31. Maya
Maya
Tonight, I am cooking dinner in Dante’s jersey.
The home navy. Number eighty-eight. The mesh hangs past my thighs and swallows my shoulders, the sleeves rolled twice and still loose around my wrists.
I found it on the hook behind the bedroom door when I was getting dressed, and my hands had already pulled it over my head before my brain caught up.
It smells like the rink, like cold rubber and athletic tape under the cedar soap that clings to everything he owns. I didn’t think about it. I put it on. They cook for me every night.
The ritual has settled into the house so completely that my spot on the counter has a faint wear mark from my jeans, a detail Dante pointed out last week before tapping the spot twice like he had put it there himself.
They cook, I sit, I drink wine, and the kitchen belongs to them.
Dante owns the stove. Cole owns the cutting board.
Between them, there are near misses, hip checks, and those easy, unconscious touches that happen without either of them looking first.
Tonight I’m cooking.
The Frozen Four semifinal is next Thursday. They should be resting, eating clean, watching film. Instead they’re going to eat my pasta and pretend it doesn’t taste like a fire hazard.
I start with pasta because pasta is simple. Water, heat, noodles. The instructions are on the box, and I can read instructions. I have decoded financial fraud documents, FOIA requests, and the filing systems of municipal court records. I can boil water.
The water is boiling. I add the pasta. I set the timer.
So far, competence.
The sauce is where things go wrong.
The recipe comes from a website with a four-star rating that I now suspect was inflated by bots.
Diced tomatoes, garlic, basil, olive oil, red pepper flakes.
I have all of these things because Dante keeps the kitchen stocked with a specificity that borders on obsession.
I dice the tomatoes. The pieces are uneven, some the size of my thumbnail, some the size of a golf ball, but the recipe did not specify dimensions, so I consider this an acceptable variance.
The garlic defeats me immediately.
The clove refuses to peel. I try the method I’ve seen Dante use a hundred times, the side of the knife, one firm press, the casual kitchen violence that always obeys him and immediately betrays me.
The clove shoots across the counter, drops off the edge, and rolls under the refrigerator with the calm confidence of something that never intended to cooperate with me in the first place.
I get another clove and attempt it again. This time the press works, but the blade slips and nicks my finger, a small cut, barely bleeding, but enough to make me swear and stick my finger in my mouth and glare at the stove like it has personally wronged me.
“Something’s burning,” Cole says from the doorway.
I turn. The olive oil in the pan is smoking, aggressively. The smoke rises in a column that is two seconds from triggering the detector Cole disabled last month after I burned toast for the third time.
“It’s not burning. It’s heating.”
“It’s on fire.”
“It is not on—”
The oil catches. A small, contained, entirely manageable flame leaps from the surface of the pan and reaches about four inches into the air before I grab the lid from beside the stove and smother it. The flame dies. Smoke continues to climb.
The kitchen smells like a bad decision.
Cole leans against the doorframe with both arms crossed, his mouth already losing the fight against a smile. Behind him, Dante appears, drawn by the smoke, or the swearing, or the instinct that brings him to the kitchen whenever it is being misused.
“What are you doing?” Dante says.
His voice is flat, every word clipped clean. His gaze cuts across the kitchen, the smoking pan, the uneven tomatoes, the garlic under the refrigerator, the blood on my finger.
Then it stops on the jersey, on his number hanging over my body.
His gaze slows. It starts at my collar and drags down. His jaw tightens, works once, then goes still.
“I’m cooking.”
“You’re committing arson.”
“I’m cooking you dinner because you cook for me every night and I wanted to do something nice and the garlic went under the refrigerator and the oil had opinions.”
“The oil had opinions,” Cole repeats, and the smile wins.
“Don’t laugh at me.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“You’re grinning.”
“I’m grinning with love and admiration for your courage in the face of—”
“Finish that sentence and you sleep on the couch.”
Dante crosses the kitchen. He turns off the burner, moves the smoking pan to the back of the stove, and examines the tomatoes with the grim focus of a man assessing structural damage.
When he picks up the cutting board and tilts it, the uneven pieces slide together in a way that makes my stomach tighten with preemptive irritation.
“These are—”
“Don’t.”
“—enthusiastic.”
“Dante.”
He sets down the cutting board and looks at me. Then he lifts me.
