Chapter Twenty-Seven
We stay loving carrot cake.
Elodie
After lunch at Sweet & Salty, an extremely short jaunt through town, and a detour to pick up Mars from next door, Lyra, Jove, and I sit at their kitchen counter snacking on leftovers from last night as we watch Mars and Roman dance around the kitchen together.
It’s a dance of an entirely different sort than we had last night—more elegant, more graceful, but no more or less beautiful.
“It’s like watching a ballet,” Lyra whispers. “They move together like they’ve always done it.”
Roman’s head ducks down to pipe the border of a small cake as Mars reaches over him to get orange food coloring from a cabinet. They miss each other by centimeters.
“So what,” Jove grunts, “Mars and I do this all the time.”
My brows rise. Is he…
Oh my gosh.
He is.
He’s pouting.
The big, scary man is pouting .
Lyra and I share an amused look, then tune back in to the show.
“Need orange in five,” Roman mutters.
“Orange incoming,” Mars returns, setting the dye next to a small batch of cream frosting.
Roman finishes his border and sets aside the used-up icing bag, swiftly switching to the bowl and mixing in just enough orange dye for his carrots to give an air of pastel spring goodness and not neon bright kids’ TV show.
A small sauce dish of icing to the side is given the same treatment, but with green.
Once his frosting is ready, he sets up two new piping bags, choosing tips from the assortment Mars has laid out to test him. At least thirty decorating tips wait in a line for Roman to mess up. They find themselves disappointed when he picks two quickly and Mars claps his approval.
“You’re doing so well,” he purrs. “A worthy protégé.”
Roman’s shoulders wiggle, and his ears turn red.
Heh. Somebody’s uncomfortable with praise.
Jove sniffs.
Lyra chokes on a laugh, and I snicker.
“It’s okay,” she soothes. “You’re still number one in his heart.”
Jove crosses his arms and glares at Roman.
“You can’t slash his tires. If you slash his tires, he’ll have to stay longer.”
Jove’s bottom lip pushes out further, and I reach past Lyra to pat him on the back. “I know, big man. I know.”
He harrumphs, and Lyra scoots her barstool closer to him, the better to distract him from his pain, I assume.
“We’re nearly done,” Roman mutters, bending over the cake. “I just need to add the carrot greens.”
“The best part of the carrot,” I spout automatically.
He pauses his work to squint at me.
I smile, all innocence. Hi, hello, angel Elodie here. I would not be poking fun at your many, many lectures about carrot greens. No, sir. No way.
He returns to his piping with a grumbled, “They’re rich in Vitamin C.”
Of course they are. Very important.
“We cut ours up for salads and share with Gingerbread, our hamster,” Mars says. “Much like the buffalo, the carrot has usefulness in all its parts.”
Roman concurs, straightening from his cake with a nod. He sets the piping bag down, steps back, and wipes his hands on the peach-printed apron he borrowed from Lyra. Heaving a breath, his hands go to his hips as he declares, “I’m done.”
Mars approaches, bending to examine minute details. He spins the cake, letting no carrot go unseen from his watchful eye.
Finally, he rises, turns to Roman, and slaps his hands down on the other man’s shoulders. A tear shimmers in his eye. “You’ve done well, my child. Now, we taste.”
Roman stands stock still as Mars retrieves a knife, then cuts the petite cake into fourths, doling it out onto plates and passing them around. Jove, Lyra, Roman, and Mars each get a plate.
“Hey!” I protest as the final plate is handed to Roman. “Where’s mine?”
Mars blinks, eyes wide and innocent. “Are you and Roman not sharing again?”
My eyes narrow.
“We are,” Roman answers, coming around the counter to sit next to me.
“Don’t be rude to Mars, Sweet. If this goes well, we’ll have unlimited carrot cake at home.
Sharing one time isn’t the deprivation you think it is.
” He twists on his stool to face me, then grabs the bottom of mine and drags until I’m sat between his legs and I have to choose to either turn away or put my legs over his thigh if I want any semblance of comfort.
Roman makes the decision for me, sliding an arm under my knees and lifting them over his leg.
“I want a big piece,” I complain. “And for you to stop manhandling me.”
“I’ll give you most of it,” he murmurs, focus shifting to our slice. “I only need a few bites to know if I’ve done it right.”
“And the manhandling?”
He shrugs, finding a lock of my hair to wrap around his fist.
Yeah, I figured. Character development, my behind.
“The texture looks right,” he says, cutting one of the points off our triangle of cake. He lifts it to his face, peering at the confection. “Taste test.”
