Page 133 of Lethal in Pink

I am attempting a full breakfast spread. Pancakes stacked in a precarious tower on a chipped ceramic plate. Eggs sizzling in the cast iron with more confidence than they deserve. Bacon draining on paper towels in a pattern that suggests I had a geometric plan and abandoned it three strips in. And on the cutting board, a pile of strawberries I am supposed to be slicing into neat, symmetrical halves.

Instead, I pick one up—plump, deep red, still cool from the fridge—and throw it at her.

It bounces off her left shoulder with a soft thud, leaves a damp red smudge on the sleeve of my t-shirt, and rolls across the counter before coming to a stop against a bottle of hot sauce she brought over three weeks ago and has never once opened.

She stares at me. Her mouth drops open in slow, theatrical outrage—the kind that starts at her eyes and works its way down to her jaw, a full-body performance of indignation that is so perfectly, completely Amiyah that my chest does something complicated and warm behind my ribcage.

“You did not,” she says.

“I absolutely did.”

“With a strawberry.”

“With precision.”

“You’re going to regret that.”

“I’m terrified.”

She reaches for the cutting board, grabs the largest strawberry in the pile, and launches it back at me with the particular, unhurried aim of someone who has spent her entire adult life calculating trajectories. It hits me square in the chest, explodes into red pulp against my white t-shirt, and the sound she makes—half laugh, half shriek of triumph—is the match that lights the entire kitchen on fire.

What follows is not a food fight. It is a full-scale culinary insurrection.

The whipped cream canister enters the battlefield with a high, pressurized hiss that sends a perfect white arc across the counter and directly into Amiyah’s hair. She gasps, one hand flying to the sticky mess now clinging to her blonde waves, and then her eyes go dark and sharp and delighted in a way that should concern me more than it does.

“Okay,” she says. “You’ve chosen violence.”

She grabs a strip of bacon from the paper towels—still hot, still glistening with rendered fat—and cracks it like a whip. The end catches my forearm with a wet snap that leaves a red welt and the distinct, greasy smell of pork.

I retaliate with an egg. Not thrown. Cracked directly over her head, because I am a man of principle and those principles include committing fully to bad ideas once they’ve been set in motion. The yolk slides through her hair in a slow, viscous ribbon, mixing with the whipped cream into something that looks both biological and vaguely artistic.

She shrieks. A real one, loud and unguarded and so completely devoid of the careful, measured control she carries everywhere else that for a second I forget to breathe.

We migrate from the counter to the floor. The tile is cold under my bare feet, then sticky as syrup finds its way underfoot, then cold again where the linoleum is still clean—a topographic map of our mutual destruction. She tackles me. Or I tackle her. The sequence blurs into a tangle of limbs and laughter and the particular, breathless wrestling of two people who have forgotten they’re adults with actual problems waiting for them outside this kitchen.

Her knee finds my ribs. My hand finds her waist. She’s ticklish—a fact I discovered approximately forty-eight hours into knowing her and have been weaponizing with calculated cruelty ever since—and when my fingers dig into the soft spot just above her hip, she collapses into a gasping, thrashing mess beneath me, her laugh breaking into something high and desperate and perfect.

“Stop—Jae—stop, I can’t—”

“Say you surrender.”

“Never.”

“Then suffer.”

She retaliates by dragging a syrup-covered hand across my jaw, leaving a sticky, sweet smear that catches the morning light and, presumably, every dust particle in a five-mile radius. I taste maple on my lips. She tastes like whipped cream when I kiss her, which is a sentence I never expected to think and now cannot unthink.

By the time we stop—not because we’ve run out of ammunition, but because we’ve run out of breath—the kitchen looks like the set of a cooking show hosted by deranged children. Whipped cream on the ceiling. Syrup handprints on the refrigerator door. A single pancake adhered to the wall with what appears to be sheer force of will. The cutting board is upside down on the floor, surrounded by strawberry carcasses in various states of demolition.

Amiyah lies on her back on the linoleum, one arm flung over her eyes, her chest rising and falling in quick, ragged pulls. Whipped cream has hardened in her hair into something approaching a sculpture. Syrup glues her shirt to her stomach in a dark, tacky patch. There is an eggshell fragment stuck to her collarbone that neither of us has the energy to remove.

I am, if possible, worse. My t-shirt is a write-off. My hair is standing in stiff, syrup-stiffened peaks. There is bacon grease on my elbow that I’m ninety percent sure will never fully wash off.

We look at each other. And we laugh. The kind of laugh that starts in your stomach and works its way up through your chest and comes out sounding slightly unhinged, the kind that makes your ribs ache and your eyes water and has absolutely nothing to do with humor and everything to do with the particular, catastrophic relief of being known completely and loved anyway.

We eat what survived. Pancakes torn with our fingers because the forks are somewhere under the disaster zone and neither of us is motivated to find them. Bacon eaten directly from the paper towels, which are now more grease than paper. Strawberries consumed whole, stems and all, because cutting them feels like acknowledging the existence of civilized behavior and we are miles past that particular frontier.

She sits cross-legged on the tile, syrup drying in shiny rivulets on her calves, and when she laughs—really laughs, the kind that tips her head back and shows the perfect white line of her teeth—the sound fills the kitchen and bounces off the ruined walls and settles in my chest like something I’ve been waiting to hear without knowing I was waiting.