23. Geo #2
“For the record,” I say, because I need my mouth doing something that isn’t the other thing, “the sauce was better before you salted it.”
“I didn’t salt it.”
“Harrison.”
“I salted it a little.” He shuts off the tap and turns to face me, hip against the counter, close in the way this kitchen forces on people, because it was built for one cook and we have never once respected that. “I’m going to say one thing,” he says, “and then we’re back to the rule.”
“One.”
“I like you.” He says it plainly, and this time he doesn’t look away after.
“I’ve said the other stuff so many times it’s lost its shape.
I don’t think I’ve said this one since we were dating.
I like you. Being in a room with you is my favorite thing to do and I’d forgotten that was even a category. ”
The glass squeaks against the towel in my hands. My heart is doing the undignified thing it’s been threatening all night.
“Okay,” I say.
“You wasted your one on like.”
“I didn’t waste it.” He takes the glass out of my hands and sets it down without checking where it lands, which from him is a whole declaration.
“Everyone gets love. Love’s a reflex. You can love somebody and still leave them alone in an auditorium.
” His hand comes up to my jaw, careful, asking.
“Nobody warns you that the dangerous one is liking a person. That you’ll burn your whole life down for the chance to stay in the room. ”
That’s the wrong word, in hindsight. Burn.
I kiss him. Or he kisses me. It stops mattering which almost at once, because this isn’t the careful kind we’ve been rationing for the sake of the schedule.
It’s the kind with a year of not-doing-this stacked up behind it, and his hands are in my hair and then under the hem of my shirt, and then he’s lifting me onto the counter like I weigh nothing and stepping in between my knees.
I’ve got both fists in his ridiculous soft shirt hauling him closer.
The rule is dead, the rule was always going to die, and I could not care less.
“Bedroom,” he says against my mouth, making no move toward it.
“In a minute.”
We do not get the minute.
The smoke alarm goes off directly over our heads, which is how I remember, later than is any use to anyone, the pan.
The grilled cheese. His redemption grilled cheese, riding a low lit burner this entire time while we conducted ourselves like the kitchen was soundproofed and none of our business, a pat of butter going from melted to smoking to genuinely furious.
The butter catches. A low lick of blue flame, and then it isn’t low or blue, it’s climbing, and the dish towel he left folded over the handle goes up like it has been waiting its whole cotton life for the chance.
“Off the counter,” Harrison says, already moving, putting his body between me and the stove, which under any other circumstance I’d have opinions about and right now do not have time for.
“Don’t you dare put water on it,” I get out, because I’ve watched enough terrible cooking television to know that much.
He doesn’t. He grabs for the lid, but the towel has already handed the fire to the cabinet, and the cabinet is old and painted and thrilled to participate, flames going up the face of it toward the shelf where I keep, of all the useless things, a decorative bottle of grappa.
“Okay,” Harrison says, in the flat calm voice of a man who has concluded the situation is now above his pay grade. “Okay. We’re calling someone.”
We call someone.
There’s a specific humiliation in standing on your own lawn in a misbuttoned shirt while a truck the size of a small building pulls up with its lights spinning and wakes every neighbor I’ve spent a year avoiding.
The firefighters are efficient and unbothered, plainly not new to the concept of a kitchen fire lit by two adults who got distracted.
One of them looks at Harrison, then at me, then at my shirt, which I have buttoned wrong in the scramble, and says absolutely nothing, which is worse than anything he could have said.
They put it out fast. The kitchen is wrecked, black up one wall, the whole downstairs smelling like a campfire that saw things. Nobody is hurt. The grappa survived, which feels pointed.
When they finally clear out, we sit on the front step in the dark and I put my face in my hands.
“We set the kitchen on fire,” I say.
“We did.”
“Because we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.”
“That is the sequence of events, yes.” I can hear him trying not to laugh. He’s losing. “For the sake of accuracy, my grilled cheese was a contributing factor, not the sole cause.”
“Your grilled cheese was a lit pan we abandoned to make out like teenagers.”
“When you put it that way.” He gives up the fight completely.
He laughs, head tipped back against the doorframe, and it’s so pleased and so unguarded that I start laughing too, the awful snorting kind, on my own front step, in front of the fire department and Mrs. Petrakis at number nine, who is watching from her window with undisguised joy.
“I’m mortified,” I tell him, still laughing. “I need that understood. This is the single most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me, it is entirely your fault, and I have never once been mortified and this happy in the same minute, and I don’t know what to do with that.”
“You could marry me,” he says, easy, like it’s a joke, except his eyes aren’t joking at all.
“Don’t push it.”
“Pushing it a little. Testing the equipment.” He knocks his shoulder into mine. “Come inside. Half the house still smells like a house. I’ll take the couch and guard you from the grappa.”
I stay. Of course I stay.
We fall asleep on the couch anyway, upright and then gradually not, fully dressed, the windows thrown open to air the place out, and it is the least romantic set of circumstances imaginable, and I would pick it again in a heartbeat.
I wake around three with my face against his shoulder and a crick in my neck that’ll be billing me for a week. There’s a bed down the hall that technically still smells fine. I could get up.
I stay where I am.
The next thing I know it’s morning, and the house is loud. Not fire-loud. Work-loud. I blink, then I blink some more as I hear people talking in hushed whispers and trying not to make much sound.
There is a crew in my kitchen. An actual crew, in matching shirts, and the ruined cabinets are already gone, torn out and hauled to a truck, and a man is measuring the wall where the char was while another shows him a picture of a range that costs more than I made in my best year of singing.
Harrison is standing in the middle of it with a coffee, in yesterday’s clothes too, watching the work like a kid at a construction site, which is precisely what this is.
“What did you do,” I say. It isn’t a question. I’ve learned the exact shape of this man doing this exact thing.
“I made some calls.”
“It’s barely morning.”
“I made them early.” He hands me the coffee, the caramel oat milk one with the extra shot, which means somewhere out there is a second set of calls, or a deeply confused barista.
“You’ve hated this kitchen the entire time I’ve known you.
The drawer that sticks. The oven that runs hot and lies about it.
You’ve complained about that oven for years, and I nodded and did nothing, because doing nothing was my entire personality.
” He tips his head at the crew. “So. New everything. The drawer that sticks goes in the truck. You pick the rest. I pay for it, and I keep my opinions about the tile to myself.”
“Harrison, this is insane.”
“It’s a kitchen, Geo.”
“You bought a restaurant because I liked it.”
“And now I’m fixing a kitchen I helped set on fire.
This one’s practically self-defense.” He’s smiling, but underneath it is the thing that’s always there now, the thing that makes it impossible to stay angry.
“I can’t give you back the years I spent somewhere else.
I’ve mostly made my peace with that. But I can make sure the room where you feed our kid doesn’t have a drawer that fights you. That one I can actually reach.”
I’m standing in my half-demolished kitchen in clothes that reek of smoke, holding a coffee he had couriered across the city before I was even awake, and I understand with total clarity that this is the rest of my life if I want it.
A man who cannot undo the thing he did, so he moves heaven and a licensed contractor to fix every single thing he still can.
“So. I’m picking the tile,” I say.
“Absolutely you’re picking the tile. I wouldn’t dream of touching it.”
“And you’re keeping the good pot. The one my grandmother’s recipe lives in.”
“It’s already in the living room. I grabbed it before the truck came. It was the first thing I carried out.” He says it like it’s obvious, like of course the pot came first, and I have to look very hard at a man measuring my wall so that I don’t come apart in front of the crew.