My eyes widen as he presents the bite to me. “Don’t you want to taste it yourself first?”
“No.”
Oh. Well. Okay, then.
Who am I to protest?
I shrug, open my mouth, and let the carrot yum come to me.
Blessings and goodness and all things delicious, this is incredible .
I make a grab for the plate. Roman can taste this next time. This one is mine.
He huffs, nimbly moving the plate out of my reach.
“Roman!” I protest.
“I’ll give it back after I’ve had a bite myself,” he snorts. “I’m glad to see that it meets your approval, though.”
“Yeah, my approval being the only one that matters. Try it next time. This time, I want. I need. Give, now.”
His lips twitch, and he enacts a game of psychological torture. He cuts into my cake. He brings the forkful of my cake to his mouth. He puts my cake in his mouth .
I whimper.
His eyes crinkle at me, and he gives my hair a tug.
“It’s perfect,” Mars declares.
Pleased, Roman agrees, which means…
I make another grab for the plate. “You’ve had your bite,” I say. “Gimme.”
He chuckles low in his throat, and it’s enough of a shock to pull me out of my carrot cake tunnel vision.
“Did you just… laugh?”
He smiles… smiles at me and shrugs.
My jaw drops. “Did you just laugh and smile? A whole full-out smile?”
I’ve known Roman for years , and I haven’t once seen him smile. A twitch of the lips? Sure. An amused eye crinkle? Yeah. A smile though? With teeth ? No. Not at all, not ever. And I live with the man.
He has the same slightly crooked canine as Ruby does.
“You’re being cute,” he replies, like that has anything to do with anything.
“I’m always cute.”
His !! smile !! softens. “Yeah, you are.”
I blink.
He slides the cake to me.
“You’re being weird.”
He rolls his smiling eyes. “Eat the cake, Elodie, before I do.”
I jolt, snatching the fork out of his hand and hunkering down over my cake. He can be weird and smiley and laughy all he wants, I guess, but he is not eating any more of this yumminess. A girl has to have a line somewhere.
Thankfully, he doesn’t seem to have any illusions about me sharing, and I’m able to eat my cake in peace while he twirls my hair in his hand and talks to Mars about “the ideal carrot." The ideal carrot being, in my opinion, whichever one you can shred and stick into a cake.
Dessert time ends sooner than any of us would like, and we disperse.
Mars goes home to Ceres, who, according to him, “simply cannot go any longer outside of my presence.” Lyra leaves, too, to work at her plant nursery for a few hours, and Jove disappears into his office to “stare at a blinking cursor in a mostly blank document.” Roman and I, left alone with no responsibilities and a world of options, decide to nap.
My second nap in two days. Ruby will be so proud.
I change into a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt in the bathroom, and when I get back to the bedroom, Roman’s changed into sweatpants himself. And that’s it.
Sweatpants.
Without. A. Shirt.
Freckles dust his back, flowing down his arms and up into his hair. They shift when he bends to snap the covers on the trundle back before he climbs in and haphazardly tosses them over his body, only covering a fifth of his exposed torso.
Shoulders. Chest. Stomach. Freckles. All of them so… out . In the open. Staring at me.
“Would you like to cop a feel, too, or just leer?”
I startle, and fire creeps up my neck. “I’m not leering!”
He yawns, stretching his arms above his head. The freckles shift on the muscle of his chest… arms… stomach…
My goodness.
I, unfortunately, leer.
It’s not like I’ve never seen him without his shirt on.
I’ve gone swimming with him and Ruby lots of times, and more than once we’ve crossed paths in the hallway at home with him sans an appropriate amount of clothing.
I’ve never done much more than glance before, because, yeah, he’s got a seriously appreciable physique going on, but…
He’s Roman , the big, giant jerk I know, so ew.
Except. You know. All that character growth he’s been doing, making his personality a lot more palatable, which makes his body…
A lot more palatable.
“Are you going to climb in bed with me?” he asks. “Because if you do want a feel, I’d prefer we do it in the bigger bed. As I’ve mentioned, this bed is not of an adequate size for me, so no chance it would hold both of us.”
That snaps me out of it. “No one is climbing into bed with anyone. Don’t be stupid.”
He hums, running a hand down his chest to his stomach. I avert my gaze.
“If you say so.”
I absolutely say so.
Hustling to my bed, I burrow under the covers and turn my back to him. No more leering. No more freckles. No more laughs or smiles. No more Roman being weird, period. Just me, the wall, and a nap.
And if I dream of Roman’s freckles…
Mind your business.