I pressed my lips together and looked at the sandwiches and said nothing, because there was nothing to say to that, because he’d just told me clearly and without any room for misinterpretation that whatever this was, he was doing it onpurpose, and that information was currently making it very difficult to remember how grilled cheese worked.
“Oh my god,” I said, which was not my most articulate moment.
I heard the quiet sound of him shifting in his chair, and when I glanced back over my shoulder, he was leaning forward with his elbows on the table, chin resting on his joined hands, watching me with an expression that was doing things it had absolutely no right to be doing. Calm. Interested. The faintest suggestion of a smile at the corner of his mouth, like he was enjoying himself and had decided not to hide it.
“Maybe you should stop reacting so well,” he said. “You’re too cute for your own good.”
I turned back to the stove. “That is not helpful advice.”
“It’s honest advice.”
“Same problem.” I slid the sandwiches onto plates with tremendous concentration. My ears were red again. I could feel them. “You’re very smug for someone sitting at my kitchen table eating my food.”
“I haven’t eaten it yet,” he teased.
“You’re going to be smug about that too, I can already tell.”
He laughed—low and genuine.
I pointed the spatula at him without turning around. “I am going to feed you, and then I am going to ask you to leave before I burst into flames.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Jasper.”
He was laughing quietly behind me. Not out loud. It was a laugh that was really just an exhale through his nose and a slight shake of the shoulders. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it, and it did something to my knees I was not prepared to examine. I flipped the second sandwich and got myself together.
Wentworth hopped up on the chair directly next to Jasper and stared up at him with unblinking devotion, his tail curled primly around his paws, his head tilted just slightly to one side. Jasper looked down at him.
“He’s watching me.”
“He’s adoring you. There’s a difference.”
“What do I do?”
“Nothing. Just exist. He’s in the evaluation phase.”
“He already head-butted me in the hallway.”
“That was the preliminary evaluation. This is the extended one.”
Jasper looked back at Wentworth. Wentworth did not blink. Jasper slowly, carefully, reached out one hand and offered two fingers for Wentworth to sniff, and Wentworth immediately shoved his entire face into Jasper’s palm and started purring so loudly I could hear it from the stove.
“I think I passed,” Jasper said.
“You passed.”
Darcy, over on the windowsill, watched all of this with the deeply offended expression of a cat whose authority was being undermined. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing and went back to the stove.
I plated everything and brought it to the table—soup in two of my favorite mismatched bowls, sandwiches cut diagonally the way my grandmother had always cut them, a small dish of extra cheese off to the side because I couldn’t help it, a little plate of basil torn by hand. I sat down across from him, and he waited until I’d picked up my own spoon before he picked up his. I filed that away with everything else. Manners. He was irresistible in every way.
He took a bite of the sandwich. His eyes closed for a second. “This is really good.”
“It’s grilled cheese. Simple.”
“It’sreally goodgrilled cheese.”
“It’s the gruyere.”
