18. Out Of Reach #2
"There was a—" She frowns at the middle distance. "I had a coffee. This morning. There was going to be a scone, and then the federal government tried to dissolve my entire life before nine a.m., so the scone and I never really—"
"So nothing. Since yesterday."
"I've been busy," she says, with enormous dignity, "getting temporarily pack-bonded to a stranger to save my business."
"Right." I'm already turning for the refrigerator. "What've you got in here."
"Nothing, that's the whole — don't open that, it's—"
I open it. It's bad. It's a bachelor's fridge wearing a nice apron: half a lemon gone to leather, a heel of parmesan, three eggs, a bunch of something that used to be basil in a past life, and enough condiments to survive a siege.
The freezer, when I check, offers ice, a lonely bag of peas, and — salvation — a box of dried pasta somebody shoved in there for reasons I will not interrogate tonight.
"See," she says, right at my shoulder, close enough that the apricot goes straight to my head. "Bare. It's fine. I'll have cereal. I have cereal. Standing up, over the sink, like a Victorian ghost. It's my whole evening process, it's very efficient."
"You're not having cereal over the sink." I pull the pasta, the parmesan, the sad half-lemon, the three brave eggs, and lay them out on the counter like I'm dealing cards. "Sit down. I'm cooking."
"You're—" She laughs, openly disbelieving. "You are not cooking in my kitchen. You're the guest. I don't even know that you can cook. You could easily be one of those Alphas who thinks 'I grill' is an entire personality."
"My grandmother," I say, cuffing my sleeves up to the elbow, "would rise straight up out of the Charleston earth and box both my ears for that remark.
She did not raise me to be a useless, cocky Alpha with a nice jaw and no working skills.
Her words, not mine. She said the world already ran a surplus of those, and she'd not be adding one more under her own roof.
" I find a pot, fill it, set it on to boil like I've lived here for years. "I can cook. Sit at the island."
"This is backwards," Amber informs me, but she's drifting toward the island stool, which is the part that counts.
"You do understand this is backwards. I invited you in.
There are rules about this. The host feeds the guest. It's practically the oldest rule in the whole book.
I have a framed hospitality philosophy in my hallway. My entire company is built on—"
"You can host me," I say, "on a day when my company's actually expected.
When you've had warning, a grocery run, and time to hide whatever's living in that cabinet you didn't want me looking in.
" Her mouth opens to argue the accusation; I roll straight over it.
"Maybe after our first date. A nice place.
You can seat me at the good table and run the whole evening down to the fold of the napkins, and I'll let you, because you'll have earned every inch of it fair.
This—" I gesture with the half-lemon at the two of us, at the midnight kitchen, at the bag of peas "—this does not count.
This is a stranded man making certain the woman who saved his week gets a hot meal before she falls over. Sit."
She sits. I watch her decide to let me have this one.
Watch some knot in her shoulders — the one that's probably lived there since a man told a small girl she was too much — go fractionally, grudgingly loose.
She props her chin in her hand and watches me move around her kitchen like she's never seen the trick performed live.
I cook. It's nothing fancy — the pasta, the last honest glug of oil in the bottle, a clove of garlic I find sprouting in a dish, the parmesan grated to snow, a whole egg and an extra yolk beaten with cracked black pepper until it turns to sauce, the starchy pasta water doing the real labor.
Cacio e pepe's poor cousin. The version you build out of an empty fridge and stubbornness.
The kitchen fills up with it — garlic, toasting cheese, black pepper sharp in the back of the throat, the good brown smell of an actual meal happening in a house that clearly hasn't hosted one in a while.
"That smells—" Amber says, and doesn't finish the sentence, because her stomach finishes it for her, loud.
"I heard," I say.
"I have wine," she announces, sliding off the stool, apparently unable to remain a seated guest in her own home for longer than four consecutive minutes.
"If you're going to cook in my kitchen and be — like this, generally — the least I can do is pour.
Do you drink? You seem like you don't drink.
