placed between the hills. The morning sun slid over it with that soft light that gives places the look of a tourist brochure.

The hotel had clearly been designed for this kind of event. Light wood, large bay windows, terraces opening onto the water. The kind of place where everything is both very simple and very expensive.

Mehdi whistled softly.

“Not bad.”

Jade stopped beside him.

“I could get used to this.”

“Me too.”

They exchanged that complicit look of people perfectly comfortable in places where I always start by checking whether I’m going to break something.

Behind me, I heard Lyralda’s voice.

“If we could avoid falling into the lake before check-in, that would be ideal.”

I turned around.

She was looking at the building with a neutral expression, but her eyes seemed to be analyzing the place as if she expected a deadly trap to appear behind every terrace.

“Are you afraid of water?” Jade asked.

“No.”

“Then?”

“I’m afraid of absurd activities organized near water.”

Mehdi burst out laughing.

“You see, Eliott?”

He tapped my shoulder.

“We’re not alone.”

I think that reassured me more than I wanted to admit.

The hotel lobby was even more impressive than the outside.

Light wood.

Green plants.

A large stone counter behind which two employees smiled with the professional perfection of people trained to handle corporate groups.

The colleagues were already spreading out through the room. Some were talking, others taking pictures of the lake behind the bay windows.

I stayed a little behind.

Watching people in moments like this is almost easier than participating. You see the roles appear very quickly: the natural leaders, the talkers, the people who settle everywhere as if they already belong there.

I was in the category polite person waiting to be told where to go.

Mister Delmas approached the counter.

“Good morning. Primeval Corps group.”

The employee nodded.

“Welcome. We’ve prepared the keys.”

She took out a small stack of envelopes.

“Individual rooms for everyone.”

A small wave of satisfaction passed through the group.

Me included.

Three days of seminar is already enough of a social challenge. If they had announced that I had to share a room with an unknown colleague, I think I would have started seriously considering open-water swimming.

A few minutes later, I found myself in the elevator with Mehdi and two other colleagues.

“So, Eliott,” Mehdi said.

“Yes?”

“First time in a company hotel?”

“Yes.”

“Enjoy it. It’s free.”

The doors opened.

“These are the only places where people drink wine while talking about synergy.”

My room was on the third floor.

I opened the door with that strange little excitement you always feel in a hotel, even when you know you’re going to spend half the time stressing in a meeting room.

The room was… perfect.

Large bed.

Light wood.

Huge window looking directly onto the lake.

A small terrace with two chairs.

I stayed for one second looking at the water.

Calm.

Silent.

Very beautiful.

And probably very cold if you fell into it.

I remembered Mehdi and the paddleboard.

My brain immediately decided to ignore the landscape.

An hour later, everyone was gathered in a large glass room at the back of the hotel.

The lake was right there, behind us.

And in the center of the room, several worktables had been set up.

With… cutting boards?

Bowls.

Flour.

And knives.

A man in a white jacket clapped his hands with almost worrying energy.

“Good morning, everyone!”

Chef.

Clearly.

And visibly very enthusiastic.

“Welcome to our collaborative cooking workshop!”

Mehdi murmured behind me:

“It begins.”

The chef continued:

“Today, you’ll be working in teams to prepare a full meal!”

I looked at the ingredients on the table.

Dough.

Vegetables.

Herbs.

I could feel something familiar slowly rising in my brain.

Something much less frightening than meetings.

The chef was clapping his hands.

“Cooking, my friends, is like business!”

Mehdi whispered:

“False.”

“You need coordination, creativity, and trust!”

“Still false.”

“And above all… passion!”

“Oh my…”

There, I almost smiled.

The groups were formed quickly.

Obviously.

I ended up with:

Lyralda.

Jade.

And Mehdi.

I don’t know if it was chance or a bad joke.

The chef came by our table.

“Perfect!”

He pointed at the ingredients.

“Your team will prepare homemade ravioli!”

Jade raised an eyebrow.

“Homemade?”

“Yes!”

“But we’re not at home.”

“Fresh pasta, filling, cooking, sauce!”

