Chapter 29 — ZAY
Iwake up with Parker on my chest.
She’s in the hollow below my collarbone, the exact spot she chose the night Teo was in Columbus and I was on my couch with his cat and the purring filling the space where his voice usually is.
Same weight. Same vibration running through my ribs.
Same small head tucked under my chin. The difference is the arm across my waist and the breathing beside me and the fact that the man I was missing is six inches to my left with his face in the pillow and his hair going in four directions.
I don’t move. Parker has precedent about disruptions to her position, and this configuration, according to her established standards, requires a minimum residency before any human activity is permitted.
I close my eyes and let the purr run through my chest and listen to Teo breathe and feel the particular weight of a morning that has no alarm in it and no boundary to reconstruct before I walk out the door.
The apartment is his and has become partly mine in the way apartments shift without anyone discussing it.
My toothbrush in the holder next to his.
My coffee in the cabinet he cleared without being asked.
The charger on the nightstand that he bought because I kept borrowing his and he got tired of the negotiation.
Teo stirs. His arm tightens across my waist and he makes a sound into the pillow that isn’t a word but communicates the following: he is aware that morning exists and has filed a formal objection.
“Coffee,” I say.
“Mm.”
“That’s not coffee. That’s a vowel sound.”
“Five more minutes.”
“Parker has been on my chest for fifteen. I’m going to lose circulation in my left shoulder.”
“Your left shoulder is fine. I’m the one who’s been lying on it all night.”
“You’re not lying on it. You’re adjacent to it.”
“Adjacent.” One eye opens. The blue is absurd at this hour, unfairly vivid against the white of the pillow and the mess of his hair. “You’re using clinical language in bed.”
“That’s not clinical. That’s spatial.”
“Same energy.”
“Wildly different energy.”
He grins into the pillow with his entire face and I feel it in my chest, the specific warmth of being the person who gets this version of his morning. Unshowered, half-asleep, grinning at me like I’m the best thing in a room that also contains a cat, which is competitive.
I extract myself from under Parker, who registers her objection with a chirp and a stare that implies a covenant has been violated. I pull on my sweats and go to the kitchen.
His kitchen. The coffee above the microwave.
The mugs on the second shelf. The sugar he doesn’t use but keeps stocked because I do.
Nonna’s bolognese recipe taped to the cabinet, the handwriting soft where the steam reaches it, the paper curling at the edges.
The bolognese bowls from last night still on the counter because neither of us cleared them before bed, which his nonna would have opinions about and my nan would have louder ones.
And next to the bowls, on the cutting board I washed and dried at midnight while he was asleep, the biscotti.
They’re not right. I know they’re not right.
The shape is close but the edges cracked where they shouldn’t have and the second bake went too long on two of them and the anise is either too much or not enough because Nonna said a pinch and my pinch and her pinch are not the same measurement.
But they’re on the cutting board and I put them there, and the recipe I wrote down in my own handwriting while an eighty-one-year-old woman in Jersey walked me through every step on the phone is folded in my back pocket, and that’s the thing. Not the biscotti. The phone call.
I got her number from Gina after the Christmas dinner.
Texted first because I’m not a person who calls strangers without warning, especially strangers whose grandchildren I’m sleeping with.
She called me back in four minutes. Didn’t ask who I was.
Didn’t ask how I knew Gina. Just said, “So you’re the one,” and started talking about flour.
Coffee maker on. The sound of it filling the quiet.
I’m reaching for the mugs when Teo comes up behind me, barefoot, and his hand settles on the back of my neck. Not deliberate. Not a gesture. Just the touch of a man passing through his kitchen and finding the person he knows on his way to the coffee.
My body doesn’t brace. The muscles under his palm release, the same half-inch they release under Nan’s hand, the response that was wired into me before I had language for any of it.
His thumb traces once along the tendon beside my spine.
I lean into the weight. That’s the whole thing.
A hand on a neck in a kitchen and a body that takes it without asking the hand to explain itself first.
His hand moves on. He reaches past me for the coffee pot. Pours two mugs. Adds sugar to mine without asking because he knows.
