5. JAMIE #3
He takes the good chocolate from my hand and puts it in the basket without another word.
There's a silence, and then I hear: "You asked."
"I know I did."
"You didn't want my opinion."
"I wanted to see what you'd say!"
"And now I know to keep my mouth shut when you hold up two identical things."
"They're not identical, that's the entire — " I look at him and he is watching me with a complete absence of expression, and I understand, a beat too late, that he did that deliberately, and I make a noise that is embarrassing and probably audible from the next aisle.
"You are not as quiet as you look," I tell him.
He moves on to the next section like that's a normal thing to do after winning.
We find the kitchen tools aisle after a ten-minute detour during which I put a completely unnecessary but deeply beautiful bench scraper in the basket and then took it out and then put it back in while Jackson waited without comment.
He stopped once in front of a row of cast iron pans, standing with his arms crossed, just looking at them.
"Do you want one?" I ask.
"I don't cook."
"You said that. But you're staring at them."
"Considering."
"That's basically wanting."
He picks up a ten-inch skillet, turns it over, sets it back. "Do you use cast iron?"
"For some things. Skillet cakes, searing fruit before it goes in a filling — cast iron holds heat differently than stainless, it's better for things that need a crust." I look at him. "Get the ten-inch."
He doesn't move.
"Jackson. Get the ten-inch, it's twenty-two dollars and you're clearly going to think about it for the next three days if you don't."
He picks it up and puts it in the basket. I face forward and do not say anything, and I feel him looking at the side of my head, and we continue down the aisle.
The woman at the vanilla extract display — this is a story I will tell for the rest of my life — looks up at Jackson when he stops beside me and immediately loses her place in whatever she was reading on the bottle she was holding. Stares.
He doesn't notice, or chooses not to, and I choose to notice his not-noticing because it tells me something. He doesn't move through space performing his own size. He just occupies it.
I grab the good vanilla. He reaches past me for the one below it and I see the price difference — four dollars — and I put his back.
"This one has a synthetic compound that gives you that fake-vanilla birthday cake flavor," I tell him. "Which some people love, but for what I'm making, you want actual vanillin, and this — " I wave the real bottle — "is real. You can smell the difference."
He looks at me steadily. "Four dollars."
"Four dollars over a recipe that takes six hours and uses a pound of butter. The vanilla is the cheapest part and the most important."
A pause.
"You're going to make this argument every time, aren't you," he says.
"About ingredients? Yes. Absolutely. No exceptions."
"For the rest of my life."
For the rest of my life. Said the same way he says everything else — flat, direct, no theatrical weight. Just a fact.
I put the good vanilla in the basket. My hands are completely steady.
At the self-checkout, I reach for my phone first — my card is linked to Apple Pay, it'll be faster than getting my wallet out — and Jackson's hand comes up and rests on my wrist. Not grabbing. Just there, large and warm, a door that's not latched but doesn't need to be.
"I've got it."
"Jackson, I can at least cover the baking stuff, it's for my — "
"No."
"I'm not asking you to pay for everything, I just — "
"Jamie."
"The chocolate alone was — "
"I've got it." He taps his card before I've finished the sentence.
I watch the screen confirm the total. I do the math in my head and I'm aware my jaw is doing something stubborn because he glances at me and says, "Don't."
"I'm just — "
"You're calculating a Venmo request."
"I am not."
"You are." He picks up the bags. All of them, both hands, like they weigh nothing, because to him they do. "Stop."
"Jackson — "
He turns and looks at me, and his voice comes out quieter and more certain than anything I've heard from him all day. "You are not paying for anything. From here on out, I got you."
The self-checkout beeps twice, waiting for something, and the overhead light flickers once, and the sounds of the store continue entirely indifferent to the fact that my throat has just closed up around nothing, around a sentence, words from a man who doesn't waste words, and the particular weight of them is something I wasn't ready for even though part of me knew it was coming, has known since he said I'll be there and then was.
Nobody has ever said I got you and made it sound load-bearing.
I reach up, grab the front of his jacket, and pull.
He leans down to meet me and I kiss him in the middle of the self-checkout lane with the machine still beeping and someone merging into the adjacent aisle and my hands fisted in the fabric over his chest, and his mouth is warm and sure and he kisses me back the way he does everything — without hurry, without performance, complete.