“Like what?”
“I’d like to write a cookbook someday,” I said, quickly, like it was a foolish dream. “I’d probably have to let Laurel start managing my online life if I really want to accomplish that.”
“Hey,” Everett said, turning me gently toward him. When I looked at him, he shook his head, brow furrowed like he’d caught on to the tone of my answer. “No. That’s a great thing to want, Sutton. You can do that if you want to.”
I nodded toward him. “I’d need your input,” I said.
Everett laughed softly. “How’s that?”
“You’d have to let me know if the recipes read well, from the perspective of a home cook.”
“You overestimate my abilities,” Everett said.
“That soup last night says different.”
Everett’s eyes sparkled at this, his hands locking around my back so our chests touched. I kept my head tilted back, looking at him, ran my hands over his shoulders. “I mostly learned to cook to impress you,” he said.
“You learned how to properly dice an onion so I’d agree to spend two extra days with you at a beach house?” I asked. Even as I joked about it, the idea planted something in me, spreading roots from my chest.
Everett’s expression shifted. I understood enough about him then to know that serious conversations sometimes felt dangerous, like he had to keep some sort of smile on his face or laugh in his voice in case things went sideways. But he looked at me like he wanted this part of things to be committed to memory, like even if it went poorly, we’d both remember the good. “I think it was always about more than two days with you, Sutton,” he said. “There were just too many other things standing in our way.”
I nodded, but I couldn’t quite look at him when I replied. “We promised everyone we wouldn’t do anything like this.”
“Maybe,” Everett said. His tone drew my gaze back up to his. “I think we’ve also gotten in our own way well enough.”
“What about now?” I asked, breath catching in my throat as I waited for him to answer. It felt so frightening that I wished I could laugh my way through it, turn it into a joke if his answer didn’t live up to what I wanted him to say.
“I’d like to help you with that cookbook,” he said, eyes hopeful. It wasn’t the fulllet’s stop getting in the way of ourselves nowI’d imagined. But it felt somehow better, bigger, a stepping into each other’s full lives that we hadn’t worked our way to yet.
My fingers drifted into his hair, and I bit down on a smile as I said, “I’d like to come see how you make one of your movies.”
A small exhale shook out of him, almost a laugh but not quite. “Yeah?” he asked, his grip on me tightening.
“Yeah,” I said. It was as big a promise as we’d ever made to each other.
When we got back to my apartment that afternoon, he immediately fell into place in my kitchen, like he belonged there.
It wasn’t until after we’d eaten that it came up. The big, unspoken thing sitting in the middle of this day.
“Only three weeks until the trip,” Everett said. We were on my couch, dishes drying in the rack in my kitchen. I was holding my glass of wine against my knee, twirling it between my fingers. This stopped me. “Everyone will be there this year.”
“No small feat,” I said.
“We haven’t talked about staying,” he said.
“No,” I said. I took a sip of my wine, set it on the table, dragged a hand through my hair.
“Maybe it’s time that tradition died,” Everett said, almost cautiously.
I faked a pouty frown. “You don’t want to spend two days alone with me anymore?”
He laughed and hooked his hands behind my knees, tugging me over to him so my legs were slung across his lap. I smiled as his hands skimmed up to my face, one thumb brushing over my lips before he said his next words. “Maybe we should tell everyone,” he said. “About this.”
I captured his wrist in my hand, placed my fingers over where I could feel his pulse. Fast. Like mine. “What is this?” I asked.
Everett’s mouth went soft. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t feel like we’re just summer people anymore. I want to find out what this is.” He brushed my hair behind my ear, let his hand linger there. “And I know I don’t want to keep hiding it from everyone.”
I turned my head to the side so I could kiss his palm, looked at him again. “I don’t want to hide it anymore either. But they might be angry with us.”
