7. JAMIE
JAMIE
The chicken is almost done.
I know this the way I know most things in a kitchen — not by checking, but by the smell shifting from raw-savory to something deeper and golden, the fat starting to crackle at the edges of the pan.
I've got it going in a white wine reduction with shallots and thyme, nothing complicated, and the apartment smells like a real meal instead of the cloud of powdered sugar and toasted butter that's been living in these walls all day.
The fridge, when I opened it twenty minutes ago to grab the shallots, presented itself like evidence. Three shelves of labeled containers in my handwriting — chili-lime caramel, attempt 2. Brown butter ganache — needs salt. Mango curd — DO NOT TOUCH, STILL SETTING.
A full shelf of the tester rounds I made this afternoon, two of which came out exactly right and one of which I'm not ready to talk about.
The fridge has gone from a place where Jackson kept bottled water and leftover Chinese food to something that actually reflects a person living here. Two people, now.
I'm stirring the sauce when I hear the key in the lock.
It's funny — I never really processed how much space a person takes up until I started living with one who takes up a lot of it.
The door opens and then Jackson is just there, the way a piece of furniture is there, solid and inevitable, his jacket still on, keys already in his hand. He doesn't say anything.
His eyes find me at the stove first and then track to the pan, and something in his jaw shifts almost imperceptibly — not a smile, not quite, but the working equivalent of one.
He drops his keys on the counter and comes up behind me. His hand settles on my hip, a brief, warm pressure, and he looks over my shoulder at the pan the way someone looks at a crossword they're considering trying.
I hold up the wooden spoon. He ducks his head and tastes.
A beat. "Good."
"That's all I get?"
"It's chicken." He straightens. "It's very good chicken."
"Jackson."
"There's wine in it," he says, like he's making a concession. He lets go of my hip and moves toward the fridge, and I hear him open it. A pause. The pause gets longer.
"Everything's labeled," I call.
"I see that." Another pause. "You labeled the water."
"That was there when I moved in and I panicked."
He closes the fridge. I hear him moving behind me, the sound of the cabinet, the tap running — his end-of-day ritual I've memorized without trying: jacket off, keys down, fridge, water. Every time. Like clockwork on a six-foot-seven frame.
We eat at the kitchen table with the window cracked, the evening air coming in cool and carrying the last bit of daylight with it. He's shed the jacket. His sleeves are rolled up, forearms on the table, and he eats the way he does everything — with complete, unhurried attention.
"How was work?" I try.
"Fine."
"Uh-huh." I cut a piece of chicken. "What does that mean?"
"It means it was fine."
"Did anything happen or did you just sit there for eight hours?"
He thinks about it, which with Jackson means a two-second pause that in anyone else would be nothing, but from him means actual consideration. "Henderson talked for forty minutes about his fantasy football team."
"During what?"
"A briefing."
"About what?"
"Something that was not fantasy football."
I press my lips together. "Did you say anything to him?"
"I said 'Henderson.'"
"Just his name?"
"He stopped talking."
The laugh comes out before I can dress it up into something dignified. He doesn't smile, but there's a quality to the way he looks at me — level, satisfied — that I've learned to read as the equivalent of a grin. He knew that was going to be funny. He timed it.
That's the thing I've figured out about him this week: he's always three steps ahead of the joke and he never telegraphs it. It still catches me flat-footed every time.
"What about you," he says.
"I made six things and successfully destroyed one of them." I reach back without getting up — the kitchen is small enough for this — and pull one of the smaller containers off the counter. "Try this one."
He takes the lid off. Looks at it.
"It's a brown butter ganache with fleur de sel," I tell him. "I've been working on the texture ratio all day. That's attempt four."
He takes a small spoonful. Chews. I watch his face the way I've been watching it all week, learning the vocabulary of it — the brow, the jaw, the slight movement at the corner of his mouth that means his brain is processing something worth processing.
"Hm."
"Hm yes or hm something's off?"
"Both."
I point my fork at him. "Explain yourself."
"It's good." He sets the container down. "The salt hits late."
I open my mouth, close it, pick up my own spoon and taste it.
Damn it. He's right — the fleur de sel blooms about two seconds after the ganache, which isn't necessarily wrong, but it's not what I want.
I want it simultaneous. I've been so focused on the butter-to-chocolate ratio that I missed the timing.
"You have an annoyingly functional palate for someone who called this 'chicken' like it was a minor observation."
"It is chicken."
"It's coq au vin blanc with a shallot reduction?—"
"Chicken," he says again, and takes another bite, and the steadiness of his face is doing something to me because he is absolutely enjoying himself right now.
I point my fork at him again, but I'm smiling too hard for it to land as a threat.
