Chapter Sixteen #2
Once they were fed, it was our turn to eat. Dinner was delicious, as always. Ro had watched us both serve up our own, keeping the lasagna and the salad apart on the plate.
“You like your foods not to touch either,” Ro said.
Deacon nodded, then talked about the complexities of lasagna and a bowl of salad. When food, such as lasagna, was made up of many parts, it was fine for those parts to touch. Necessary even. They had to be layered to make the dish. Same as a sandwich.
And a tossed salad was a whole unit. Now, if the individual components had been served separately, they would stay separate on the plate and shouldn’t touch. But served as a complete dish, a tossed salad was a whole entity.
Made total sense to me.
“One hundred percent agree,” I said. “But the salad and the lasagna should never touch.”
Deacon nodded. “Correct.”
“When Win was a boy,” Ro said, smiling, “he used to say the food was the hills and there should be enough space between them, like a road for the fork.”
Deacon’s eyes met mine and he laughed, warm and throaty.
The sound made my heart skip a beat. The light in his eyes when he looked at me shot a thrill through me that felt a lot like love.
The realization that I might actually love him made my dinner hard to swallow. Ro’s foot nudged mine and it prompted me to try again.
“You okay, Win?” she asked.
I sipped my water, cleared my throat, and nodded. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
The look she gave me told me she saw straight through me.
Between her smug smile and Deacon making my heart happy, I didn’t dare make eye contact with either of them. It was hard enough to eat while trying not to grin like a lunatic.
“Leave the dishes,” she said, giving me a fond, all-knowing smile. “Go on,” she said, nodding to the living room.
I checked the clock. “Oh, Deacon, your show is about to start.”
I found Antiques Roadshow on TV and we sat on the sofa, not touching, but almost. I looked down at the space between us, barely an inch. “Is this okay?”
He swallowed hard, and not meeting my eyes, he nodded. “Yes.”
I was ridiculously giddy. Ugh. It was surreal that I should feel like this.
Had I been in love before?
Sure.
Well, what I thought was love.
This surpassed any of that. This was different somehow.
“Eighteenth century,” Deacon said. “French, ￡500.”
Oh, the show . . .
“Ummm,” I hedged. “I have no clue about clocks . . . German, ￡1,000.”
It was eighteenth century, French, and worth ￡500.
“You’re so good at this,” I said.
He beamed.
The next item was a painting by a Scottish artist I’d never heard of. “￡2,000,” Deacon said.
“￡500,” I guessed.
It was ￡2,000.
He guessed the next one too.
“Hey,” I said, nudging him. “Have you seen this before?”
He blushed.
“Oh my god, you totally have!”
Deacon laughed, his cheeks bright red, and he nodded. “Yes.”
I laughed with him, surprised by his sense of humor. I got up. “Come on then, I wanna show you my room.”
I almost tripped over Bright as he attacked me in the hall. I scooped him up and Merry squeaked as he ran-hopped behind us, trying to catch up. Deacon picked him up, and we went inside.
Thank goodness I’d made my bed and hadn’t left clothes hanging over the hamper.
“It’s a work in progress,” I said. “I have plans. I want bookshelves all along this wall and a reading chair in front of the window. This room is bigger than my old room, so . . .”
“I can help you build the bookshelves,” he said, holding Merry to his chest and petting him.
“Uh, build? I’m um, not really the building type. I’m more of a buy-it kind of guy.”
“Flat packs are easy,” he said. “If you buy them and have them delivered, I can come over one day and we can do them together. It could be fun.”
“Or,” I suggested, “one day we could go to some thrift shops and check out some secondhand ones. Ooh, and we could go looking at some antiques. Might find a Rembrandt or Ming Dynasty vases or something, like they do on Antiques Roadshow.”
His eyes met mine and he grinned. “I would like that.”
“Me too! It could be so much fun.” The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. “Oooh, secondhand books! I love secondhand books.”
He chuckled. “Do you not have enough?” he said, gesturing to my one very lonely bookcase. “This does not include your bookstore.”
“But those aren’t technically mine,” I countered. “I’m like their foster parent waiting for someone to come in and adopt them.”
He laughed just as Bright fought to escape my hold. I gently threw him onto my bed, the way he loved, which apparently activated his gremlin mode. He did little kitten zoomies, attacking the bed covers, then trying to attack me.
It made us laugh. “He’s in a mood,” I said. “And did you say I had another year of this?” I gave Merry a gentle pat in Deacon’s arms. “Not like this sweet little angel.”
“They are cute,” he said. “Playful and funny. It doesn’t last too long. You’ll have a good ten or twelve years or more where they’re much more chill.”
