Chapter 23 #2
“You have a Lacanche?” she says with a gasp, hurrying inside, her gaze moving across the range with something approaching reverence. “A Lacanche, Paul? A Lacanche.”
“I was told it was called that, yes. It’s just a range.”
“Just a range,” she mutters disbelievingly, running her hand along the top and over to the counter. “You have a chef’s kitchen. You have my dream kitchen…” Her hand stills on the counter. “Wait.” She presses herself flat to the surface. “Is this lowered?”
It is, in fact, lowered. I’d requested the modification when the kitchen was fitted, but haven’t thought about that in years. Seeing that it’s exactly the right height for her does things to my chest.
“It appears so,” I say, setting the bags on the kitchen table.
“This is the perfect height for me.” She looks up, genuinely baffled. “But you are tall, so why is that?”
“Fortunate coincidence.”
She narrows her gaze, but then her hands resume their slow survey of the counter, fingertips trailing along the edge.
“You never cook in here,” she states, a truthful observation.
“Occasionally.”
She gives me a look.
“Rarely,” I amend.
“Okay, well.” She turns back to the counter with a small, satisfied smile. “I’ll be honored to pop your kitchen’s cherry.”
I huff a laugh, and she gets right to work, unloading groceries and moving things around, grouping ingredients. Her hands still on a bunch of thyme, and she looks up at me with an expression I can’t quite pin down.
I glance at the herb, trying to keep the low-grade nausea at bay.
“Okay, so,” she starts. “The plan was mushroom risotto, and I stand by that plan. The porcini in that shop were genuinely beautiful, and I almost cried a little. Then on the walk back, I kept thinking about how the same porcini, with shallots and thyme, would be absolutely incredible in a stroganoff instead. I think that’s objectively the better idea, the problem being that I’d need beef for that, but I didn’t grab beef because I was thinking risotto.
I could still do the risotto which was always a good plan and is still a good plan, or I could run back out, except the shop might be closed by now, so maybe risotto is just…
” She sets the thyme down, scrunching her nose at it.
“Sorry. You don’t need the full internal monologue. ”
“I don’t mind the internal monologue,” I say honestly. “Both options are fine. I can go grab beef if you want the stroganoff, it’s not—”
“The shopping was lovely,” she says, cutting across me.
I pause. “It was.”
“You were lovely.” She’s looking at the porcini now, not at me.
“And then you went quiet, and I’ve been doing that thing in my head where I replay everything and try to figure out at what point I said something weird or did too much or…
” She turns a mushroom over. “Who invites themselves to someone’s house to cook dinner?
On a first date? That’s insane, but I just did that.
Nevan talked me down from the sandwiches by inhaling them, but then I looked at a delicacy shop and basically said yes, I will be moving into your kitchen now.
You were too polite to say no, and now you’re standing there being quiet, and I just…
if this isn’t what you expected, or I’m not what you expected, you can say so.
I can take all of this home. I’m genuinely not offended.
I just don’t want to be here making you uncomfortable in your own—”
“Lennon.”
“… kitchen when you could be having a perfectly nice, quiet evening without someone reorganizing your—”
“Lennon.” I push off the table, and her eyes flick to me as I approach.
“… whole virgin kitchen, and—”
I cup her face with my hands, tilt her head back, and press my lips to hers.
She goes completely still against my palms, but the words stop, which was my hope.
I pull back a fraction to see her face. Her eyes are closed, lashes dark against her cheeks, lips slightly parted.
There’s a faint flush climbing her throat, and she looks, God, she looks…
So much for not moving too fast.
“You’re not too much,” I murmur, and she opens her eyes. “I’m sorry. I went quiet because I was trying to figure out how to tell you something. Not because I wanted you to leave.”
She swallows. “Oh.”
Her hands find my wrists somewhere in all of that, fingers wrapped loosely around them.
“What did you want to tell me?”
I’ve told her about the nightmares, about the celibacy, and my fear of darkness. I dropped all of that without any difficulty, because those things are clinical to me now, managed, filed away into language I can use without bleeding.
This, apparently, is harder. She releases my wrists, and I let my hands fall from her face as I take a small step away,
“I have ARFID.”
Her flushed, embarrassed expression dissolves as understanding moves in to replace it. “Textures?” she asks. “Or smell, taste…”
“Textures, mostly… but honestly, it’s most food.”
