It’s always him.
Everything, everywhere, every goddamn second, it’s him. At least, until two nights agobefore gravity happened, and suddenly it’s not always him. Suddenly, every second has turned into every minute. Everything, everywhere, now has two faces, and that’s not the way it’s supposed to be.
The first batch comes out wrong. Too dense, not enough sugar, something off about the texture.
I eat one standing over the sink, and it tastes like nothing, and I make another batch. This one burns slightly at the edges. I make another.
The kitchen fills with warmth and the smell of cinnamon and something that keeps almost being right and isn't, and I can't stop. I need it to be right. I need it to taste like the ones he made. It has to be exactly like his because I need a dose of nostalgia. I need reminders of him before two faces turn into one, and I don’t even have a picture of him, or a shirt that smells like him, or anything to make sure the face I see is his, and not?—
"Sophia."
I jolt, the spatula clinking loudly against the mixing bowl. When I look up, Ian’s in the doorway. Hair disheveled, no shirt, sweatpants hanging low, and it’s not like I’ve never seen the sleep-drunk Ian. I have. Multiple times.
But this time it hits differently, in a way I don’t know how to make sense of.
My gaze drags over the hard planes of his shoulders, the faint sheen of sweat on his skin, the way those sweatpants cling to the powerful lines of his thighs and the unmistakable outline beneath them.
Heat floods low, sudden and treacherous, a sharp pulse of pure want that steals my breath. Suddenly, it’s much harder, much messier to draw the line between wanting what almost happened on the step to happen and knowing it absolutely should not.
His eyes move across the kitchen—the three muffin tins, the cooling racks, the flour on every surface, the bowl I'm currently mixing a fourth batch in—and something moves through his face.
"Hey." He comes in slowly, the way you approach something that might startle. "What's happening?"
I clear my throat, straighten my composure, and focus on the bowl in front of me. "I'm baking."
"I can see that." He looks at the racks. "Sophia, there are thirty muffins in this kitchen."
"The first batch was wrong."
“So you decided to bake four more batches?”
I keep mixing. "They’re all wrong.”
Ian’s standing on the other side of the counter now, and I do everything I can to not look at him, trying to push the image of Reth’s face to the foreground.
“Crazy, how can five batches all be wrong?”
“The texture. The taste. They're not—" I stop.
Ian is quiet for a moment. He pulls out a chair and sits at the table, not trying to take anything from me, just present. Watching.
"Not what?" he asks carefully.
I don't answer. I pour batter into the tin, and my hands are shaking slightly, and I don't know when that started.
"Sophia."
"He made them." The words come out before I can stop them, and I pick up the tin. "At the house in the mountains. And in Paris." My throat closes. "I need them to taste like his. I don't know why I need that. I just need something to feel like him right now, and I can't find it, I can't find it anywhere.It's like he's?—"
"Hey." Ian stands.
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine."
"I'm fine. I just need to get the recipe right. I need to?—"
"Sophia." He's beside me now, and his hand covers mine on the baking tray, stilling it. "Stop."