Hmm. Even that didn’t seem long enough. It made me think though . . . “Do you think Mrs. Stevens might like to go to the pet-adoption day in the new year? I can drive her down if she needs. It’s a month or two away. I don’t mean to just replace her dog, but she might like some company by then.”
Deacon sat down on the end of my bed. “Maybe. That’s a very nice offer.
” He put Merry down on the bed, which Bright understood as fair game.
He tackled Merry and they wrestled for a moment before Deacon saved the day.
He extracted Bright, who decided Deacon’s hand was also fair game and chomped his little milk-vampire teeth into the skin.
Deacon barely winced—clearly used to handling tiny feral gremlins—and he put Bright on the bed. Bright then decided to launch into attack number two on Deacon’s arm, but I caught him just in time.
“Excuse me, little mister,” I said, holding him up near my face so I could speak sternly to him. “No attacking the guests. We have manners in this house.”
Deacon chuckled. “He’s fine. I’ve had worse.”
When he turned his palm up, I could see puncture marks and a scratch. “Oh my goodness,” I said, turning Bright around so he could see his handiwork. “Look at what you did. Say sorry to Deacon.”
Bright was, in fact, not sorry.
He was ready for attack launch number three.
“Nope. Bedtime for you, mister. Solitary confinement until you calm down,” I said. “I’ll put him in the crate, then please let me take a look at your hand.”
I put Bright in the crate, which displeased him greatly. If we had a cat-translator, I was sure his tiny angry yips were a string of four-letter curse words.
Deacon was holding Merry up to his chest and I went to him, looking at his palm. “It’s fine,” he said again.
“Please let me have a look. I’ll feel terrible if it gets infected or something.”
He showed me the punctures and there were two tiny spots of blood. I sighed. “We can add Dracula to his résumé. I’m so sorry.” I gestured to the table. “Come take a seat.”
He sat, still holding Merry, and I retrieved the antiseptic spray and swabs. “It’s not that serious,” Deacon said, amused.
“Yet. It’s not serious yet. God only knows where his mouth has been.”
Deacon seemed to find that funny.
I put the spray and swabs between us and met his eyes. “Can I touch your hand?”
I didn’t want to just grab him, especially knowing he had issues with touch and consent. Being prepared was key.
Deacon’s smile faltered, his eyes serious, and he gave a single nod.
So, holding his fingers with one hand, I sprayed the cotton swab and then his puncture marks, then I lightly dabbed his skin before applying a bandage. It only took a second, but when I was finished, I kept my fingers on his, and he didn’t move away either.
He was watching me though, and this time it was me who couldn’t look at him. My heart was strumming and I was almost too scared to breathe. “Is this okay?” I asked quietly.
He gave another nod and whispered, “Yes.”
Then he turned his hand over, and I kept mine still. Our palms were almost touching, our fingers almost entwined.
And my heart was almost bursting.
He skimmed his hand over mine, our palms, our fingers, then traced his fingertips across my skin. He was watching his movements, as if he were both fascinated and scared.
“Do you like it?” I whispered.
He nodded. “Yes. Do you like it?”
“Yes.”
Then his fingers slipped through mine and he held them. Warm, gentle, soft.
Perfect.
He pulled his hand back and he let out a quiet laugh.
I was so freaking happy. And yes, I was definitely falling in love with him. “Thank you,” I murmured. “For coming into the store earlier, for coming here for dinner. For being you.”
His eyes met mine then. “Me?”
I could still feel the ghost of his touch on my hand. “Yes, you.”
Just then, the wind howled outside and we both turned to the window. “Hmm,” he said. “I should get home before it really starts coming down.”
“Good idea.” As much as I didn’t want him to leave, I’d rather he not drive in a blizzard. “I’ll take this little one,” I said, taking Merry. I put him in the crate with his now-behaving brother and walked Deacon to the door.
He pulled on his boots and coat, found his beanie in his pocket, and put it on too. “So,” I said. “About our Christmas gifts . . .”
“I think I know now what to get you.”
“But we didn’t set any parameters,” I said.
“Have you not any ideas for mine?”
The truth was, I’d ordered him something already, but now it didn’t feel right.
I made a face. “Well, I thought I knew what I was going to get you, but now I’m not sure. I’ve never had to buy a boyfriend a Christmas gift before, so . . .”
He grinned at the word boyfriend. “Okay. Parameters are a spending limit of forty dollars. This will eliminate one of us outdoing the other and making it uncomfortable between us.”
“Great idea. I love that. Look at you making awesome executive decisions.”