Page 82 of How To Not Need You

I've thought about it. Usually when the weather turns cold or I catch the smell of paprika somewhere and get dragged backwards twenty years without warning. But thinking about making it and actually pulling out the card are apparently two very different things.

Mum used to make goulash when she wanted the house to feel warm. Not physically warm. Although she'd have argued the giant pot simmering on the stove helped with that too. It was her people are coming over, everyone sit down and eat something meal.

Which probably explains why I'm standing here holding the recipe now. Jake starts a forty-eight-hour shift tomorrow. Tilly goes back to Megan tomorrow.

And apparently two days without seeing either of them has become enough of an event that I've decided to resurrect my dead mother's goulash recipe.

Fantastic.

I'm emotionally stable and handling this relationship beautifully.

For the next two days, I will wake up in my own apartment, drink my own coffee, work from my own desk, and see exactly nobody who matters to me until Sunday evening.

It’s two days. Two days. I once went two weeks without seeing Harper during her book deadline and survived just fine. I have gone entire months without dating anyone and considered it a personal victory. I am a grown woman with a functional social life and an impressive collection of takeaway menus. Two days is nothing. It is a rounding error. It is the length of time it takes for milk to go bad if you leave it on the counter, which I have done exactly once and will not be discussing further.

Except.

Except I don’t want to go two days without them.

The realisation is irritatingly simple.

I don’t want two days.

I don’t want to drink coffee alone and wonder what ridiculous thing Tilly said at breakfast. I don’t want two nights without Jake stretched out beside me, stealing half the bed despite repeatedly claiming he doesn’t. I don’t want to sit in this apartment with its perfectly good walls and perfectly functional kitchen and its complete absence of a small human asking me questions about unicorns, or a cat destroying the houseplants, or a firefighter who kisses me like he’s savouring the taste.

Jake Reid has ruined me.

Jake Reid and his impossible daughter and his terrible cat have collectively dismantled every rule I spent years building, and the worst part is I watched them do it.

Actually, that’s not the worst part.

The worst part is somewhere along the way, I stopped wanting to stop them.

I set the recipe card on the counter. The late afternoon light catches the stained corner, turning the old tomato mark amber.

I grab my keys from the hook by the door.

The supermarket is five minutes away, and I move through the aisles with determination. Beef. Onion. Red capsicum, because the recipe doesn't specify and red feels right. Tinned tomatoes. Stock. Sour cream. Paprika.

I stand in front of the spices for longer than any reasonable person should.

Sweet paprika. Mum always bought the same little red tin, and for a second I can almost see it sitting beside the stove in our old kitchen. See her reaching for it without measuring, shaking an irresponsible amount into the pot while I complained that she'd made it too spicy last time.

You'll survive, she'd tell me.

Apparently I did.

I grab the jar and put it in my basket before that thought has time to become anything else.

By the time I get back to the car, the grocery bag is bulging on the passenger seat.

I don't text ahead.

The element of surprise is the only defence I have against my own sentimentality. If I tell Jake I'm coming over to cook dinner, he'll ask why. If I tell him it's my mother's recipe, he'll get that look on his face. The one where those warm brown eyes somehow see every uncomfortable emotion I'm trying very hard to pretend isn't happening.

And then he'll understand. Possibly before I do. So, no warning. I'm just going to show up at his house with groceries and emotionally significant Hungarian food like a completely normal person.

This is fine.