10. Zuri
ZURI
He brought groceries, which was so aggressively domestic that I almost laughed in his face.
Tasha was on my couch when he knocked. She'd been there since ten, painting her toenails and providing unsolicited commentary on my life choices, which was her love language.
She looked at the door. Looked at me. "That's him."
"That's him."
She stood up slowly, cotton balls still wedged between her toes, and opened the door before I could stop her.
Liam stood there holding two reusable bags from Whole Foods like they contained classified documents. His face did something complicated when he realized it wasn't me.
"Liam Cavanaugh?" She looked him up and down. Took her time. "Tasha Brooks. You burn my girl's rice, I burn your building."
"Understood."
"I wasn't asking for confirmation. I was informing you of the terms." She kissed my cheek, grabbed her bag, and paused in the doorway on her way out. "You did good, firing your friend like that. I still think you're a lot. But you did good."
Then she was gone, and it was just the two of us and two bags of groceries and the particular silence of an apartment that had been rearranged, invisibly, by the fact that he was allowed in it now.
"That was liking me?" he asked.
"That was her not closing the door in your face. Trust me. It's progress."
"I'm not cooking for you," I added as he stepped inside. "I just want to be clear about that."
"I'm cooking for you." He said it with the same certainty he used in boardrooms, which would have been insufferable except he was also holding long-grain rice, tomatoes, and smoked turkey sausage.
He'd done the research.
I perched on a counter-height stool — the only comfortable seat at eight months pregnant that didn't require an engineering degree — and watched him ruin my grandmother's red-rice recipe twice before tomato sauce splashed the front of his dress shirt.
"Take that off before it sets," I said. I handed him an old college T-shirt from the laundry basket by the hall.
It was mine, technically, though the shoulders had always been too wide.
On him it was still too small. He changed in the bathroom, returned in suit pants and borrowed cotton, and submitted himself to the stove again.
On the third attempt, I took the wooden spoon out of his hand and showed him how to bloom the tomato paste without burning it.
"You're stirring too fast," I told him. "Red rice doesn't reward impatience. You have to let the grains tell you when they're ready."
"The rice doesn't talk."
"The rice absolutely talks. You just don't speak the language yet. My grandmother — Elise — used to say the pot knows if you're rushing because you're scared of something. She'd have made you start over from scratch. Twice. Just to teach you patience wasn't optional."
"What was she scared of? Your grandmother."
"Nothing, by the time I knew her. She'd already survived everything worth being scared of.
" I handed him back the spoon. "She taught my mother this red rice standing in a kitchen not much bigger than this one.
It's the one thing that's come down clean through three generations of Black Southern women who didn't inherit much else.
No property, no money, no man who stuck around long enough to leave anything behind.
Just the recipe, and the specific patience it takes to make it right. "
"Then I really shouldn't be the one making it."
"You're not making it. You're learning it. There's a difference, and my grandmother would tell you the difference is the whole point."
He looked at me — standing at my stove in his suit pants and a borrowed t-shirt too small across his shoulders, tomato paste on his wrist — and his whole face went quiet. Not strategizing. Not calculating. Just present.
The red rice came out decent. Not great. We ate on my couch with our legs tangled together, the baby kicking against his thigh every time I shifted.
"I want to talk about the nursery," I said, when the plates were empty. "Not tonight. But soon. I've been putting it off because doing it alone felt like admitting something I wasn't ready to admit."
"I'd like to build it. If that's something you'd let me do."
"I'm not letting you buy your way into this. I've seen what you do with a company chair. I don't need a five-thousand-dollar crib because you can't resist solving a problem with money."
"I hear you." He held up both hands. "No solving with money. I'm asking to put together furniture badly and read instructions twice and probably still get it wrong. That's not money. That's a Saturday."
I considered it. Considered him. "Two Saturdays from now.
You bring the crib — a normal one, nothing that requires an engineer — and I pick the color.
Sage, probably. Or the yellow Tasha keeps sending me links for.
If you show up with anything gender-reveal-adjacent, glitter cannons, balloons, any of it, I will end this before it starts. "
"Understood. No cannons."
