Page 21 of Ex Somnis

Apparently, we’ve sat down at a table. It’s the best one, the one with the garden view, and there’s a bottle of white wine that Tessa opens with confidence.

“The halibut goes on the permanent menu,” Tessa decides.

“When we fix the sauce.”

“When we fix the sauce. Which we already did. Preserved lemon, done, settled.”

“I want to test it first.”

“Lenny.”

“One test run.”

“You are constitutionally incapable of putting something on a menu without testing it seventeen times.”

“Fourteen,” I say. “Seventeen is an exaggeration.”

She raises an eyebrow. “The risotto.”

Instead of responding, I take a sip of wine, and she sits back, satisfied.

Because yeah, the risotto took nineteen tests, which is a number I’ve never said out loud and don’t intend to start now. She knows. She was there for at least six of them.

This is us. This has always been us—the argument that isn’t an argument, the back-and-forth that is really two people thinking together out loud. I have missed it so much that sitting in it now feels like pressing on a bruise.

“Tasting menu—” I start.

“Thursdays,” Tessa cuts me off.

“Eight covers.”

“Ten.”

“Eight.” I point my wine glass at her. “That’s intimate. Ten looks like we’re trying.”

She concedes this with a tilt of her glass. “Eight. But I want a bread course that means something.”

“Then we need a baker.”

“You can bake.”

“I can bake. I cannot bake bread. Those are different skills. And even if I wanted to try it, I’d need to get up at like four to be able to add that to my already full schedule.”

I think about someone who gets up before the sun without complaining, who makes things with their paint-streaked hands without needing to be asked. Then I don’t know who that would be and why I thought about that, so I move past it.

“We’d need someone who takes it seriously. Someone who understands that bread is not an afterthought.”

“We’ll find someone.” Tessa shrugs. “Just think about what you want, and it will happen.”

I look at her across the table. The one person I wanted for… how long? Years?

That doesn’t seem right. But she’s here. She’s real. She’s the Tessa who finishes my sentences, steals the last of the fish, and has opinions about everything and is never wrong about the ones that matter.

I want to stop time and just sit in this.

The fairy lights are doing something soft to the room, turning everything gold at the edges.

The bridge of my nose itches, and I glide a finger over it. For half a second, there’s a different pressure there, like a thumb, someone else’s. But then it’s my finger, nose, and the fairy lights.