Chapter 1
The recipe said thirty minutes.
That was forty-five minutes ago, and the only thing we'd successfully accomplished was boiling water.
Which, for the record, I did, by myself.
Because the one task I gave Lakey, measure the pasta, had somehow devolved into a twenty-minute debate about whether penne was superior to rigatoni and an unsolicited TED Talk about the aerodynamics of noodle shapes.
"Cam, I'm telling you, rigatoni holds more sauce per square inch.
It's basic physics." She held up a piece of dried penne and squinted at it like she was examining evidence at a crime scene.
Which, to be fair, she'd done before. Her own crime scene, just with more enthusiasm and a hell of a lot of blood on her skin.
"It's basic shut the fuck up and put the pasta in the water, Lakes."
"Wow." She pressed a hand to her chest. "Verbal abuse in the kitchen. Very G-Ram of you."
"Gordon Ramsay would've had this done an hour ago."
"Gordon Ramsay has a staff. You have me, which is arguably better." She dumped a fistful of penne into the pot and half of it bounced off the rim and scattered across the counter. She didn't pick them up. She just looked at me and shrugged. "Casualties of war."
I pinched the bridge of my nose. This was my fault.
I'd seen some cooking video on her phone while she was scrolling at two in the morning—because Lakey didn't sleep so much as she passed out mid-scroll and woke up with her phone cemented to her face—and I'd made the mistake of saying, we should try that.
Four words. Four stupid, naive words that assumed my five-foot-one tornado of a girlfriend could follow sequential instructions for longer than ninety seconds without her brain rerouting to something completely unrelated.
Rookie mistake, Cam. You know better.
I did know better, but she'd looked at me with those big eyes and said, "Like a date?
We never do normal date shit, Cam," and something in my chest did that thing it only does for her.
That stupid, inconvenient thing that reminded me I wasn't made entirely of murder and the need to bury my cock inside my demonic little princess.
So here we were. Date shit.
"Okay," I said, turning back to the cutting board. "I'm doing the sauce. You're on garlic duty. Four cloves. Minced. Can you handle that?"
She saluted me with the paring knife, and I tried not to think about how comfortable she looked holding it. Most people picked up a kitchen knife like it was a foreign object. Lakey held it the way other girls held mascara wands. I didn’t want to not think of it because I was afraid or something.
No, it’s because my cock gets hard every time she brandishes her weapons and slices into someone’s skin and right now, I was the only one holding our dinner together.
"Four cloves. Minced. Copy that, Chef Dickhead."
"That's Chef Sexy Dickhead to you."
"In your dreams, babe," but she was already peeling the garlic, so I counted it as a win and turned to the tomatoes.
I'd bought San Marzano’s tomatoes because I'd read somewhere that they were the only ones worth using for authentic sauce, and I was nothing if not committed to a bit once I started one. The sauce was simple: tomatoes, garlic, basil, red pepper flakes, olive oil. Even we couldn't fuck this up.
Famous last words.
I crushed the tomatoes by hand into the pan, the juice running between my fingers and spattering across my white t-shirt. Behind me, Lakey was humming something off-key while she butchered the garlic. And I mean butchered. I turned around and she'd produced chunks the size of pebbles.
"Lakes."
"Hmm?"
"That's not minced. That's barely chopped."
She looked down at her cutting board, and looked back at me with confusion on her face. "It's deconstructed."
"It's wrong."
"It's rustic."
"It's going to taste like you're chewing raw garlic cloves, which—" I stopped. She'd grabbed another clove from the bulb and was peeling it. That made five. "I said four."
"More is better."
"That's not how cooking works."
"That's not how your cooking works. My cooking has vision." She tossed the extra clove into her mouth and ate it raw. Just bit into it and chewed, her face twisting into something between defiance and immediate regret. Her eyes watered. She kept chewing.
"You did that to prove a point. I’m not sure what point, but it’s been made."
She swallowed, gagged slightly, and pointed the knife at me. "That was disgusting, and I would do it again."
I stared at her. This woman. This tiny, unhinged, garlic-eating gremlin, for whom I would burn the world down for without a second thought.
She had tomato juice on her cheek from where she'd leaned too close to my cutting board and a piece of garlic skin in her hair.
She was wearing my old shirt, the one with the bleach stain on the hem, and a pair of underwear that said Tuesday on the front, despite it being Saturday.
