Chapter 31
thirty-one
SOPHIE
Mike’s kitchen looks like a crime scene.
Flour dusts every surface, tomato sauce spatters the backsplash in arterial spray patterns, and something that might have once been pizza dough has achieved sentience and is currently making a break for freedom over the edge of the counter.
“I think we used too much yeast.” Mike pokes the escaping dough blob with a wooden spoon, and it jiggles ominously.
“You think?” I scoop up a handful of the runaway dough, its texture glutinous and wrong. “This is what happens when you eyeball measurements.”
“Harsh.”
“Accurate.” I laugh, wrestling the dough back into submission. “And I quote: ‘A packet looks about right,’ and ‘trust the process.’”
“In my defense, I’ve never made dough, so it was another ‘first thing’ that went a little haywire.” He slides behind me, and suddenly every nerve ending in my back maps the exact contours of his chest through our flour-covered shirts. “And you’re distracting.”
His lips find that spot just below my ear that only he knows, the one that short-circuits my ability to form complete sentences. My knees go instantly liquid when Mike touches me like this. “How am I distracting? I’m literally just standing here.”
“And that proves it.” His hands settle on my hips. “Standing there all… tempting.”
“Tempting?” I turn in his arms, my flour-covered palms leaving perfect handprints on his shoulders. Evidence. Of what, I’m not sure. Maybe this thing between us that still feels too good to be real. “I’m covered in flour and smell like I bathed in garlic.”
“Mmm.” He nuzzles into my neck, and I make a sound that would be embarrassing if I cared about dignity anymore. “My favorite perfume.”
I whip the dish towel at him, but he catches it, using it to reel me closer. My protest dissolves as his body presses against mine, solid and warm and smelling like flour mixed with that deodorant that makes me want to bury my face in his chest and just breathe.
“You’re ridiculous,” I manage.
“You love it.” His grin is crooked.
“I love you .” The words still feel new on my tongue, precious and terrifying. It’s only been a week since I first said them, and part of me keeps waiting for the universe to realize its mistake and take this away. “Your ridiculousness is just something I tolerate.”
He kisses me then, slow and thorough, claiming every corner of my mouth with patient intensity. His tongue slides against mine and I taste the pepperoni he’s been “quality testing” since we started. At this rate, there won’t be any left for the actual pizza.
His hand tangles in my messy ponytail, thumb stroking the sensitive skin at the nape of my neck, and that sound escapes again, pure need wrapped in a whimper. God, the things this man does to me, like making me calculate how sturdy his counter is.
“Mike,” I mumble, even as my hands slide under his shirt. “The sauce.”
His teeth graze my bottom lip. “What sauce?”
A violent hiss from the stove answers for me.
We spring apart. I lunge for the pot, cranking down the heat just as molten tomato begins its volcanic escape. The garlic smell intensifies to weapon-grade levels. My eyes water, and not delicate, single-tear water, but full-on, mascara-destroying, someone-call-hazmat water.
“Jesus.” I wave at the toxic cloud. “How much garlic did you put in this?”
“The recipe said four cloves.” He’s trying to look innocent. Failing spectacularly.
“Did you use four cloves or four bulbs?”
His teeth catch his lower lip. “What’s the difference again?”
“Mike. No.”
“In my defense, they were really small bulbs!”
“We’re going to repel every vampire in a fifty-mile radius.” I grab the spoon to stir, and he molds himself against my back again. The hard length of him presses insistently against me through his jeans. “Although on the bright side, we’re both eating it, so neither of us will notice how we reek.”
“See? Romance isn’t dead.” His chin hooks over my shoulder, breath warm against my ear.
I lean into him anyway, loving how natural this feels. How easy. A week ago, I was armor-plated in anxiety, analyzing every touch for signs of impending abandonment. Now I can just… exist. With him. Covered in flour and reeking of garlic and happier than I’ve been since?—
“You’ve got sauce on your cheek,” he murmurs.
“Where?”
“Right…” He leans in, pressing a kiss to my cheekbone. “There.”
“So subtle.”
Then he grosses me out by licking the spoon and putting it back in the sauce.
“I’m adding Sophie essence to the sauce.”
My face heats. “That’s disgusting.”
“You weren’t complaining about how much I liked Sophie essence last night.” His voice drops to that register that vibrates straight through me to places that clench with the memory. “Or this morning. Or in the shower after we’d finished but not really finished?—”
I slap a floury hand over his mouth. “Boundaries, Altman.”
He licks my palm. Slowly. Deliberately.
“Michael Altman!” I shriek, jerking my hand back and wiping it on his shirt.
