Page 37 of The Apparent Trap

“Just forget the rest,” he says with a sigh.

Like that’s possible. Like he didn’t just give a soliloquy on the impossibility of forgetting something you’re desperate to put out of your mind.

I want to kiss him. I want to scream at him.

I want to never see him again. I want to stare at him all night.

I want to go back to the magic of that first night. I want to erase it from my memory.

He confuses me, more than anyone ever has, and now he’s just whipped all that confusion up with a whisk. Any calm I’d carefully worked on finding with him is suddenly, completely upended.

We’re silent, all those admissions taking up every inch of the room.

Until, mortifyingly, my stomach rumbles.

And the noise breaks all the tension. He tries to suppress a laugh, but it’s not possible.

How ridiculous. This man is over here calling me luminous, and just that fact is breaking my entire brain, but meanwhile, in reality, I’m whatever the opposite of grace and poise actually is, my awkward bodily noises putting the finest point on how wrong he is.

“You’re hungry again?” he says with a chuckle, and I’m horrified.

“We ate a few hours ago!” I cry, defensive. “I can’t help it!”

“No, you can’t.” He smiles. “But come on, I’ll make you something.”

Chapter 12

I watch, still stunned, as he moves effortlessly through the kitchen, as though he’s on autopilot, trying to move us gently as far away from his previous words as possible. I have no idea what he’s making; it seems way more complicated than it should be when he could just shove anything in my hands to make my inexplicable post-Thanksgiving hunger subside.

He’s putting a sauté pan on a flame and throwing a few pieces of bacon on it. He’s salting garlic and then smashing it. He’s squeezing a lemon. He’s whisking egg yolks so fast that I’m practically breathless. That knife tattoo on his bicep I want to mock is getting a workout, and it’s making my mouth water more than anything happening on the kitchen counter.

But it soon becomes apparent what he’s doing when he pulls out some lettuce and tomato. He cuts through one of the delectable fluffy biscuits from earlier and slides a knife full of his aioli-looking concoction on either side. He slices a large tomato, almost the exact size of the biscuit, and places it on top, followed by springy lettuce, and finishes with four slices of sizzling bacon. He places the second half of the biscuit on top. And then gently sets the whole thing on top of a plate.

He slides it toward me, gingerly keeping the plate between our hands as though if he got closer to me, that might be the final straw of whatever he’s doing.

“You made me a BLT?”

He shrugs it off, and I figure after this strange new place we’ve found ourselves in, I don’t need to question anything else. I’ve already heard more tonight than is probably good for me to know.

I hop up on the counter to sit and take a bite. I close my eyes as the flavors hit—pillowy biscuit, crunch of lettuce, garlic tang of the aioli, acidity of the tomato, and fatty umami of the bacon all melding perfectly together.

“This is the best BLT I’ve ever had in my life,” I garble, taking another bite.

I open my eyes and am surprised to see Lee staring, taking in the whole scene. He’s watching me like there’s nothing better than a woman on his counter, scarfing down a sandwich he made.

It’s a strange sensation, seeing myself through his gaze like this now. For so many weeks that gaze has avoided me, looking up or away whenever we’ve spoken. I never realized it was because he wasn’t letting himself look. Tonight has been a fever dream of information, but I’m not sure I actually believed his words until right now.

He’s really looking at me like I’m someone a person would call luminous.

“That sandwich place you go to is garbage,” he says, knocking me back to reality.

“What?”

“You have the same BLT every time I see you. It’s like a random deli BLT on presliced white bread and probably a tomato that tastes like nothing.”

“Is my BLT offending your culinary senses?” I ask, trying to hold in a laugh.

“You live in New York City,” he says, as though that in itself is an explanation.