God, I love you. You fucking lunatic.
"Quit staring at me and stir your sauce, pretty boy. It's bubbling."
It was bubbling. Fuck. I turned back to the stove and gave it a stir, adjusting the heat.
The kitchen smelled good. Garlic, and tomatoes, and olive oil, and whatever shampoo Lakey used that smelled like coconut.
Our apartment wasn't much, just a one-bedroom that had seen better decades, but the kitchen had a gas stove and enough counter space to prep on, and right now, with the late afternoon light cutting through the window over the sink, it almost looked like a place where normal people lived.
We were not normal people, but we were good at pretending, and tonight we were pretending to be the kind of couple who cooked dinner together on a Saturday evening instead of the kind of couple who, well…
Some things were better left in the other room.
Behind the locked door. In the safe that Lakey had decorated with stickers because she said it looked too suspicious without them.
"Cam, how much red pepper do I put in?"
I hadn't asked her to add red pepper. I'd specifically said I would handle the seasoning because the last time she'd been in charge of spice levels, she'd made eggs that required a glass of milk per bite. "I didn't say—"
I turned around. She was holding the jar of red pepper flakes upside down over the pan. At least a tablespoon had already fallen in. Maybe two.
"Lakeyyyyy, whyyyyyy?” I whined.
"Too much?"
"You think?"
"Okay but in my defense, the lid came off."
"The lid came off because you unscrewed the lid."
"Right, but then it came off. Like, fully. I wasn't expecting that kind of commitment from a lid."
I took the jar from her hand and set it on the counter behind me, out of her reach. She huffed.
“Please, please my love. My darling ray of sunshine. The sweetest, most murderous little doll in the world, please go sit. I will finish up. Have a beer, scroll your phone, just… please go.”
"I'm being sidelined."
"You're being contained."
"Same thing." She hopped up onto the counter next to the stove, her bare legs swinging.
The shirt rode up her thighs. She wasn't doing it on purpose, which somehow made it worse.
Or better. Depending on which part of my brain was running the show, and I was desperately trying to keep the logical head from losing its blood supply to the horny head.
"You know, most boyfriends would appreciate a partner who takes initiative in the kitchen. "
"Most boyfriends don't have partners who treat cooking like an episode of Jackass."
"Excuse me?" She pressed a hand to her chest. "I am a delight."
"You are a health hazard."
"Tomato, to-mah-to." She picked up an actual tomato from the pile I hadn't used yet and tossed it between her hands. "Get it? Because tomatoes?"
"Put the tomato down. I bought the exact amount I need for the sauce."
"Make me."
Two words. That's all it ever took with us. Two words and the whole atmosphere of a room shifted. She knew what she was doing. That smile, the one that pulled to the left and showed too many teeth and made her look about as innocent as a loaded gun.
"Lakes. Put. It. Down."
She cocked her arm back and threw it at me.
I caught it, because of course I did. My reflexes were the one thing I'd never had to work on.
Years of training had wired them into something involuntary and automatic.
The tomato burst in my hand, seeds and juice exploding through my fingers and down my forearm.
I looked at my hand and then looked at her. She was already grabbing another one.
"Don't you fucking dare."
She dared.
This one hit me square in the chest and exploded.
The juice soaked through my shirt, and I stood there, dripping, staring at this woman who was now doubled over on the counter, cackling.
Full body, wheezing, tears-in-her-eyes cackling.
Her laugh was the most unhinged sound I'd ever heard, and I'd heard plenty of unhinged sounds in my life.
It was high and loud and completely shameless, and it destroyed every wall I'd ever built.
"Oh my god, your face." She could barely get the words out. "You look—you look like a clown."
A clown. If she only knew how accurately she'd described my current emotional state.
I picked up the bag of flour.
Her laughter stopped. Her eyes went wide. "Cameron. Don't."
Cameron. Warning shot. Good. That meant she knew what was coming.
"What happened to 'make me', doll?"
"I take it back. I take it all back." She held up her hands, palms out, still grinning. "We can talk about this."
"We really can't."
I grabbed a fistful and launched it at her. The flour hit her like a white cloud, coating her face, her hair, the front of my shirt that she was wearing. She sat there, frozen, blinking, her eyelashes caked white, her mouth open. For one perfect second, the kitchen was silent.
Then she wiped her eyes, looked at me, and said, "Oh, it's on, motherfucker."