Chapter 2
THEO
The morning light diffused by the lace curtains in this kitchen had always looked good on Simon. He was all warm tones, chestnut hair and amber eyes, olive skin and a dusting of freckles over his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. I envied the freckles, something I’d always wished I had myself.
Most people wouldn’t have noticed him behind his big square glasses, under his oversized, loudly patterned vintage sweaters and hair that never behaved.
Most people didn’t notice him. At least, not as the drop-dead gorgeous man he was, all easy smiles and warm, glittering eyes.
People liked Simon—loved him, pretty much universally—for his personality, for his generosity, his sense of humor, and his intelligence.
I loved him for all those things, too. He was the smartest person I knew—how many people could read Latin and Greek and decipher hieroglyphs and in an emergency speak enough French to get their point across?
Aside from that, he’d do anything for anyone—especially me, so much so that I always felt like I had to be careful about asking too much, because I knew he wouldn’t say no.
He was funny, and easy to be around, friendly, too nice for his own good.
And on top of that, he pushed every single one of my buttons like a toddler mashing an elevator control panel. The first time he’d smiled at me, I’d felt like my heart was going to burst out of my ribcage.
One day someone would see him the way I did—someone who deserved him—and they’d marry him a week later and be the happiest person in the entire world for the rest of their life.
For now, as promised, he was making pancakes for me. Double chocolate chip, with the good cocoa his mom had given him as part of her Christmas care package and rich dark chocolate he’d chopped himself, the smell filling the kitchen as he worked.
I watched him cook with my chin resting in my hand, perched in my traditional place at the breakfast bar.
His nails were painted neon green today, except for the ring fingers, which were a deep purple that shimmered when the light hit them.
Simon was good with his hands, careful and precise whether he was making breakfast or handling ancient, delicate artefacts at the museum. I loved watching him use them.
“You awake yet?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder at me.
I turned my coffee mug around by the handle, tracing the letters of the quote on it. My courage always rises.
Simon had given it to me while we were still in college.
He’d found it in a thrift store and picked it up because I’d told him a couple of weeks earlier that Pride and Prejudice was one of my favorite books while I was explaining the plot to him because I’d been studying it at the time and he was letting me lay out the argument I wanted to make in my essay on it.
I’d’ve bet anything he’d been looking for something like it from the moment I said so. I’d’ve been more surprised to learn he hadn’t.
That was what Simon was like. Always had been.
“Uh,” I said belatedly, peering into my coffee. “Mostly?”
I’d left the mug on purpose when I moved out of the apartment we’d shared from senior year to a couple of years after we’d both started working.
Simon chuckled, sliding a final pancake onto the stack he’d been producing and turning off the stove burner.
“Eat,” he said, setting the pancakes down in front of me and grabbing one of the small, mismatched plates from the stack by the toaster. This one had a gold rim and a pink-and-blue flower pattern.
For once in my life, I didn’t need more encouragement than that.
I rarely ate breakfast—or lunch, and dinner was hit-and-miss—except when Simon cooked for me.
It wasn’t just the cooking, it was the company.
Eating in front of anyone else made me nervous, but eating with him was the kind of thing I looked forward to.
We tried to get together at least once a week, but we’d both been busier than usual lately.
I’d missed him.
I took two pancakes off the stack and accepted the fork Simon offered me, our fingers brushing together. I should have been used to touching him by now, but the brush of his skin against mine always sent a little shiver of pleasure rippling through me.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Simon asked, taking a pancake of his own—no plate—and rolling it up before biting the end off.
“Not especially.” I cut a bite of my own pancakes, swiping my forkful through the melted chocolate oozing out onto the plate before putting it in my mouth.
For a beautiful moment, there was nothing in the world but the rich, sweet burst of fluffy, chocolatey breakfast on my tongue.
My eyes fell closed as I chewed, savoring the first bite and not thinking about anything else, at all, for the length of time it took me to swallow.
“Have you changed this recipe?” I asked, peering down at my plate as though I’d be able to tell by looking.
Simon laughed. “I knew you’d notice. Secret ingredient.”
“What’s the secret?”
“Cardamom,” Simon said without hesitation. I knew he wouldn’t keep it a secret from me.
Not that there was much point, since all my previous attempts to make pancakes had ended in disasters ranging from batter all over the floor to setting a kitchen towel on fire. As a result, I was banned from trying. Probably for the best.
I nodded, taking another bite and searching for the new taste, taking the time to appreciate it again. That gave me another few seconds of not thinking about anything else, which I was grateful for.
“I’m going to strangle both of them with my bare hands,” Simon said, licking chocolate off his thumb. I watched his tongue swirling around the tip of it with a completely normal amount of interest for a perfectly platonic friend.
“Please don’t,” I said. “They send you to prison for attempted murder and you can’t make me consolatory pancakes in prison.”
“Who said anything about attempted murder?” Simon asked, eyeing the remainder of the stack of pancakes.
I pushed the plate toward him. He always let me eat all of them, which I wished he wouldn’t do. He’d made them. He ought to enjoy them.
He pushed them back toward me.
“They’re—”
“—for me,” I finished for him. We’d had this conversation dozens of times. “I can’t eat them all.”
“I’ll wrap the rest up for lunch. You might even take a lunch break, that way.”
I huffed. I did take lunch breaks. At least once or twice a week.
It still counted if I took them at my desk. And lunch was comprised of coffee. Coffee was one of the major food groups, after all.
“Do you know I love you?” Simon asked wryly.
I looked down at my plate, heat rising up the back of my neck. “Yeah,” I told my pancakes, licking chocolate off my lips as I cut another bite. “Yeah, I do.”
I knew Simon loved me. He was the one person in my life who’d never made me doubt that.
If only he loved me a little differently.
That was why I’d moved out. Because he didn’t, and was never going to, and I couldn’t take being so close to what I wanted every single day while knowing I’d never have it.
“You’re still not murdering my sister,” I said, spearing a piece of pancake with my fork. “Or Corey.”
“Only because you say so.” Simon moved to the sink, turning on the faucet to rinse out the bowl he’d used and clean the spatula.
“You can get from the second of July to the fifth off, right? Thursday to Sunday?”
Simon didn’t turn to face me, but I could still see the way his brows furrowed, mouth turning down in confusion.
“I guess?” he said. “It’s short notice but Abdul has been hinting that if I don’t take some leave soon he’ll break my kneecaps so I have to.”
Abdul was Simon’s boss at the museum. I’d only met him once and he’d given me the impression of being maybe the cuddliest man on the face of the Earth.
He’d made me a cup of tea while I’d been waiting for Simon to finish something up and talked at me about exciting new developments in the scholarship on mirrors in the Classical world.
If he was starting to threaten Simon to take some time off, I felt way less guilty for asking him to.
“Why?” Simon continued. “Are we doing something for the Fourth?”
“The wedding,” I said. I hadn’t told him it was so soon, had I? “You have to come with me.”