He wasn’t ashamed of me. I believed that. He was scared of what being with me meant for every other part of his life. The parts I didn’t touch. The rooms I wasn’t allowed in yet.
I understood it.
That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.
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 hewas 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 beforethey 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.”