The chef was delighted with himself.

He placed his hands on the table.

“It’s simple.”

The ravioli, yes.

Not the rest.

Lyralda was looking at the knife in front of her as if someone had entrusted her with a very sensitive diplomatic object.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

Jade burst out laughing.

“Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve never cooked?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“I know how to open a fridge.”

Mehdi leaned toward me.

“I think we’ve found our weak point.”

Jade crossed her arms.

“You don’t have to be afraid of dough, you know.”

Lyralda looked at her.

“I’m not afraid of dough.”

“Then?”

“I just don’t see why we would do this when restaurants exist.”

I think that was the most honest answer in the whole room.

The chef came back toward our table.

“So?”

He looked at our ingredients.

“Shall we start?”

No one was really moving.

Lyralda was still holding her knife the way a lawyer holds a criminal problem.

Jade was watching the scene with obvious amusement.

Mehdi was waiting for the show.

I looked at the dough.

Then the ingredients.

Then the worktop.

And without really thinking, I rolled up my sleeves.

“We’ll start with the filling.”

Everyone looked at me.

I don’t know why I did that.

Probably because cooking is the only place where my brain stops doubting.

I took a knife.

Cut the vegetables.

Added the herbs.

Mixed the filling.

My hands worked almost on their own.

Like at home.

Like when I cook to forget the rest of the world exists.

For a few seconds, the room, the colleagues, the seminar disappeared.

There was only the board, the knife, the smell of fresh herbs.

Then I looked up.

And everyone was looking at me.

Even the chef.

Even Jade.

And especially…

Lyralda.

Her expression had changed.

Not just a little.

As if something had shifted behind her eyes.

“You cook like that often?”

Her voice was different. Lower. More… attentive.

As if she wasn’t only looking for an answer.

I felt myself blush slightly.

“Yes.”

Small silence.

Mehdi started laughing.

A real fit of laughter.

“Wait…”

He pointed at the dough.

“The fragile accountant is saving us with homemade ravioli.”

Jade was shaking her head.

“That’s not fair.”

“Why?”

“Because I thought we were going to starve.”

I think it was the first time I saw Lyralda smile openly.

And, strangely, that was almost worth every team-building activity in the world.

“You hide your game well,” Jade added, moving closer to the table.

Her tone was light.

But her gaze… lingered a little too long to be completely harmless.

Not insistent.

Just precise.

“I thought you only knew how to panic in front of Excel.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said very calmly.

One second.

Then, with a very slight smile:

“It’s a compliment.”

I don’t know why… but I had the impression she was talking about something else.

Mehdi leaned over the filling.

“Right. What do we do now, Chef Eliott?”

The chef embarrassed me.

And pleased me.

Which is an emotionally inconvenient combination.

“You can roll out the dough.”

“Oh no,” Jade said. “I’m taking that.”

She had already grabbed the rolling pin.

“I’ve always dreamed of exercising power over flour.”

“Worrying sentence,” Mehdi commented.

Lyralda was still looking at the ingredients with that applied distrust of intelligent people suddenly placed on ground where their usual intelligence is no longer the right one.

I showed her a bowl.

“You can mix this?”

She lowered her eyes toward the bowl.

Then toward me.

A brief moment.

“Is that a real task or are you keeping me busy to avoid a disaster?”

“Both,” I said.

A silence.

Then that slight movement at the corner of her mouth.

Barely visible.

But enough to look like approval.

“Okay.”

She started mixing very seriously, as if the company’s cohesion really depended on a properly homogeneous filling.

It was a little funny.

And a little charming.

Jade was rolling out the dough with far too much energy for someone who claimed to be here only to mock.

“Is it normal if it looks like a floury crime scene?” she asked.

“Yes,” Mehdi said.

“No,” I said at the same time.

She looked at me.

“We’re going to have to choose an authority in this group.”

“That’ll be me,” Mehdi said.

“Certainly not,” Lyralda said without looking up from her bowl.

“You see?” Jade whispered. “She discovered a culinary instinct.”

“I mostly have a survival instinct,” Lyralda replied.

