It was now ten of seven and the frittata I had in the oven still had a few minutes left on it. While it finished, I cut strawberries into halves, then quarters, then a precision no strawberry has ever asked of anyone. There were four shirts on my bedroom floor; the one I had on, soft green, was the one I'd decided looked like I hadn't tried, the trick to which is about an hour of trying. I'd put on the mascara I tell myself doesn't count. I had, in plain fact, put a face on for him, and I was choosing not to follow that thought to where it went.
Under all of it was the one thing I wasn't catastrophizing about at all: that I wanted him to come up that path. That part was simple. It was the only simple thing in the room.
I checked the clock. 6:52. I pulled the frittata out of the oven, hoping it would have a few minutes to cool before he arrived.He started at the shop at eight, and breakfast plus a man who is never late came out to roughly now. I wiped my hands on the tea towel and made my palm go flat on the counter and stay there. The table was set for two, something I had rarely — if ever — done in the four years I had lived here.
A knuckle hit the front door. Two raps, unhurried.
I let out a deep exhale, and went to answer it.
He stood on my porch with the new sun behind him, and the one coherent thought I managed was that it ought to be illegal for a man to be put together like that before seven in the morning. Six four, built by actual work and not by mirrors, dark hair he plainly hadn't run past anyone, whiskey-brown eyes fixed on me over the slow lazy curl of a smile that started at the left corner of his mouth and took its time getting anywhere. He held up a tray of coffee and a paper bag, while I forgot to say good morning.
His eyes went past me to the laid table, the strawberries, the kitchen warm with breakfast. He looked at the fruit and put whatever it was away.
“You cooked.”
“I did.”
“I brought coffee. Figured I'd save you a job.”
“I have coffee.” There was a full pot going cold on the counter, made at five-twenty and abandoned the second the frittata worried me.
He looked at the pot, looked at the tray, and the left side of his mouth went up. “We'll be awake, then.”
“That appears to be the operating assumption.” I stood back. “Come in before my neighbors start a newsletter.”
He came in and the cottage shrank around him. He set the tray down and didn't sit until I waved him at a chair, then pulled it out and sat with his forearms on the wood like he'd been doing it for years.
I cut the frittata and slid a wedge onto his plate. He leaned in to take it and brought his scent with him — sandalwood and warm skin and something underneath it that was just him, all man, and close enough now to fill my whole kitchen.
He pointed his fork at the plate. “This beats anything Dottie's has ever put in front of me.” He cut a glance at the door. “Don't you dare tell her I said that.”
“I'll deny it under oath.”
“Where'd you learn to cook like this?”
“Aunt Lou. She ran a kitchen the whole street walked through, a peach cobbler people planned their week around, and one iron rule — any kid who ate at her table learned to feed themselves first. So we all did, one summer at a time. She wouldn't accept that anybody was helpless.”
“Were you helpless?”
“Deeply.” I smiled. “She kept me anyway.”
He reached over and took a strawberry off the edge of my plate like he'd been doing it for years. I let him. Then he reached into the bag and set a blueberry muffin the size of a softball on a napkin in front of me.
“Oh, yum.” It came out on a breath. “Thank you, Dottie.”
“Breakfast dessert.” He said it like he was reading it off a statute.
I laughed at that. “Is that a thing?”
“Course it's a thing.” He nudged the napkin half an inch closer. “Eat your dessert, Sophia.”
We took the second coffee to the porch — the kitchen had too much in it, and the porch had the morning instead, the cul-de-sac going gold at its edges, a sprinkler ticking two houses down. I sat on the top step. He sat one below it, which put his shoulder by my knee and his forearms along his thighs in the full light, and the forearms were the trouble. They were covered. I'd caught the edge of it at his collar across the road and past hissleeve in the trauma bay, but never sitting still in good light with leave to look. So I looked.
“You're reading me,” he said, not turning his head.
“Occupational hazard. You should see what I put people through in waiting rooms.”
He turned his arm over, the inside of it up to the light. “Go on. Diagnose.”