“Sophie Pearson!” He mimics my scandalized tone perfectly.
“I’m walking right out of this kitchen if you don’t behave.”
“You wouldn’t dare abandon our dough child.” He cages me against the counter, hands braced on either side. His hips pin mine in place, a delicious weight that makes coherent thought nearly impossible. “That’s joint custody abandonment.”
“Our dough child is delinquent.” But I don’t move. Can’t move. Not when he’s looking at me like I’m the only thing he’s hungry for. My hands slide up his chest to explore the solid warmth through his thin t-shirt, wondering if we can keep an eye on the food while we?—
“Hands to yourself, Pearson.” His grin widens at my hypocrisy. “We have work to do.”
We manage to wrangle the dough into something vaguely circular, though it looks more like abstract art than proper pizza shape.
Mike keeps finding excuses to touch me—steadying my waist as I reach for olive oil, tucking flour-dusted hair behind my ear, pressing quick kisses to my shoulder as I work the dough.
It’s been like this all week.
This perfect bubble where I wake up tangled in his sheets and everything just makes sense. Where I can sleep through the night without jolting awake at 3:00 a.m. to check my phone for disaster. Where studying feels manageable because Mike’s there.
Where I can go hours—actual hours—without the familiar knot of anxiety tightening in my chest about Mom’s medication schedule or whether Hazel got to gymnastics on time or if I’m failing every single person who depends on me by being twenty-three and selfishly in love.
“Hey.” Mike bumps my hip. “You’re doing the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you solve all the world’s problems in your head.” He demonstrates, furrowing his brow and chewing his lip.
“That’s not what I look like.”
“That’s exactly what you look like.” He steals mozzarella from the bowl. “What’s the crisis? World hunger? Whether pineapple belongs on pizza?”
“It doesn’t.”
“Controversial. But you’re deflecting.”
I focus on spreading sauce, avoiding his too-knowing gaze. How does he read me so easily now? “Just thinking about how normal this feels.”
“Making terrible pizza?”
I risk a glance up, catching something soft in his expression before I chicken out and return to sauce distribution. “Not waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“Hey.” His fingers catch my chin, gentle but insistent, tilting my face up. “No shoes are dropping. Just pizza dough. And that was your fault.”
“I was trying to fix your yeast situation!”
“My yeast situation is perfect, thank you.” But his thumb strokes along my jaw, and his voice goes serious. “This is real, Soph. You and me.”
My chest fills with so much feeling I might explode—not the panic attack tightness I know so well, but the terrifying fullness of too much emotion. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He looks like he wants to say more, eyes dark with that intensity that usually leads to me naked and extremely late for things. But my phone buzzes.
I freeze. Old habit. The sound still makes my heart skip—never knowing if it’s nothing or everything falling apart. My hand hovers over the phone, and I read a text from Maya:
Study tomorrow? The pharm exam is going to eat me alive.
The breath rushes out of me.
“See?” Mike’s shoulders relax too. “Not a crisis.”
“Shut up,” I say, smiling as I type back confirmation.
He grabs some mozzarella. “Hey, Sophie?”
I look up and see his intent a second too late.
“Don’t you dare, Mike!”
Cheese rains down.
I stand there, shocked and decorated in dairy, watching his triumphant grin. Then I grab the sauce spoon, flinging with the accuracy of someone who grew up with a coach. Red splatters across his shirt in a perfect arc.
He grins. “Did you just turn me into a crime scene?”
“You mozzarella’d me first!”
“That’s not a verb!”
“It is now!”
He lunges for the flour bag. I shriek and dart sideways, but his kitchen’s too small and he’s too quick. White powder explodes between us, and soon I’m coughing and laughing and blind, hands outstretched to ward him off.
“Truce!” I gasp through the flour cloud. “I call truce!”
“What are the terms?” He’s closer than I thought, voice warm with laughter.
“No more food fighting?”
I crack one flour-crusted eye open. He’s covered in white powder and sauce, looking ridiculous and perfect and mine. Devastatingly handsome despite it all. Or maybe because of it.
I’m laughing too hard to stand properly, sagging against him. He catches me, always catches me, and we’re both wheezing and covered in ingredients and definitely ruining his shirt beyond salvation.
“We’re a disaster,” I pant against his chest.
“The hottest disaster.” His hands frame my face. “Extremely fuckable disasters.”
“Mike!”
“It’s true.” He backs me against the counter again, and the playful mood shifts. “You have no idea what you look like right now.”
“Like I lost a fight with Italy?”
“Like you’re mine.”