The chef passed by again, looked at the table, then pointed at me with his chin.

“Ah! Here’s someone who knows what he’s doing.”

I immediately felt far too visible.

“A little,” I said.

“Not a little,” Jade replied. “He’s been discreetly humiliating us for ten minutes.”

“That’s true,” Mehdi added. “And with fresh herbs, too.”

I think I laughed.

A little.

Not a defensive laugh.

A real laugh.

The chef left us to continue.

I showed Jade how to cut clean circles in the dough.

She leaned a little too close.

Just enough for me to feel her presence before even seeing it.

“Like this?”

“Almost.”

“Almost is vexing.”

“There, that’s better.”

“Ah. So I’m coachable.”

“That’s already good.”

She looked up at me.

A small smile.

But not completely light.

“You’re coachable too after all, Eliott.”

I couldn’t tell if she was talking about the ravioli or the rest.

Probably both.

Meanwhile, Lyralda was carefully filling the dough circles.

Very focused.

Very straight.

Very serious.

“You’re doing that like you’re preparing a litigation file,” I said before thinking.

The silence lasted half a second.

Then Mehdi burst out laughing.

Jade too.

And Lyralda looked at me.

Not offended.

Just… surprised.

Then she lowered her eyes to the ravioli.

“It’s roughly the same level of responsibility.”

“False,” Mehdi said. “No one cries in front of ravioli.”

“You’d be surprised,” Lyralda replied.

The worst part is that the joke had escaped me on its own.

That doesn’t happen to me so often.

And the fact that it made everyone laugh left me with a strange feeling.

Almost light.

Jade was watching me with a new expression.

Or maybe I imagined it.

“So he does have comebacks after all.”

“By accident,” I said.

“The best ones are like that.”

What followed went much better than expected.

Which is already, in my life, an event.

Jade turned out to be surprisingly diligent once it involved doing something with her hands, provided she complained a little beforehand. Mehdi commented on everything like a cooking show host on caffeine. Lyralda followed the instructions with almost worrying seriousness, as if she refused to be bad in a field simply because it wasn’t hers.

And me, in the middle, I guided.

I corrected a shape.

I tasted a filling.

I showed how to close the pasta without making everything explode.

At one point, Jade tried to close one, failed, and the filling overflowed onto her fingers.

“Look,” she said. “It’s terrible.”

“It’s salvageable.”

“Are you saying that to reassure me?”

“No. To save the ravioli.”

She gave a small laugh and, without thinking, held her hand out toward me.

“Fine. Repair it.”

She held out her hand.

I took it.

Just to show her.

Just for the dough.

But her fingers were still warm.

And the contact lasted a fraction of a second too long.

My brain completely lost the thread.

“There…” I said.

A little slower than expected.

“Ah.”

She was watching me do it.

Not the ravioli.

Me.

“That’s very domestic,” she murmured.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Then she smiled, as if she had just kept something to herself again.

When the ravioli were finally aligned on the tray, the chef returned to inspect them.

“Very good! Very, very good, even.”

He looked at our table with more enthusiasm than any human being should feel in front of raw pasta.

“Beautiful coordination!”

Mehdi placed a hand over his heart.

“Thank you, Chef. We have grown a lot.”

“Especially him,” Jade said, pointing at me.

“Yes,” Mehdi added. “We were mostly here to create a favorable emotional environment.”

“Which means nothing,” Lyralda clarified.

“And yet it’s a very HR sentence,” Jade replied.

“That’s exactly what worries me.”

The chef left for another team.

I wiped my hands on a towel, and for one second, I felt… good.

Not brilliant.

Not transformed.

Just in my place.

Which, honestly, was already huge.

Jade moved closer to the table and observed the ravioli as if she had discovered something slightly annoying.

“This is irritating.”

“What?” Mehdi asked.

“He’s competent. It breaks my character.”

“Your character of what?” Lyralda asked.

“Of a contemptuous woman judging interns from afar.”

“You’re still managing very well,” Mehdi said.

“Thank you.”

Then Jade turned her head toward me.

“Honestly, Eliott… you’re full of surprises.”