"And you don't get her room. That's mine to design. You get to hold the drill and hand me things."
"I can hold a drill."
"We'll see."
It was, I realized, the first future tense either of us had used out loud — not if this works but two Saturdays from now, like the calendar itself had quietly agreed to keep us both on it.
"There's a rocking chair," I said, more to myself than to him. "In my mother's attic in Charlotte. It was my grandmother's. I want it in there, not something new. I don't care if it doesn't match anything."
"Then we'll drive up and get it. Whenever you want. I'll rent whatever we need to haul it, and I promise not to suggest buying a new one instead, even though some competitive instinct in me is already flinching at that sentence."
"Good instinct to flinch and ignore."
"I'm working on it."
We didn't finish the movie. Somewhere after the opening credits, he kissed me.
Or I kissed him. The choreography was unclear and didn't matter.
What mattered was the way his mouth felt on mine — careful at first, the way he'd been careful about everything since he showed up at my door that morning.
Like he was waiting for permission. Like he understood that every touch had to be earned now, not assumed.
"You don't have to be gentle," I said against his mouth. "I already let you in. You don't have to keep asking."
His hands stilled on my waist. His forehead pressed against mine. I could feel his breath — warm, unsteady.
"I'm always going to ask." His voice was quiet. Certain. "That's the deal."
The deal. My word, not his, and he was using it like he understood what it meant.
Okay, something inside me whispered. Not my brain — my brain was still running risk assessments and contingency plans. Something lower. Something that had been waiting for eight months to exhale. Okay. This one. This time.
I took his hand and put it on my belly — not on the bump, but on the space where my hip met my waist, the territory that was still just me, just skin and nerve endings and the particular sensitivity that pregnancy had turned into something almost unbearable.
His thumb traced the edge of my hip bone, slow and deliberate, and I felt the touch all the way to my spine.
"Bedroom," I said. Not a question.
He helped me off the couch without making it awkward, which was a miracle given that getting vertical required the strategic deployment of both his arms and my remaining core strength.
I led him down the hallway — my hallway, my apartment, my space — and the fact that he was following me, not leading, mattered more than I could articulate.
My bedroom smelled like lavender and the pregnancy pillow that took up seventy percent of the bed. The sheets were clean because Tasha had done laundry yesterday. The lamp on the nightstand cast the room in warm gold.
I pulled my sweatshirt over my head. No performance.
No careful angle to hide the belly. Just me — eight months pregnant, stretch marks mapped across my sides like tributaries, skin darker than it had been in May.
He watched me with an expression I'd only seen once before: that night at the summit, when I'd let him see me for the first time.
"Your turn," I said.
He pulled the borrowed T-shirt off. In the lamplight, his chest was broader than I remembered — or maybe my perspective had changed, now that I knew what those arms felt like when they were wrapped around me at midnight.
He wasn't the man from the summit anymore.
He was the man who'd fired his oldest friend, restructured his company, remembered a meal I'd mentioned once, and learned to wait.
I stepped into his space. Put my palm flat against his chest. Felt his heart hammering under my hand — fast, erratic, the heartbeat of a man who was terrified and certain at the same time.
"Lie down," I told him.
He did. On my bed, in my sheets, in the space I'd built for myself and the baby and no one else. He lay there and looked up at me with dark eyes and the kind of patience that I was starting to understand wasn't strategy. It was worship.
I climbed over him carefully, knees on either side, the bump settling between us. His hands found my thighs — warm, steadying, not guiding. I braced my palms on his chest and looked down at him.
"Rules," I said.
"Okay."
"Don't tell me I'm beautiful. Don't tell me you love me. Don't say anything that sounds like a speech." My voice was steady but my hands weren't. "If this is real, it doesn't need narration."
His mouth twitched. Almost a smile. "Can I tell you the rice was actually terrible?"
I laughed. A real laugh — the kind that started in my belly and vibrated through both of us, the kind that made the baby roll in protest. His hands tightened on my thighs and he was laughing too, and the laughter cracked open something that all the serious conversations and board meetings and midnight confessions hadn't been able to reach.