Chapter Seven
THE CHEF CALLS IN SICK on a Tuesday, and Maximo does the last thing I expect from a man with his particular bank balance.
He cooks.
Not orders-in-and-plates-it-to-save-face. Cooks. Sleeves shoved to the elbow, knife going like he has a personal grievance with the onion, a pan throwing off a hiss that sounds costly and looks like a controlled emergency.
I hop up onto the counter to watch, which breaks a rule, and he lets me, which breaks a much bigger one.
"You can cook!"
"That almost sounds like an accusation."
"No, but you can cook cook. Who taught you?"
His hands slow down. Just for a second. "My sister liked to eat."
And just like that, she's in the kitchen with us. The girl from behind the locked door, here and not here, and I keep my promise to myself. I don't ask. I just find the salt and put it by his hand before he reaches for it.
He notices that too. He notices everything. It's genuinely one of his most annoying features.
"Stir that," he orders, nodding at a pot. "Low. Don't let it catch."
"I don't cook," I warn him, already reaching for the spoon like a girl who's never met a warning she didn't want to pet.
"I'm aware. You told me your last real meal was a sleeve of crackers you found at the bottom of your bag."
"That was a nutritionally complete sleeve of crackers."
"Stir." So I stir. And he steps in close enough to fix my grip, one big hand coming over mine to slow the circle, and my entire nervous system lodges a formal complaint about the unfairness of this exact moment.
And my borrowed heart takes off like it's late for something, exactly the sort of excitement my cardiologist keeps circling in red on her little chart.
It has picked this man and it is not accepting further questions.
A man shouldn't be allowed to be this bossy and this careful in the same body. It's a fire hazard.
"Taste it," he tells me. "Tell me what it needs."
I taste. "Salt?"
"It needs salt because you're guessing. Taste again. Actually taste this time."
I shut my eyes. I actually taste. And somewhere under all that tomato there's a hole the dish keeps reaching for and not finding, a bright missing corner of it.
"Lemon," I blurt, surprised at myself. "It wants lemon."
Something eases in his face. "She always knew that too," he tells the pot, before he can catch himself. "First taste, every time."
He doesn't say her name. He doesn't have to. The whole kitchen goes soft around the shape of her, and I put the lemon in his hand without a word, and for one breath we're just two people cooking for someone who isn't coming.
Then he clears his throat, and the moment shuts like a book.
He plates the food like it's nothing. I take a bite and make a noise that earns me a warning look. I take a second bite and make a much worse noise.
"This is illegal," I inform him, mouth full, dignity fully abandoned. "You can't be hot and feed me. That's too much power for one man. Pick a lane."
"Eat."
"Marry me."
"Eat."
"I'm serious, I'll sign things, I'll—"
And that's when it happens. He smiles.
It's small, and it's against his will, and it's gone almost before it happens, but I saw it. A real, actual, involuntary smile, cracked clean across that unsmiling face like the first warm day at the end of a long winter.
Then he feels me watching. And I get to see the second thing, which is worse and better than the first. I get to watch him reach up and take the smile back. Fold it away. Shut the door on it like the man keeps a whole vault for joy and mine isn't on the approved- visitors list.
"Rule fifteen," he informs me.
"Don't propose over dinner?"
"Don't watch me."
Too bad, I think, licking my fork. I've already seen it now. And here's the fatal flaw in a man who only ever smiles by accident.
Once you've seen it, you'll spend the rest of your natural life engineering accidents.
A smart girl would leave it there. This smart girl is already planning the next one.
I'm in trouble. Deep, catastrophic, delicious trouble.
And I've never in my life been so happy to be losing.