We pushed past my sister and started unpacking the groceries in the kitchen.
Mattie stood in the doorway, watching us. “Um, you really don’t have to do this.”
“What’s going on here?” Giles asked, walking in and standing behind his wife. He wrapped his arms around her and rested his chin in the crook of her neck.
“Oliver and Frankie are making us dinner,” Mattie said through a wide fake smile. “Isn’t that nice?”
Oliver and I smiled at each other, taking pleasure in my sister’s obvious unease.
“We aren’t going to poison you,” I said, taking out the bell peppers from the bag and pulling open drawers in search of a cutting board.
Giles stepped around Mattie into the kitchen and pulled open a drawer by the stove. He produced a wooden cutting board and handed it to me.
“I wanted to do something to show my appreciation for you both letting me stay here for the past month.”
“I thinktakingus out to dinner would suffice,” Mattie grumbled, looking over my shoulder to see what I had procured.
“Frankie and I are naturals in the kitchen,” Oliver added, pulling out some more items from the bags.
“You’re going to wash that, right?” Mattie squeaked when I set the peppers on the cutting board.
Oliver and I glanced at each other.
“Of course. I was about to do that,” I lied, moving to the sink and rinsing off all the produce we’d picked up.
“What brought on this sudden domestication urge?” Mattie asked.
Giles had grabbed her arm, forcing her to take a few steps back from the kitchen. She still eyed us warily as if dying to intervene. As if she had any sort of culinary skills to speak of. I think I’d seen her boil water once since I’d arrived here.
“Oliver wanted to learn how to cook,” I said, chopping the peppers into uneven squares.
Oliver placed a pan on the stove and turned on the gas before dropping the beef we’d purchased into the pan. “We figured it’d be fun,” he said.
“So fun.” Mattie looked desperate to interfere but Giles chuckled.
“It’ll be fine, babe. Let them cook.”
“Yeah, listen to your husband,” I said, waving my knife. “Let us cook.”
“I guess…I guess we’ll wait in the living room?” It came out like a question.
“You two go relax,” I said, shooing them away with my other hand. “We’ll let you know if we need anything.”
Oliver snickered next to me as he attempted to break up the ground beef with a spoon. He’d pulled up a recipe for tacos on his phone. We both peered over it to reference it. Lines formed between his eyebrows as he studied the recipe, his concentration making him look endearingly adorable.
“Do you think we’ll be better at this or bartending?” he asked.
“I resent that question. I’m an excellent bartender.”
He smirked, eyeing me.
Just then, the meat sizzled aggressively and he jerked away from the stove.
“Shit,” he muttered before turning the heat down.
I giggled. “Off to a solid start.”
“Hey, the stove is sensitive,” he complained.
