Chapter 59
Fifty-Nine
ELI
Addie was looking at me like I had grown an extra head. It was almost funny. Her mouth kept trying and failing to find the words.
“But this dish is so boring,” she said eventually, her voice full of disbelief, but the barest of blushes tinted her cheeks.
“It’s simple. Not boring. Never boring. I cook for a living.
I feed a lot of people by definition, but I have learned this summer that there is no one I enjoy feeding more than you.
And despite everything I have in my wheelhouse to make, this dish right here, or more accurately, this pesto, is the thing you love most. If I am bound for all eternity to only produce one dish, this is the only option. ”
My timer went off and I went to take my sponges out of the oven, but not before I noticed tears welling in Addie’s eyes.
By the time I pulled the cake tins out, she had managed to wipe the tears away and was prodding at the pasta again.
“I have made many friends with benefits pacts in my time, and not once have I ever broken the ‘do not fall in love’ rule. It’s been broken a few times, don’t get me wrong.
But it’s never been broken by me. Until sometime in August. I think.
I spent a lot of last night trying to pinpoint the moment that I realised I was in love with you, and I haven’t nailed it down yet, but August sounds about right,” Addie said quietly.
She was mostly talking to the bowl of pasta.
I gently put the cake tins down on the cooling rack. Addie looked up and smiled quietly.
“Falling in love with someone is basically my idea of hell. Which I know sounds drastic, but when you have a front row seat to your mother falling apart because the man she loves is in hospital and things looked dicey for a while, it has a way of altering the way you view things, like romantic love. The idea of opening myself up to that kind of heartbreak made me feel unwell. So I vowed to never do it. And I built up all these solid walls to keep people out, but I left this window open for physical relationships because I could do those on my terms. Every partner I’ve ever had was aware of what they were getting into.
No love. And things had been working. Very well.
“Then I came back here, to you, and that all went to shit. You climbed over the walls so stealthily, I didn’t even realise you had done it. Then I’m feeling things like safe and content. And I want to make sure that you’re taken care of and happy. And I’m feeling things, like jealousy!”
I laughed. “Jealous about who?”
“I may or may not have thought that you were dating Steffy,” Addie admitted quietly.
My eyebrows raised in shock. “Steffy? No. She wanted me to help with her Christmas menu, and then we kind of became friends. That was all it’s ever been.”
“Yeah, I know that now! But I only found that out yesterday.”
“You want to talk about jealous? Think about how I felt when I saw you with Josh. And that text!” I countered. Addie’s face drained of colour as her mouth opened in shock.
“I was at Becky’s. That was why I didn’t come that night. I didn’t—I wouldn’t have done that to you.”
I smiled. “Yes, well, I know that now. Jesse told me last night.”
“We really fucked this, didn’t we?” she asked.
“Not completely.”
“Before we go any further, I need to know. Did you ever think my eyes weren’t real?”
I frowned. “What, the colour? No. I mean, yes, but in the sense that I couldn’t comprehend that you got to walk around with eyes that stunning. But I didn’t think you were wearing like, contacts, or whatever. Did Josh question them?”
Addie nodded slowly while I went to the fridge and got two more bowls out.
One with whipped cream in, the other jam, and put them on the island.
“He did. Although it was somehow the least absurd thing he said in the ninety minutes that we were sitting at that table. I know we’ve had many a debate about interpretations of Shakespeare’s work, but at least you’ve never tried to explain his importance in Elizabethan culture to me. ”
What a fucking idiot. “Hang on, he tried to mansplain Shakespeare to you? A woman with two master’s degrees and half a PhD in Shakespeare. The same woman who was brought in because she was a specialist on the Bard. Are you serious?”
“Like a heart attack.” She clapped a hand over her mouth.
I found it mildly amusing. “Fuck, that was a bad joke. But yes, I am serious. He then deeply misread the signs and thought we were something more than what we were. A bust. He invited himself along last night, and then—well, you were clearly a witness to it. And I’m sorry.
I didn’t mean for that to happen. To be honest, part of me didn’t think you would care. ”
“Because I’m dating Steffy.”
Addie rolled her eyes as she picked up the bowl of cream and started scooping it out from around the sides with her finger. I handed her a spoon.
“You aren’t alone in catching feelings. Although I’ve arguably had them since the first time I made your nostrils flare in annoyance.”