Later, we end up on the couch with the TV on — some crime procedural he put on with the confidence of a man who does not require input on remote decisions, and which I immediately started criticizing because the detective is making choices that would not survive a single yelp review of police work.
"She's going back into the building alone," I say. "After already going in once and finding evidence of a struggle. This is a character flaw."
Jackson doesn't look away from the screen. "She's persistent."
"She's a liability."
"She solves the case."
"You've seen this episode."
"I've seen them all."
I turn to look at him. He's got his arm along the back of the couch, which means my head is approximately level with his ribs, which is a geometry situation I've made peace with. "You watch crime procedurals."
"Yes."
"You." I gesture at him — all of him, the size of him, the economy of him. "Watch crime procedurals."
"They're predictable." He says it like that's a virtue. "The killer is always someone from the first act."
"That's the point. You know it's someone from the first act and you watch anyway?"
"Knowing the outcome isn't the same as seeing it happen."
I consider this. On the screen, the detective is now inexplicably alone in a parking garage. "That's either deeply comforting or slightly terrifying and I can't decide which."
He says nothing. The detective does something inadvisable. I pull my feet up under me and settle into the couch, my shoulder against his arm, and we watch a man get dramatically arrested to a swell of orchestral music.
"Jackson."
"Mm."
The question has been sitting in the back of my throat since this morning, since I woke up warm and pressed against him and felt the low, certain ache of his words from the night before living in my skin.
It's not a scary thought. That's the strange part — it should be a scary thought, and it just isn't. "What if I actually get pregnant?"
He doesn't move. Doesn't shift, doesn't recalibrate, doesn't do any of the things a person does when a sentence lands sideways. He just turns his head and looks at me, and his voice is completely level.
"Good." A beat, like the sentence isn't finished, and then: "Then you can't get away from me."
Something goes very still inside me. It's not shock — it's almost the opposite. Like a jar that's been rattling finally going quiet.
"Really," I say. It comes out softer than I meant it.
His eyes stay on mine. "I'll keep you pregnant." His gaze drops for just a second, taking in all of me, and when it comes back up it's unhurried, certain. "Watch your belly swell over and over again."
My hands are in my lap and I'm not moving them.
There is no graceful thing to do with this feeling — it's too large and too quiet at the same time, sitting in my chest with the weight of something that has already been decided.
Not by a conversation, not tonight, but by something in me that looked at this man and made a choice before I knew I was making it.
I want his children.
The thought arrives with no scaffolding around it, no maybe someday softening it into something manageable.
A real want, immediate and specific — a life that looks like this apartment but fuller, and him at the center of it, and me making labeled containers and him eating things that are just chicken and both of us on this couch with something between us that started out impossible and became ordinary inside of a week.
The wanting sits in my body like a stone that's been smoothed into something beautiful. Heavy, but not wrong.
"Okay," I say.
He watches me a moment more, then turns back to the television. His arm comes down from the back of the couch and settles around my shoulders instead, and I let my head rest against his side, and we watch the detective close her case.
The show ends and another one starts — something he doesn't change, something I stop paying attention to.
The kitchen smells like the remnants of dinner, garlic and wine and butter, and underneath it the permanent background sweetness that has apparently bonded to the apartment's molecular structure at this point.
The refrigerator hums. Somewhere outside, a car passes and fades.
Jackson is warm and solid against my side. I can feel his chest rising and falling. His thumb is moving in a slow, absent pattern against my shoulder — the kind of thing you don't do on purpose, the kind of thing that means your hands have found somewhere they want to be.
I'm watching the TV but I'm not seeing it. What I'm seeing is the week behind us and the weeks ahead and this couch, this specific arrangement of two people and one TV and the hum of a fridge full of things I made, and the weight of an arm that means stay.
I want this forever.
I want to stay right here, exactly like this, for as long as he'll let me, and I think he might let me for a very long time.
On the screen, someone is laughing at something. I watch the light shift across the ceiling.
Then Jackson turns his head and I look up at him, and he's already looking at me with that expression that I've been learning all week — the one that isn't a question and isn't an answer, that just is, the same way he is.
He cups my jaw in his hand, his thumb settling just under my cheekbone, and kisses me.
Unhurried. Thorough. Like he has nowhere else to be and no part of this to rush — like the kiss itself is the destination and he plans to stay there.
His mouth is warm and certain, the same way the rest of him is certain, and I bring my hand up to his chest and feel his heartbeat moving slow and steady under my palm.
My toes curl. Physically, actually, pressing against the couch cushion, my feet flexing without my permission — my body doing the only thing it knows how to do with this man, which is respond to him completely, without reservation, right down to the smallest and most involuntary parts of itself.