She doesn’t flinch or offer me the look I’ve learned to anticipate, the one that moves through confusion and lands somewhere between pity and skepticism. That’s the expression people get when a psychologist admits to struggling with eating.
But Lennon looks at the ingredients spread across my counter, then back at me. “What are your safe foods?”
No qualifier, no raised eyebrow, no but surely you can just… just the question, practical and warm, and asked like it’s the obvious next thing to ask.
Safe foods are a list of foods my nervous system has approved, and approved specifically, the right texture, the right preparation, from the right source.
Change one variable, and it’s off the list. It’s not a preference, and it’s certainly not pickiness.
It’s the difference between eating and not eating, and on bad days, I choose not eating.
“I’m guessing none of this qualifies.” She says it matter-of-factly, already gathering things back into the bag. “I can use these at the inn. Tell me what works for you, and I’ll grab different stuff.”
I’ve spent twenty years making this nobody else’s problem. But with her…
“White, yellow, and beige foods,” I say finally, and I hear how limiting it sounds even as I say it. “Espresso and minced meat.”
“Okay,” she says thoughtfully. “So… potatoes?”
“Mashed potato. No lumps.” I clear my throat. “Scrambled eggs, not runny. Plain pasta with butter. White rice. Fries if they’re consistent. Ground beef, if it’s uniform.”
“Predictable texture,” she says immediately.
“Yeah.”
She hums. “So nothing that surprises you. Okay. That’s not hard, just specific.”
Not childish. Not broken. Not the thing my father’s voice still occasionally resurfaces to call it.
Just specific.
“I feel dumb every time I say it out loud,” I admit, and I’m not sure why I’ve said it, except she’s standing in my kitchen asking me practical questions with soft eyes, and I appear to have lost my usual discretion.
“Nothing that keeps you functioning and safe is dumb.”
Jesus Christ.
I have to actively stop myself from falling to one knee.
She tilts her head, thinking. “If I cooked your safe foods, would that work? Or is it also about who makes it? We covered eating disorders at culinary school, and I think I remember reading that it can be tied to specific preparation, specific people…”
“If I trust the person making it,” I say carefully. “And they’re consistent.”
Her smile turns slow and confident. “Oh, I can make it consistent.”
“And I trust you, darling.”
She opens her mouth, closes it. Then she nods once.
Good. It’s a small victory, seeing her let herself have something without argument.
“I think I know what I’d like to try.” She moves past me toward the hallway. “I’ll run and grab it from the store.”
And just like that, the moment shifts from us standing close in my kitchen to errands, doors, and the space she’ll leave behind.
The air already feels thinner.
No.
I am not ready to be alone after that confession.
“Lennon.” I follow her into the living room and catch her hand before she makes it two more steps. “Can you… not leave, please?”
She looks between our joined hands and me, probably reading my desperation in my eyes. “Of course. Do you have stuff here I could cook?”
I draw her back to the couch and sit her down, then settle beside her without letting go of her hand. She’s close enough I can smell the lemon and sugar on her skin, and something that has no name but lives permanently in the back of my throat now.
“I’m not hungry,” I murmur.
“You’re not?”
“You have…” I start, and then stop, because the sentence I was building in my head sounds clinical compared to what’s actually happening in my chest. I try again. “There are billions of eyes in this world, and yet, I could pick yours out of every single one of them.”
She makes a small sound, not quite a word or a breath. It’s caught in between, and her lips part slightly with it, a soft unconscious gasp.
I move to cup her cheek, but my hand has a mind of its own, tracing her jaw until my fingers reach the swell of her bottom lip.
She breathes out against my skin, and the warmth of it travels straight down my spine.
My thumb presses into her lip, and the soft flesh yields beneath it.
Things tighten and stir in my lower abdomen that I have no business feeling right now, and I am chanting you’re celibate, Paul, you’re celibate, you made a decision to take it slow with her, but the desire to act on that knowledge feels very far away.
I want to watch her reaction, not to miss a moment, but my gaze drifts down to the crystal. Her breaths heave in quick, shallow rises and falls of her chest.
I would give a significant amount to know if she’s wearing the pretty black bra I held in my hands underneath that sweater.
No. Stop. Celibate. Focus.
I look back at her face, and she’s already looking up at me, from under those lashes. Her whole expression has gone soft, open, wanting, and she leans, just barely a breath, into my hand.
“You’re extraordinary. Do you know that? I don’t think anyone’s told you enough.”