Chapter 8 #3
He turns it up a little anyway, low, filling the quiet so it isn't just the two of us and the knife.
He keeps at it. "Beef goes in first to brown, then it cooks down in the sauce a while. Low and slow." A pause I could step into. I don't. "You cook at all, before?"
"No."
"Well. You're getting a lesson whether you want one or not." He waits.
Nothing.
He lets it go and stirs the pan, then slides the carrots across to me. "These next. Rough is fine."
I brace a carrot with my bandaged hand and it rolls. I catch it, and it rolls again—the wrap makes my fingers stupid, and the knife skids off the side. “Shit,” I mumble and then wait for him to scold me.
He doesn't. Calder wipes his hands on a towel, comes around the counter, and fits himself in behind me. "Here." He lays his hand over my bad one, holds the carrot down, closes his other hand loose over my knife hand. "Just steer. I've got the holding part."
His chest is warm against my back and his hands are around mine and that clean cut-grass scent is everywhere, in my mouth, in my head, and all of it crowds out whatever I was bracing for.
I lose the thread of the knife. I lose the thread of everything.
There's just the heat of him along my spine and his breath somewhere above my ear and the slow certain way his fingers move mine.
My whole body wants to melt back into him and I don't know what my hands are even doing anymore, I've stopped watching them—
"There." He steps back, and the cold rushes in where he was. The carrots are done. I don't remember doing them. He scrapes the board into the pan like nothing happened, and I stand there blinking at the empty cutting board with my heart going crazy.
He cooks. He also keeps the quiet from getting heavy—a word here and there about the food, nothing that needs an answer, filling the silence so I don't have to. I help out where I can but at some point I just feel like I’m in the way, so I head around the island and sit back on my stool.
He boils pasta at the end and spoons the sauce over it—a rich, simple bolognese that’s done in forty minutes. He plates it, two plates, and sets one in front of me. Then, to my surprise, he sits his plate down next to mine as if we’re going to eat together.
“We both have to eat, don’t we?” He asks.
I shrug.
Calder grabs two bottles of water from the fridge and slides onto the stool next to mine.
I pick at the pasta. Push it around. Manage a few bites and stall out.
It's not the food–the bolognese is surprisingly good. It's that my stomach's a fist and all I really want to do is go back to my room.
"You don't like it," Calder says.
"No, it's—I'm just not really hungry."
He sets his fork down. Scrubs a hand down his face, and when he drops it he looks tired, and older, and like he's about to do something he's bad at.
"Cut the bullshit." He sets his fork down. "I'm sorry, alright?”
I’m a little taken aback, but he keeps going.
“I snapped at you and you didn't do anything to earn it—you asked a normal question and I bit your head off, and then—" His jaw works. He doesn't finish that part. "Whatever. You can ask questions. We can talk. It's fine. I'm sorry. Okay?"
I just look at him, because I don't know what to do with it. Starla never once said sorry to me—twenty years and not a single time, not after any of what she’s put me through.
As if it wasn't a word she’d ever learned.
I keep waiting for the catch in his, the part where it turns into something I owe him for.
It doesn't come. He just said it and meant it, and now he's waiting to see if I heard it.
If I accept it.
Something in my chest cracks very quietly.
"Why are you nice to me?" I ask. It comes out before I can stop it, and it's the real question, the one under all the others, the one I actually want the answer to. "You don't—none of you are supposed to be. You brought me here to make me pay. So why are you—"
"I don't know."
He says it plainly, and I can tell it's true. He's the one who likes knowing how things work, and maybe this is something he can’t figure out about himself.
Maybe we have more in common than I thought.
"I don't know," he says again, quieter. He picks his fork back up. Looks at my barely-touched plate. And retreats, the way he does, back behind the gruffness where it's safe. "But I'm not letting you off that stool until you eat. It's good. I made it. Eat."
And I don't know why—maybe because I'm exhausted, maybe because I’m an idiot and just don’t want to make things more difficult—but something in me loosens, just for a second, and I smile.
It's small. It's barely anything, really. But it happens before I can stop it.
Calder goes still. His eyes catch on my mouth and something shifts in his face, and he draws a breath in through his nose, sharp, like the smile landed somewhere he wasn't guarding.
Then he looks away, fast, and clears his throat, and stabs at his own food. "Eat," he says again, rougher.
I twist my fork to get a big bite and try to hide the smile as I chew.