Chapter 12 #2
I pick up a dinner roll. Eat it in two bites. Look at the mounted largemouth bass on the wall above her head and give it a long, considering look, as if it might have useful input. It has none. Neither do I, about any of this, and somehow that's fine.
The next evening I decide to cook.
This is not, as decisions go, poorly reasoned. I cook for Ivy regularly. I make a solid chicken piccata, a respectable pasta, and a chili that Big Jim has asked me for the recipe for twice. Feeding one more person isn't complicated.
Except that the additional person is Gemma, and knowing she's on the other side of the shared wall while I'm at the stove does something to my concentration that garlic and olive oil don't deserve to pay for.
I oversalt the sauce. Correct with more lemon.
Overcorrect. Start over with a new pan, and the kitchen already smells like the first attempt.
The second attempt is going better when the smoke starts.
Not a lot of smoke. A reasonable amount of smoke from a sauté pan where the oil got hotter than intended and the garlic went from golden to black in the window of time it took me to find the tongs I'd set down somewhere.
I get the pan off the burner, push the window up, and wave a hand in the general direction of the smoke alarm.
The smoke alarm, which has the sensitivity of a Victorian lady encountering scandal, goes off.
It is very, very loud.
I grab a dish towel and start fanning the sensor with the focused urgency of a man who has already provided too much material for Gemma to laugh at. The alarm keeps screaming. The towel does nothing useful. I drag a chair over, stand on it, fan harder. The smoke alarm continues to scream.
Her door opens, and then she's standing in my kitchen doorway in bare feet and an oversized shirt, holding a mug with both hands, blinking at the scene with an expression of someone who heard an emergency and has assessed that the emergency is me.
She doesn't say anything.
"It's under control," I tell her, from the chair, with the dish towel.
The alarm screams.
She crosses the kitchen without hurrying, stands on her toes — she has to go all the way up to reach it — and presses the reset button on the smoke detector with her thumb. The silence is immediate and total, broken only by the tick of the cooling pan and the cold draft from the open window.
"There's a button," she says.
"I know there's a button."
"You're a fire captain," she says.
"I'm aware."
"Just noting it."
She looks at the stove. At the pan, still sitting on the cold burner, the garlic beyond any reasonable description. Then she looks at me, still standing on the chair, dish towel in hand, and her expression is so neutral that holding it is costing her something visible.
"How long have you been doing this?" she asks.
"A while," I say, which is a dignified non-answer.
"Beck."
"It's handled."
She sets her mug on the counter, opens the refrigerator, and surveys what's available with the calm efficiency of someone accustomed to finding solutions in unreasonable situations.
Peanut butter from the second shelf. Bread from the counter.
Butter knife from the second drawer she tries, because she already knows the first drawer is where I keep the spatulas.
That small thing — the fact that she knows which drawer — lands somewhere I'm not ready to examine.
"Sit down," she says.
"You're not cooking in my kitchen."
"I'm not cooking," she says. "Sit down."
I step off the chair and sit at the kitchen table. Gemma makes two sandwiches without ceremony — peanut butter spread evenly, both halves pressed together, cut diagonally. She sets a plate in front of me and sits across the table with her own, bare feet hooked on the chair rung, and takes a bite.
"This is the best date I've ever been on," she says.
I look at her.
She's not faking it. That's what catches me — no brightness turned up for the room, no smile she's managing.
Just her face, open and steady, a smear of peanut butter at the corner of her mouth she hasn't noticed, looking at me like there's nowhere else she'd rather be than in this kitchen that smells like failure and dish soap.
"You're being nice," I say.
"I'm being honest," she says. "Mrs. Delgado's note. Hazel with the phone. Big Jim announcing us like we'd walked into the Super Bowl. And then this." She looks at the sandwich, then back up. "This is the most fun I've had in I don't know how long."
"You have a very low bar for fun," I say.
"I have a well-calibrated one," she says. "Most dates I've been on, everyone's performing. Like the whole point is to convince the other person you're worth their time. This was just—" She gestures around the kitchen, at the open window and the cold draft and the pan that will need soaking. "Real."
My chest doesn't settle the way it should.
"The restaurant being closed was not planned," I say.
"I know. That's what made it great." She's looking at me steadily across a failed attempt at a real date that somehow became one anyway, and I cannot get a read on what's behind her eyes except that she means every word and is waiting to see if I'll believe her.
"You're serious," I say.
"Completely serious," she says.
The refrigerator hums. The window lets in pine and cold air. On the counter behind her, the second ruined pan sits waiting to be dealt with.
"Okay," I say.
She picks up her sandwich and takes another bite.
Walking her to her door shouldn't take any time at all.
It takes longer than it should. The kitchen still smells like smoke, so I push the sliding door open and we end up on the back porch without discussing it, crossing the few feet to her side like we've done it a hundred times.
The porch light is a pale yellow and it catches the loose ends of her hair, and she's still in bare feet and an oversized shirt, and I'm having a harder time than usual not looking directly at her.
She stops at her sliding door. Turns to face me. Up close, there's a warmth in her expression that has nothing to do with performing warmth for anyone's benefit.
"Thank you for dinner," she says, smiling at the absurdity of the word in this context — at the burnt pan and the smoke alarm button I panicked and forgot about. "Both attempts."
"Next time I'll get the reservation right," I say, which comes out like something a person who intends there to be a next time would say.
She goes up on her toes — the same reach as the smoke detector, the same complete commitment to it — and kisses me.
She doesn't make it a question. Her hand comes up and presses flat and warm against my chest, right over my sternum, and she tilts her face up and kisses me like she's made up her mind.
She smells like peanut butter and something underneath it, warm and faint, that I'm going to be thinking about for the foreseeable future.
When she pulls back, her eyes are still closed for a beat. The porch light puts a soft edge on everything. Then she opens them and she's looking at me from close enough that I can see her deciding to speak.
"I figured out a while ago," she says quietly, "that if I waited for you, we'd both be old."
My pulse is doing something I'm choosing not to acknowledge.
"Gemma," I say, and don't get any further than that because I don't know what comes after it except that I mean it, whatever it is.
She pats my chest once, twice, like she's settling something into place. Then she steps back.
"Goodnight, Beck," she says, and disappears inside.
The door clicks shut.
I stand there longer than I should, hand on my own doorknob, the porch gone quiet around the space where her hand was. Whatever I thought I was managing — the careful distance, the coffee without being asked, the not-noticing — she ended all of it on a porch the size of a welcome mat.