He presses his mouth to the back of my shoulder. Stays there, breathing against my skin. Then he lifts his head and looks past me at the counter.
His hand goes still on the mug.
“Those are,” he starts, and stops.
I don’t turn around. I let him look. I can feel him behind me, the particular quality of his stillness when the words have left the building and his body is the only thing processing.
“I called your nonna,” I say. “She walked me through it.”
“You called Nonna.”
“After Christmas. I got Gina’s number first. Gina gave me Nonna’s.”
He’s quiet. The man who rates everything, argues about everything, narrates everything, is standing in his kitchen with his hand on a coffee mug and his mouth open and nothing coming out.
I turn around. His eyes are wet and his face is doing the thing it does when every feeling he has arrives at the surface at the same time and none of them are willing to wait their turn.
“They’re not right,” I tell him. “The edges cracked. The second bake went long.”
“Shut up.” His voice is rough. “Shut up about the edges.”
“I’m just noting that the structural integrity is compromised.”
“Isaiah.” My full name, which he almost never uses, and the sound of it in his mouth right now is a sound I am going to keep.
He puts his hands on my face. Both hands, the way Nan does, the way his nonna probably does, the gesture that apparently lives in every person who loves someone enough to hold them still and look at them.
“They’re biscotti,” I say, because if I don’t say something small and factual I’m going to lose the ability to speak in complete sentences.
“You called my nonna,” he says again, like the words need repeating to become real. “You called my eighty-one-year-old nonna and asked her to teach you to make biscotti.”
“She was very patient. She only yelled about the flour twice.”
He laughs. Wet and cracked and pressed into my neck. I put my arms around him and hold the laugh against me and feel it move through his ribs and into mine.
He pulls back. Wipes his face with the heel of his hand.
Picks up one of the biscotti and bites into it and chews with his eyes closed and I watch him the way I’ve watched him taste everything this man has ever put in front of me, with the complete focus of a person whose verdict will be delivered with full ceremony.
“Seven,” he says.
“Seven.”
“Seven-point-two. For a first attempt. Nonna’s are a nine-four. You’re working with a significant handicap.”
“A handicap.”
“You have no Italian heritage and your kitchen skills are, by your own admission, limited.” He takes another bite. Chews. “Seven-point-five. The anise is actually close.”
“Your rating changed mid-biscotti.”
“New data.” He grins at me, the full grin, the one that fills his face and leaves no room for anything else. “You called my nonna.”
“You have to stop saying that.”
“I will never stop saying that. This is going to be the only thing I talk about for the rest of the week.”
“It’s a good thing I love you, because a week of this is going to test my patience.”
The kitchen goes quiet.
His grin doesn’t fade. It just freezes, still fully open, while his eyes catch up to what my mouth already said. I watch the recognition arrive on his face. The slight widening. The breath he takes and doesn’t release.
I hear the echo of it a half second after he does.
The sentence replaying in the air between us, the three words sitting inside the dry delivery like they’d been there the whole time, waiting for a sentence boring enough to hide in.
I didn’t plan it. I didn’t feel it build.
It just walked out of my mouth the way true things walk out when you stop guarding the door.
Teo is silent. Complete silence. For the first time in the entire time I’ve known this man, there are no words, no theories, no ratings, no follow-up observations.
Just his face, open and still, and his eyes on mine.
The man who fills every room he enters standing in his kitchen with his mouth closed and his hands at his sides and the biscotti still in his fingers, and the silence coming off him is louder than anything he’s ever said.
“I’m going to need you to say something,” I tell him. “Because the silence is medically concerning.”
“You love me.”
“That appears to be what I said. Yes.”
“Inside a sentence about patience.”
“I didn’t plan the delivery.”
He puts down the biscotti. Puts his hands back on my face.
Kisses me once, slow, his mouth tasting like anise and the coffee he hasn’t finished and the specific taste of a man who has been smiling so hard his lips are warm from it.
Then he pulls back and looks at me and the look on his face is the look of a man who just heard the thing he’s been waiting to hear and heard it inside a sentence about my patience and would not change a single thing about that.
“Hi,” he says.