The tone was light.

But the look less so.

I think that’s what unsettled me most with her. You never knew exactly when she was completely joking, and when she was letting just a tiny bit more truth pass through.

The class continued in this strangely pleasant atmosphere.

We tasted, corrected, plated, waited. Other teams produced results that were more or less convincing. Mehdi criticized a sauce with the seriousness of a television competition. Mister Delmas came to see where we were, observed our table and then the ravioli, before looking at Lyralda.

“You didn’t injure anyone, that’s already a success.”

“For now,” she replied.

He had that small discreet smile he sometimes had with her. Not intimate. But too easy to be recent. The kind of smile that says: yes, I know exactly how you function.

I don’t know why that caught on me.

Maybe because they seemed to share a language I didn’t understand.

Maybe because I immediately chose the most useless and unpleasant interpretation for myself.

I looked at them for one second.

Then I looked away as if I had just caught something I wasn’t supposed to see.

Ridiculous.

And probably false.

But my brain loves making little humiliating scenarios out of almost nothing.

When the meal was finished, the chef finally declared the workshop over. Some of the colleagues went off toward their rooms. Others went straight out onto the terrace overlooking the lake.

The sun had started to go down a little. The light was more golden, less sharp.

I found myself outside with the others, a glass of water in hand, in that strange in- between space between mandatory activity and supervised free time.

Mehdi was already talking with two colleagues from the sales department as if he had known them for fifteen years. Mister Delmas was exchanging a few words with the hotel organizer. Lyralda had placed herself a little apart from the railing, straight, calm, looking like someone who accepted the landscape but not the general principle of the seminar.

Jade had disappeared for a minute.

Then she came back.

And stopped beside me.

A little more than necessary.

“So, Chef.”

“Please, no.”

“Yes. That’s your name now.”

“That’s awful.”

“I find it endearing.”

I looked at her.

She was drinking something through a straw, very calmly, as if she hadn’t just dropped the word endearing into the air without warning.

As if it had done nothing.

“You’re saying a lot of worrying things today.”

“And you’re not saying enough.”

I didn’t answer.

The lake was reflecting the light right in front of us. Reflections moved softly near the pontoons. In the distance, we could hear voices, the sound of dishes being put away, a laugh rising from the terrace.

Jade followed my gaze.

“It’s pretty.”

“Yes.”

“You look surprised.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

I sighed.

“I just thought it would be more… ugly.”

“That’s a beautiful anxious-person compliment.”

I think I gave a small laugh.

She turned toward me, slightly.

“There’s a little path that goes down to the shore.”

“Ah.”

“Mm-hmm,” she made.

I knew that mm-hmm.

The one that meant she had just decided something.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Small smile.

“Just that you look like you need to see the lake from a little closer to be sure it really intends to kill you.”

“That’s possible.”

“You’ll like it, it’s rather pleasant.”

She lowered her drink, then leaned toward me just enough for her voice to lower too.

“Come with me later.”

My brain immediately ceased all higher activity.

“Sorry?”

“Before dinner.”

She vaguely indicated the water’s edge with a movement of her chin.

“We’ll go see if you’re compatible with nature.”

“Why me?”

“Because I feel like it.”

I stared at her for one second.

She looked serious.

Well… serious in her way. Which is already a very particular category.

“Okay,” I said.

Too fast, obviously.

She had that satisfied smile of people who get exactly what they wanted.

Then she took another sip of her drink as if she hadn’t just asked me to go walk alone with her by a lake at sunset.

Mehdi joined us at that moment.

“Are you plotting?”

“Always,” Jade said.

“I demand to be included.”

“No.”

“That hurts.”

Jade didn’t even bother looking at him.

“You’ll survive.”

I don’t know why, but I felt something stir in my chest at that exact moment.

Not huge.

Just that very clear impression that the end of the afternoon had shifted slightly.

As if something had opened.

Or prepared itself.

I turned toward the lake.

The light slid slowly over the water. Shadows were lengthening near the shore. And somewhere in that ridiculously pretty scene, there was now a later.

With Jade.

Alone.