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I did try, a couple of times, to bring it up. There were moments where we were snuggling on the couch or lying down in bed where I opened my mouth to talk about it, but something always stopped me. It was like the words dried up in my throat and refused to come out. Panic would set in, and I would wonder if I said the words I was thinking, it would pop the balloon.
The honeymoon phase of our relationship had lasted much longer than any I had been in before. But every other relationship ended when it was done. What if this one did too? What if I said something, bringing the situation into reality and forcing us to address it, and it ended the honeymoon phase, then she was out of my life a week or two later? How would I deal with that?
I didn’t want to. So, I didn’t bring it up. No matter what we did, I refused to let the words come out of my mouth and screw it all up. I would let the words dry up in my throat every single time, swallowing them back down and forcing myself to squeeze her tighter, live in the moment just a little bit longer.
I had started to think of her place as “home” already. It was weird. I had a few things there, mostly clothes, but I spent so much time there I was beginning to think of it as the place I lived. Besides, Wendy was there, and wherever she was, I thought of as my place anyway. I just wanted to be near her.
It had been a long day, working a double, which usually meant I would go to my apartment to sleep. But it was also Saturday, which meant that I had the next day off. I had already come up with a few ideas as to what we could do with the day. Olly had been talking about the creek, and Wendy had mentioned wanting to go fishing sometime. A day of hiking, fishing, and watching Olly splash around sounded fun to me.
I pulled up to the house and saw the lights on in the living room. A warm feeling washed over me as I looked at the place and thought about the people inside it and how they had taken to me. How I fit with them. Home. It was starting to feel like that, and it scared me. I didn’t want to get my heart broken. Secretly, I was looking for some sign that it was about to fall apart and had to chide myself over it.
When I opened the door, the smell of fresh laundry and lilac, the smells that usually hit me when I walked in the door, weren’t there. Instead, there was rosemary and thyme. Something was cooking. But I wasn’t in the kitchen.
Whatever was cooking smelled good. Suspiciously good. What if she didn’t need me anymore now? What if my joke was reality? What if she decided that now that she could take care of Olly and cook him meals on her own, she didn’t need me around so much anymore?
I fought the urge to turn around and go back to my apartment, shutting the door behind me quietly. I could hear Olly in the living room, crashing his toy trucks together. I could also hear Wendy in the kitchen, the soft classical music I tended to play when teaching her drifting through the air as the familiar sound of food being cooked in a pan sizzled.
“You’re cooking?” I asked as I entered the kitchen.
Wendy nearly jumped as she turned toward me, clearly not having heard me come in. She had been humming with the music and apparently tasting the sauce in the pan. A tasting spoon clattered on the stovetop, and a little bit of marinara fell on her shirt, or rather, my shirt as she was wearing one that I’d left over. In spite of everything, my cock twitched.
“You scared me,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Sorry. What’s this?”
The smile on her face faltered a little as she looked from the stove back to me and then back and forth again.
“It’s dinner,” she said. “Chicken parmesan. It was in the recipe book you gave me as an easy one.”
She indicated a book lying open on the table. It was one of my old recipe books, one I’d bought when I first started cooking. A famous TV chef, who I still had a soft spot for even after learning to cook myself, smiled from the page with a perfect-looking chicken parmesan in a glass pan. I had made that exact dish a dozen times, if not more, and it never looked as good as hers.
“Oh,” I said. “You just usually wait for me to cook anything.”