The blush on her cheeks deepened. “My sisters keep trying to tell me that I might have had a crush on you back then. And I can assure you that while I can now admit that you annoyed me so much because you were both cute and smart, I did really think you were the bane of my existence.”
She scooped more cream out of the bowl, and I held my hand out for it.
“And I fell a little bit in love with you anyway,” I said simply as she placed the bowl in my hand.
“Does it do it for you, when I’m a little bit mean?” she teased.
I smirked as I scooped some cream onto the cake. When I had enough to spread evenly, I gave it back to her.
“Not no. You’re kind of incredible. You always have been.
I would have had to make a concentrated effort not to fall in love with you the moment you told me that you were a born academic, because the sexiest thing about you has always been your confidence, and it made me so happy to know that you’ve never let that go. ”
“You know no one has ever found my confidence in my academic ability sexy before,” she said as she grabbed the bowl of jam.
“I do. Always have. Always will. You know you’re contaminating my cake, right?” I teased as I gently took the bowl from her arms and tipped some on top of the cream.
“We’re giving it to my mother. She’s not going to care. As she frequently likes to remind me, I lived inside her for months. Plus, if we give her this cake, it might make her like you even though you’re defiling her baby.”
I gave her the jam back. “I’ve been doing that for months. I think you’ve even begged me to do it once or twice.”
She hummed around her spoon. “I don’t think I begged for it. That doesn’t sound like me. You begging for things on the other hand?”
I felt my skin start to flush. “Right now, I am just begging for us to officially dissolve this friends-with-benefits arrangement and let me take you out on a date.”
Her eyes sparkled as she raised her eyebrows.
“Please. Please. Please,” I added.
“Yes, you can take me out on a date. But I do have one small request,” she said as she licked more jam off her spoon.
“Which is?” I asked roughly as I watched her slowly pull the spoon out of her mouth.
“We don’t have sex until we’ve been on a date.”
I picked up the second cake and put it on top of the other one, pressing down and watching melted cream and jam spill around the edges.
“I’m not working on Thursday night,” I said.
“Thursday works. Are you okay about everything else? You want to talk about it, or do you want to keep making your cakes in peace?”
Tears pressed at the back of my eyes at the idea that someone was giving me an option to be anything other than okay. It was nothing that I wouldn’t expect from Addie, but it was so different to what I knew, I almost didn’t know how to respond.
“I’m not going to say that I’m completely okay about the whole upcoming dead mother’s birthday, but I don’t feel the need to talk about it in this moment.
Can’t say that won’t change over the next few days.
” Addie nodded slowly but didn’t say anything further.
“Speaking of mothers, this cake isn’t making it to your parents unless we give it to them ASAP.
I got distracted by you, and it did not cool anywhere near enough before I started applying the fillings. ”
Addie put her spoon down in the bowl. “That was an interesting segue. We can go over there now. I think the walk would be a good time to talk about how you used to have a crush on me while I used to dream about all the ways that I could crush you.”
“With your thighs, while my head is buried between them, would be my preference,” I shot back.
“I have never met a man who was so obsessed with eating pussy in my life.”
“And now you won’t meet another one.”
Addie’s eyes darkened behind her glasses.
“Now come on, Addie, you’re not already thinking about being a rule breaker, are you? It was a rule that you put in place.”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t break rules.”
“You broke one,” I pointed out as I found a box that would fit the cake in.
“And breaking that rule might just be the best thing I’ll ever do,” she said as she ran her finger through the excess cream and jam along the cake and slipped the finger in her mouth.
She hollowed out her cheeks as she cleaned the sugar off, a smirk glittering in her green eyes.
A dab of cream was on the corner of her mouth, and when her finger was clean, she removed it from her mouth with a pop before the tip of her pink tongue peeked out to remove it.
I swallowed the groan that threatened to escape me and transferred the cake to the box.
“I’ll remind you, Eli, that you broke that rule, too. So what’s to say that you won’t break this one?”
“Because I am going to have way too much fun trying to get you to break it first,” I replied, taking her chin in my hand. With one quick glance down to her lips and one gentle tilt of her head as an affirmative, I pressed a kiss to her mouth, pulling away before she could deepen it.
“Two can play that game, Elijah.”
The next few days were going to be hell.