You give off a very committed 'I do not drink' energy. "
"I rarely drink," I say, plating.
"See. I called it."
"Rarely isn't never." I consider the pan, the late hour, the strange soft thing happening in this cottage that I don't have a name for yet. "I could be talked into a glass. Special occasion."
"What's the occasion?"
"You didn't let the federal government dissolve your whole life before nine a.m.," I say. "Strikes me as worth a toast."
She huffs a laugh and comes back with a bottle of red — already half gone — and two glasses that don't match.
"Red all right? I only really keep red," she says, pouring.
"I didn't used to drink at all, actually.
Isn't that funny." She hands me the fuller glass.
"I got into it after. You learn an awful lot about a grape when you've suddenly got a great many evenings to fill and nobody's coming over to help you fill them.
It was wine or take up an instrument, and the neighbors on this lane had already suffered enough for one lifetime. "
She weaponizes the joke before the sad part can get so much as a word in edgewise. Same trick I run. We are going to be a genuine problem for each other.
I set the plate down in front of her. She eyes it like it might be rigged. Then she takes a bite. Her eyes fall shut. The sound she makes is one I'm going to be thinking about later, on the couch, being extremely disciplined about my choices.
"Oh, that's not fair," she says with her mouth full, already forking up the next bite.
"That is genuinely not fair. You cook like this, and you look like that, and you're—no.
No. Absolutely not." She eats like she's mad at the food personally.
She's halfway down the plate before she surfaces for air.
"I want seconds. Is that rude? That's rude.
I don't care even slightly. Second plate.
And then I'll have to be rolled to the deadline in the morning, but honestly—" she waves the fork, breezy, "—who cares.
Might as well let it all go completely to hell.
Gain the weight. Have the seconds. It's not as though I'm getting married.
Nobody's fitting me for a dress. No audience left to keep the figure for anyway. "
I set my fork down.
"Hey," I say. "Look at me a second."
She does. Mid-chew. Wary.
"Your body is not a thing you keep on hand for an audience.
Not for a dress. Not for a wedding. Not for a father with opinions.
Not for a town that turned out to watch.
" My voice comes out lower than I planned.
"You want the second plate, you have the second plate — because it's good, and you're hungry, and you're alive to want a thing.
Don't you dare shrink one single inch of yourself for the exact same society that stood around perfectly comfortable while people mocked you on the worst hour of the worst day of your life.
They don't get a vote on your body. They lost the vote. They lost it standing in a ballroom ."
The kitchen goes very still. Her fork hovers over the plate.
"You're a lot," she says faintly.
"So are you," I say. "It's my favorite thing about you so far." I pick my glass back up. "Second plate. Come on. To having the seconds."
She clinks her glass to mine. Her eyes have gone a little bright at the rims. "To having the seconds."
We eat. She has the seconds, every bite of them.
Afterward I do the dishes, because she tries to and I hip-check her gently out of the way of her own sink, which earns me a look that could strip the varnish off a boat and also — I catch it — a small, private, furious little smile she believes I didn't see.
"I should text somebody," she says, drying a glass I hand her, having lost the war to keep me out of her kitchen entirely and negotiated a truce at the towel.
"Marlowe. Juniper. They'll have a search party half-assembled by now.
Marlowe owns a salvage van and a great many opinions, and she'll deploy both without hesitating. "
"Already handled."
She stops drying. "What do you mean, already handled."
"I mean I texted your team a couple hours back.
" Watch for the flare. "From the road. Let them know you were safe, off the grid for the night, no van required.
Told them to check in with you after nine — once the office opens, and once you've signed the government's paperwork.
Priya wrote back. Uses a great many exclamation points, that one. "
The spiced-citrus edge comes up sharp in her scent, bright over the apricot, quick as a struck match. And there she is.
"You texted my team," she says slowly, "from inside my life, without asking me first."
"I did."
"That's a rule, Sawyer. That is one of the actual, written, signed-in-front-of-a-federal-officer rules. No decisions about my life without me in the room. You were in the truck for that specific clause—"