Chapter 25
Cooking Lessons
"I want to teach you something," Tessa announced one Sunday in April, standing in the tiny kitchen of Beck's apartment with a grocery bag of ingredients she'd hauled over on the bus, setting it down on the counter with real ceremony.
"Real sauce. Not the jar stuff you people insist on calling marinara like it's an acceptable substitute. "
"You people," Beck repeated, delighted, already pulling up a stool. "I love when you get like this, all territorial about pasta sauce."
"I'm serious. This is a Marchetti family recipe, four generations deep. Poppi would come back from the dead specifically to fight you over that jar in your cabinet, I mean that literally, he had strong opinions about jarred sauce that he was not shy about sharing."
He surrendered his kitchen without complaint, pulling a stool up to the counter to watch as she worked, narrating each step with the exact cadence her mother used, the exact cadence her mother had learned from Grandma, three generations of instruction passed down through a kitchen that no longer existed in the same shape it used to, carried forward instead in Tessa's hands, in a kitchen four hundred miles away, taught now to someone who'd never once tasted the original.
"You have to let the garlic get golden, not brown. Brown means bitter, and bitter garlic ruins the whole pot, no coming back from it. Golden means patient, means you watched it closely enough to catch the exact right moment."
"Golden means patient," he repeated, solemn, like he was memorizing scripture, watching the pan with real focus.
"You crush the tomatoes with your hands, not a blender, never a blender. My great-grandmother would haunt me specifically, cross an ocean to do it, if I used a blender for this."
He tried it, hands sticky with tomato juice up to his wrists, laughing at himself, at the mess of it, and she found herself laughing too, easy and unguarded, teaching him something that mattered to her more than she'd expected it to and watching him take it seriously instead of treating it like a cute bit for her benefit, actually listening to the instructions instead of performing enthusiasm.
They ate the sauce over pasta two hours later, sitting cross-legged on his living room floor because his one kitchen chair had a wobbly leg neither of them trusted with a full plate, and he took one bite and went quiet in a way that made her nervous, setting his fork down slowly.
"What? Is it bad? I can tell if you don't like it, you don't have to pretend—"
"It's the best thing I've ever eaten," he said, and he wasn't joking, wasn't performing, just staring at his plate like it had rearranged something fundamental in him.
"I mean that completely. This tastes like — I don't know how to explain it properly.
It tastes like it has history in it, generations of it.
Like I'm eating something that took decades to get exactly right, and somehow you just handed me the whole thing in one afternoon. "
"It did," she said quietly, something tightening in her throat. "That's exactly what it is, actually. You're not wrong about that."
"Thank you for teaching me. I know I'm never going to make it as good as you do, I already know that, I saw how many small adjustments you made that you didn't even explain out loud.
But I'm going to try, every time, because I want to be someone who knows how to make this properly.
For us. For whatever family we end up building together someday, down the road. "
She hadn't expected to cry over a pot of sauce, but there she was, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand while he laughed gently and pulled her into his side, both of them sitting on the floor of a cramped apartment kitchen that smelled, for one evening, exactly like home used to smell on a Sunday morning.
"I love you," she said, simple and certain, no hesitation in it.
"I love you too," he said. "Golden, not brown. I'm taking good notes, I promise, I'm going to remember every single thing you just taught me."
? ? ?
Sometime in May, after everything — the fight, the reconciliation, the arena, months of steady, unremarkable happiness that felt more precious for how ordinary it had become — Tessa woke up before him on a Sunday morning, sunlight just starting to creep across his bedroom floor, and simply watched him sleep for a while, something she'd never let herself do in the early months, always too careful, too guarded to be caught looking that openly.
He woke slowly, blinking against the light, and caught her watching.
"What?"
"Nothing. Just looking."
"Creepy," he said, but he was smiling, pulling her closer, tucking her against his chest with the easy familiarity of eight months of practice. "Come here. It's early. We don't have anywhere to be for hours."
They stayed like that for a long time, tangled together in unhurried Sunday light, and when it turned into something more, it was slower than anything they'd done before, unhurried in the particular way that only comes after months of actually knowing someone, no nerves left to navigate, no insecurities left to prove wrong, just two people who'd learned each other completely, taking their time because they had all the time in the world now, no reason to rush toward anything.
"I keep thinking about September," she said afterward, tracing lazy patterns on his chest, both of them loose-limbed and unhurried in the warm light.
"The girl who made that list in the car, all the rules about keeping everyone at arm's length.
I don't think she'd believe this if I could go back and show her. "
"What would you tell her? If you could?"
"That the plan was wrong. Not the wanting to protect herself part — that part made sense, given everything.
But the specific shape of the protection.
Building walls doesn't actually keep you safe.
It just makes sure you're alone while you wait to find out whether anyone's worth letting in.
" She kissed his shoulder. "I'd tell her the actual safety comes from learning who's worth the risk, not from refusing to take one at all. "
"Heavy thoughts for a Sunday morning."
"You started it. You let me watch you sleep and then made me feel things."
He laughed, pulling her closer, and they lay there a while longer, unhurried, just morning light and each other and eight months of proof that some risks were worth every single thing they cost to take. A whole summer of long drives and stolen weekends was about to test exactly how true that was.