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“What did you find? Anything good?”
“Eggs, bacon, cheese, leftover Chinese from the other night. I think there’s chips and salsa and stuff in the pantry,” he said. “I got groceries a few days ago, but supplies are getting low again. There’s bread and shit. You know, peanut butter, jelly.”
“You still like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?” she asked, delighted. “Some things really never change.”
“Hey, you have a thing about doughnuts, I have a thing about PBJ. Everyone’s gotta have a vice.”
“I’m pretty sure that rock star sex gods are supposed to have vices other than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,” she said. “It would ruin your street cred if that ever got out.”
“I think you overestimate how much street cred I might have,” Zach said, bending to take plates out of the cabinet. “And peanut butter and jelly is always pretty easy to find when you’re on the road. It’s my version of comfort food. Dad used to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at midnight and sneak them up to me in my room when Lou wasn’t looking.”
“That definitely sounds like Grey,” Leah said with a smile. “Okay you can have a sandwich, but I think I’m going to make bacon and eggs. Assuming this place has a frying pan of some kind.”
“This place has just about everything,” Zach said. “Dad went all out stocking the guesthouses when he built them. He wanted his friends to be able to do whatever they wanted. Including cooking. Not that I’m sure many of them ever did.” He moved to another cabinet, extracted a frying pan. “If I make toast, do I get some of those bacon and eggs as well?”
“Deal.”
The cooking went fast enough—it wasn’t like bacon and eggs was anything too complicated. And she and Zach moved easily together around the kitchen, passing plates and utensils and ingredients without the need to talk much. Almost as though they had been cooking together for years. Maybe it was all that time they’d spent watching Lou cook in the Harper kitchen as kids, or the time Zach had spent hanging around the Santelli house, angling to get his hands on some of Leah’s mom’s lasagna. Whatever the reason, it was kind of nice.
The bacon and eggs eased some of the rumblings in her belly, and by the time she was finishing her third piece of toast, this one smeared with some of Zach’s peanut butter, she was starting to feel human again. And starting to think a little harder about what they had just done.
Sleeping with Zach. Which, from the point of view of her very satisfied body, was undeniably awesome. But from the point of view of the rest of her life, it also had the potential to be undeniably complicated.
She put down the toast, suddenly not so hungry. “You know, we left the rest of those beers outside.”
“I don’t think a few hours in the open air is going to hurt them,” Zach said, pushing his own plate away. “But I can grab them if you feel like one. They might still be cool.”
She shook her head. “No, it’s a bit late for me. And we have to work tomorrow.” She shifted on the chair.
“Something on your mind?” Zach said, watching her.
“I was thinking that we need to talk about how we can handle this,” she said, waving her hand back and forth between them. “I mean, if this is something you want to keep doing, of course.”
Zach nodded without hesitating. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”
She tried not to feel too pleased about that, but it made her feel ridiculously happy. She smooshed that part of her back under control. “Okay, then we need to talk about it. I mean, do you want everyone to know?”
“Do you?” he parried.
Part of her wanted to shout it from the rooftops. But luckily that wasn’t the part that was in charge. She took a breath. She’d started this whole thing by being honest. No point changing that approach now. “You’re leaving. It seems kind of mean to let everyone get excited about the two of us being together if it’s only a short-term thing.”
“So you don’t want to tell anyone?” Zach asked. He pushed back his chair, expression not quite a frown, but definitely not entirely happy.
“I just think it’s going to cause more trouble than it’s worth,” Leah said. “For one thing, I don’t want to be the ‘got the gig because she was screwing the talent’ girl. And for another, well, you know what your family’s like. Mine’s probably worse. If they think we are seeing each other, they’re going to start spinning all sorts of fantasies in their heads.”
“I think they’re all pretty distracted by Faith and Caleb’s wedding, don’t you?” Zach said.
“In my experience, wedding fever spreads very easily,” Leah said. “I’m not sure why this idea bothers you. I mean, you’re leaving, right? This is temporary. Why make it more complicated than it has to be?”
He shrugged. Then picked up his plate and carried it over to the counter, dropping the silverware into the sink with a little more force than seemed strictly necessary
“Zach?” she said. Lou had raised all her kids to be helpful—they didn’t get out of doing chores around the house just because they were Grey Harper’s kids. But Zach had never struck her as the kind of guy who got up and started doing the dishes straightaway after dinner. The fact he was doing so now meant that he was either pissed off or trying to avoid the rest of this conversation. Well, she wasn’t gonna let that happen. This was something that needed to be sorted out before they went any further. Otherwise someone was going to get hurt. And she didn’t want that someone to be her.
“Where do you keep the dish towels?” she asked, joining him at the sink.
“I was just going to put everything in the dishwasher,” Zach said.
That only confirmed her suspicions. After all, no one who regularly washed dishes would put a cast-iron skillet in the dishwasher. “How about we just finish this conversation? Then we’ll know where we stand.”
