Chapter 13
Chapter thirteen
Ellis made pasta the way other people performed surgery.
Focused, precise, weirdly tense about it.
He’d cleared an entire counter for his mise en place—garlic minced into identical slivers, cherry tomatoes halved and draining on a paper towel, fresh basil he’d bought from the farmers market that morning because the grocery store stuff was, apparently, “an insult.”
“You’re an insane person,” I said from my perch on the opposite counter, bare feet dangling, eating an olive straight from the jar.
“Stop eating the garnish.”
“These aren’t garnish. These are snacks that happen to be near your cooking.”
He pointed the wooden spoon at me. “Out of the olives.”
“Make me.”
His mouth twitched. He turned back to the stove.
This had become our Wednesday. His apartment, his kitchen, his rules.
I contributed nothing to the meal except commentary and the occasional playlist, which Ellis tolerated as long as I didn’t put on reggaeton while he was trying to concentrate.
He’d banned it after the time I’d started dancing behind him and he’d almost dropped a saucepan of boiling water.
Fair.
The apartment smelled like garlic and something green, the basil maybe, or just the fact that his apartment was basically a greenhouse.
His fiddle-leaf fig cast long shadows across the kitchen from the window, and the trailing pothos above the sink had grown so far down it brushed the faucet.
I’d started thinking of the plants as roommates.
The fern in the bathroom was Jack. The pothos was Diane.
I hadn’t told Ellis this yet because I was saving it for a moment when he least expected it.
“Hand me the red pepper flakes.” He pointed. “Top shelf, behind the cumin.”
I hopped off the counter, reached up over his shoulder and grabbed the jar. But instead of handing it over, I stayed. My chest against his back, chin near his shoulder, watching his hands work.
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t stiffen. Just leaned back into me half an inch, adjusting to the new weight the way a plant leans toward light.
“You’re in my cooking zone.”
“Your cooking zone is my favorite zone.”
“That doesn’t make grammatical sense.”
“I don’t care.” I set the red pepper flakes on the counter beside the stove and stayed where I was. His shoulder blades moved against my chest as he stirred, and the kitchen was warm, and the light through the window had gone golden with the last hour of sun, and the words arrived.
Not quite a thought. The truth landing before my brain could filter it.
“I love you.”
The spoon stopped moving.
For a second, I wasn’t sure which one of us had said it.
The words had come from somewhere south of my brain.
Chest, maybe, or gut, wherever the real stuff sits before your mouth gets involved.
I’d bypassed every filter I had, every instinct that usually intercepted declarations before they could land.
Ellis turned around. Slowly, the way you turn toward a sound you weren’t expecting.
“What?”
“You heard me.” My heart was doing something stupid and fast and I couldn’t take it back, didn’t want to, but my hands had gone cold and there was a ringing in my ears that sounded suspiciously like twenty-four years of emotional self-preservation screaming at me to laugh it off.
I didn’t laugh it off.
“I love you,” I said again, steadier this time, looking right at him. “I don’t know when it happened. Somewhere between the first time you stayed the night and now, watching you stress over pasta. But yeah. That’s what this is.”
His eyes went wide, then soft, then scared, then something I didn’t have a name for. His hand was still holding the spoon. A drop of sauce fell on the floor, and neither of us looked at it.
“I love you, too.” His voice cracked on the last word. “That terrifies me.”
“Why?”
“Because what if I’m not good at this?”
The question hung there, naked and so perfectly Ellis that my chest ached with it. Not “what if I don’t mean it” or “what if it goes wrong”—what if I’m not good at this. Like love was a skill he hadn’t trained enough, a project he might fail if he didn’t execute it correctly.
“You’re already good at this. You’ve been good since you made me coffee the first morning you stayed over. You remembered I take it with too much sugar.”
“That’s just paying attention.”
“Yeah. That’s love. Paying attention.”
He set the spoon down on the counter. Turned off the burner. Looked at me with those hazel eyes that had hooked me under fluorescent gym lighting and held me every day since.
“Say it again.”
“I love you.”
“Once more.”
“I love you, Ellis. I love your color-coded watering schedule, your sprint reviews, and the way you argue with recipes when they’re wrong. I love that you bought a plant humidifier last week and didn’t tell me because you thought I’d make fun of you.”