He lifts me with both hands on my waist, easy as breathing, and my stomach drops before my ass hits the counter. One second I am standing between the smoke, the cut tomatoes, and the missing garlic, and the next I am on my spot, legs dangling, the worn place in the counter lining up beneath me.
Dante steps back and surveys me with quiet satisfaction. Then his thumb brushes the eight on my hip. Once.
The touch is lighter than the lift, which somehow makes it worse. He lets the touch speak for him.
“Sit there,” he says. “Let us handle this.”
“That’s sexist.”
“It’s survival. The kitchen was on fire.”
“A small fire.”
“Maya.” He leans in, his hands braced on the counter on either side of my hips, his face close enough that his cedar soap cuts through the smoke. “The cooking is going to kill us. Sit on the counter and drink your wine and let me save dinner.”
“I was saving dinner.”
“You were creating an insurance claim.”
Cole crosses the kitchen, opens the wine, and pours me a glass.
He puts it in my hand, kisses my forehead with one quick, warm press, and then he is at the cutting board re-dicing my tomatoes with a competence that is, frankly, insulting.
Dante dumps the ruined oil, starts fresh, and adds the tomatoes to the pan before my pasta timer can start screaming.
“The pieces need to be uniform,” Cole says. “Dante gets weird about it.”
“I don’t get weird. I have standards.”
“He once measured a bell pepper with a ruler.”
“The recipe said half-inch dice. Half-inch means half-inch.”
I sit on the counter with my wine and my nicked finger and burnt oil still scratching my throat, and I watch them take back the kitchen.
The choreography resumes around me, Dante at the stove and Cole at the cutting board, moving around each other without needing to look.
Dante reaches past Cole for the olive oil, and his hand trails across Cole’s lower back, casual, unconscious.
Cole leans into the touch for half a second before returning to the tomatoes.
“You have garlic under the refrigerator,” Dante says.
“I’m aware.”
“It’s going to bother me.”
“Let it bother you.”
“It’s going to bother me until I move the refrigerator and retrieve it.”
“Dante. Leave the garlic. The garlic has made its choice.”
Cole laughs, and the sound fills the kitchen, bright and full enough to make the smoke feel less like evidence.
His laugh makes strangers feel included. With me, it gets under my ribs before I can brace against it.
Dante’s mouth twitches. He fights the smile and loses, and the loss feels like its own kind of victory. Dante smiles in his kitchen while Cole dices tomatoes and I sit on the counter in his jersey, holding wine with a cut finger.
“Come here,” I say to Dante.
He comes, standing between my knees, his body fitting into the space mine makes. I hook my fingers into the front of his shirt and pull him closer. When he leans in, I kiss him softly, and his mouth is warm and tastes like the wine he was drinking before the smoke summoned him.
“Thank you for letting me try,” I say against his mouth.
“Thank you for not burning down the house.”
“It was a small fire.”
“There’s no such thing as a small fire, Maya.”
I kiss him again. Harder. My hands slide up his chest, over his shoulders, into his hair, and he answers me with his palms gripping my thighs. The kiss deepens until smoke and burnt oil disappear under the heat of his body against mine.
My hand drops from his hair, down his chest, over his stomach.
I find the waistband of his jeans and slide my fingers below it.
My thumb traces the first barbell through the denim, the ridge of metal I have memorized by touch.
Second. Third. I press the fourth, and his hips jerk against the counter between my legs.
“These are mine,” I say against his mouth.
His breath catches. His grip on my thighs tightens.
I trace the fifth. The sixth. Slow. Possessive. My thumb stays there long enough to make him feel it.
“Sauce is going to burn,” Cole says from behind Dante, amused and not even slightly concerned about the sauce.
Dante breaks the kiss and returns to the stove. He stirs the sauce with one hand and looks at me over his shoulder with an expression that says later and means it with his whole schedule.
Cole takes his place between my knees. His hands bracket me on the counter, mirroring Dante’s position, and I cup his jaw. His face turns into my palm, the gesture that belongs to him, the way he leans into touch before he seems to remember he has done it.
“You’re sweet,” I say. “For re-dicing my tomatoes without criticism.”
“I would never criticize your tomatoes.”
“You said the pieces needed to be uniform.”
“That was instruction, not criticism. There’s a difference.”
“There’s not a difference.”
“There’s a huge difference. Criticism would be saying your tomatoes looked like a crime scene. Instruction is giving you a chance next time.”
“There’s not going to be a next time. The kitchen tried to kill me.”