“You can sit. The kitchen’s too small for two people. We’d set each other on fire.”
He didn’t sit right away. Instead, he drifted closer and came to stand just behind my shoulder, looking at the pot.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Tomato. My grandmother’s recipe.” I stirred it, very focused on the stirring. He was close enough that I could feel his warmth at my back, and the kitchen was small, and I had not been exaggerating about the fire hazard.
He reached past me, and I thought he was going to take the spoon, but instead his hand came around mine—light, just his fingers closing gently over my wrist—and he guided my handtoward him, tilting the spoon slightly. Not taking over. Just redirecting. I forgot entirely what I’d been about to say.
He bent his head and blew across the surface of the spoon, slow and careful, his eyes coming up to mine over my shoulder as he did it, and the look on his face was so quietly intentional that my stomach turned over completely.
Then he tasted it.
I was looking at him. I was very aware that I was looking at him. I made no effort to stop.
“Good,” he said, low, his fingers still loose around my wrist. He wasn’t looking at the soup anymore.
The word took a second to reach me. “It needs a few more minutes,” I said, which was technically true and also the only sentence I could locate in my scrambled brain.
He let go of my wrist slowly, unhurried, took a small step back, and I turned back to the pot, stirred it with tremendous concentration, and did not say anything for a moment because I needed the moment.
“You can sit,” I squeaked. “Would you like a drink? Oh wait. Tea. Oh my god.”
He sat, obedient, at the small kitchen table where the wildflowers were now presiding. The chair was a little low for him, but he didn’t say anything. He put his hands flat on the table and watched me move around the kitchen with an attention that was neither a stare nor casual.
I tried very hard not to think about it. But I thought about nothing else.
I put the sandwiches into my cast-iron pan with a generous pat of butter and pressed them down with the spatula the way my grandmother had taught me, with a little shimmy at the end for good color. The kitchen filled with the sound and smell of bread crisping in butter, and Jasper made a small appreciative sound behind me that I pretended not to hear.
“So,” I said, over my shoulder, “how’s your morning been?”
“Quiet. I was up early.”
“How early?”
“Earlier than I needed to be.”
I flipped the first sandwich. “Why?”
A small pause. Then, with the faintest edge of amusement: “No comment. Or maybe I was thinking about you.”
The spatula nearly left my hand entirely, but I managed to tighten my grip before it fell to the floor.
I stood there for a second with my back to him, staring at the grilled cheese and silently freaking out a little bit.
He’d said it so easily. That’s what hit me. It wasn’t a test. He just said it, plainly, like it was simply true and he’d decided I could know it. Jasper Dean had been thinking about me. I could either believe that or spend the next ten minutes talking myself out of it. I believed it. That was the terrifying part. I believed it completely.
“Jasper.”
“Mm.”
“You can’t just say things like that.”
“You keep telling me that.”
“Because you keep doing it.” I flipped the second sandwich with slightly more force than was strictly necessary. “Normal people don’t just—say things like that. Casually. While someone is trying to cook.”
“I’m not particularly interested in being normal about this,” he said, from the table, in the tone of a man who was very comfortable with that position.