“You would have.”
“Absolutely. But I would have loved you while doing it.”
He crossed the two feet between us, cupped my face in both hands, his palms still warm from the stove, and kissed me. Like he’d decided I was his and he was mine and the math finally worked.
The kiss didn’t end. It drifted, the way sleep drifts in, no clear moment of crossing over. His hands stayed on my face. Mine found the small of his back, his hip, the place his shirt rode up over the waistband of his jeans where his skin ran warm.
He pulled back enough to look at me. Not for permission. For something else. Like he wanted the picture of this before anything else happened.
“Bedroom.”
I nodded.
He took my hand and led me. Not like the other times we’d ended up in his bed.
Not the ones that started with him pinned to a wall, or me on the couch with his thigh between mine; the kind of want that didn’t bother with rooms. This had no urgency in it.
He walked me down the short hall like he’d been waiting all night for the right song to come on.
His bedroom held the last of the marigold light through the slatted blinds. The plants in the corner threw soft shadows across the duvet. Sandalwood from the candle on his dresser. The faint green smell of his apartment under everything else.
He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled me to stand between his knees.
His hands moved up under the hem of my t-shirt.
Slow. Palms flat against my ribs, learning the shape of me like he hadn’t already learned it a dozen times.
He pushed the cotton up over my chest, and I lifted my arms, and the shirt landed somewhere behind him.
His eyes traced the line from my collarbone to my shoulder to the place my jaw met my ear.
Then he leaned forward and pressed his mouth to my sternum.
Just there. The warmth of his lips, the faint scrape of stubble, the slow exhale of his breath against my skin.
My hand went to the back of his head; his hair shorter than mine, soft under my fingers. He stayed there a long moment. Like he wanted to listen to my heart from the outside.
“I love you.” Quieter the second time. Said into my chest, not into the room.
The words landed somewhere deeper than my ears. Lower. The place words go when you don’t have a defense ready.
“I love you.”
He pulled me down with him.
We ended up against the doorframe of his bedroom, my back against the molding, his thigh between mine, his mouth at my throat.
The golden light from the slatted blinds striped his face.
The candle by his bed had only been burning long enough to push sandalwood into the room.
His plants cast soft shadows across the floor.
“This isn’t the bed,” he murmured.
“Beds are overrated.”
“They really aren’t.”
I pulled his shirt off. The barbells caught the candle.
The Libre tattoo flexed under his hand. We took the rest of our clothes off in pieces against the doorframe, jeans landing in the doorway between his bedroom and the hall, neither of us bothered.
My cock came free with the metal at the tip already wet.
His came free a beat later, longer, leaner, the head already flushed dark pink where he’d been hard for the last twenty minutes through his jeans.
He pressed his forehead to mine. His hand wrapped around me without ceremony, slow, the heel of his palm dragging up the underside of my shaft. His thumb caught the bead at the tip and dragged through the pre-cum there, slicking it down. The metal warmed under his palm.
“I want to do something tonight I haven’t done with you yet.”
I went still.
“Tell me.”
“The conversation.” He swallowed. Touched the underside of me, gently, where the metal sat. His thumb pressed against the bead on the bottom side, the one most people never knew was there, and a slow heat banked low in my stomach. “The longer one.”
Heat pooled low. I didn’t answer right away.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ve been reading about it.”
I laughed. “Of course you have.”
“I take research seriously.”
“So I keep learning.”
He took my hand and led me to the bed. Climbed up onto the duvet with knees folded under him and pulled me up with him.
The sheets were warm. The candle on the dresser drew a wedge of light across his collarbone and down across the lean line of his stomach, where his cock stood hard against him, a curve up toward his navel, a bead of pre-cum catching the light.
“Where do you want me?”
“Up against the headboard. I want to look up at you the whole time.”
I climbed up and settled back against the headboard, pillows banked behind me.
He crawled between my thighs and rested his palm flat against my chest, over my heart, the way I’d done for him the first time.
His other hand wrapped loose around me. The candlelight turned the wet at my tip into a small bright thing.
“Tell me what to do.”
“Take your time. Slow. Not the metal first. Skin first. Mouth.”