Page 22 of Her Age Gap Match

"Sauce doesn't rush." He moved to a cabinet and opened it, pulled out a bottle of red wine, and held it up to me in a question.

“Yes please,” I said.

He poured two glasses, slid one across the island toward me, and leaned against the counter with his own.

I took a sip of the wine, moaning under my breath at the flavor. Johnny noticed, smiling softly.

"That's from a small vineyard outside Traverse City," he said. "Natural wine, minimal intervention. They do maybe five hundred cases a year."

"It's incredible," I said, looking at the ruby red glass.

"I have a case delivered every few months." He swirled his own glass, easy and unselfconscious about it—not performing expertise, just a man who knew what he liked. "One of the things worth spending money on."

"What are the others?"

He considered this. "Good meat. Good coffee. A mattress that doesn't make you feel like you're being punished." A pause. "The bike."

"Not the apartment?"

"The apartment is fine," he said simply. "I don't need more space than I use."

I looked around again with that in mind — the deliberate smallness of it, everything chosen rather than accumulated. It was the opposite of the way I lived, which was chaotic and overcrowded and full of things I'd acquired without quite meaning to.

“I'm messy,” I blurted out.

He grinned. “Would you believe me if I told you I find that charming?”

“Maybe.”

“Tell me about your place.”

I hummed. “Mm…books stacked on every surface. My roommate’s forensic pathology textbooks mixed in with my romance novels. A plant I bought on impulse six months ago that's somehow still alive.” I paused. “His name is George.”

“The plant’s a man?”

I balked. “Well…he's a boy. Not a man.”

He raised an eyebrow. "How do you know?"

"I just know," I said. "You can tell with plants."

He looked like he was deciding whether to push that and then thought better of it. "So George the boy plant. What else?"

"A roommate who watches true crime as white noise," I said. "Which is its own kind of unhinged. Stevie will fall asleep to a documentary about a serial killer and then be completely confused when she has bad dreams.”

“Like what?”

“She had a dream the other night that Sophie set her up with a guy who wanted to drink soup out of a her skull.”

Johnny snorted, then: “Who drinks soup?”

I shrugged. “Tomato soup? Miso?”

“So he specifically wanted to drink miso soup out of her skull?”

“I don't know specifically, but Stevie does love sushi.”

Johnny chuckled and turned back to the stove to get the pasta started. He looked—he was so gorgeous. I didn’t know how else to say it. Wearing a black t-shirt that hugged his biceps, the hint of a tattoo flashing every so often on his right inner forearm…jeans slung low on his hips. He’d kicked his shoes off; I stood up to do the same thing, leaving me in my fuzzy socks. Then I padded over to him.