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I stepped in, tentatively at first.
“Hazel?”
She whipped around, her face flushed and sweaty, her gray T-shirt splattered with food.
“You okay?” I toed off my boots and hung my keys on the hook by the door.
She nodded. “Just making dinner.”
Alarms clanged in my brain at that comment. Hazel did not cook. She could not cook. This was a known fact and had been since she was nine, when she put a package of pop tarts in the wrapper into the toaster at my parents’ house and almost started a fire.
I did a quick scan of the room. No fires. Just a mess. Literally everywhere. The island was littered with bowls and cutting boards and, inexplicably, a waffle iron. There was a massive head of lettuce perched on the edge of the countertop with a knife stuck in it. Just stuck in the head of lettuce, like it was the victim of some kind of grizzly vegetable-cide.
Mess I could handle. When she turned back to check on one of her concoctions on the stove, I discreetly shuffled to the coat closet and confirmed that the fire extinguisher was still there. Henri was obsessed with safety, so there were probably half a dozen more around the house, but it never hurt to check.
“Whatcha making?” I asked, tiptoeing through the kitchen toward my bedroom.
“Tacos. It’s Tuesday, and it’s our one-week anniversary. Alice gave me a ride to the grocery store since she was headed to town with the kids.”
I nodded, biting back a cringe. My eyes burned as I sniffed, despite my better judgment, struggling to identify the scents that filled the cabin. I’d have to thoroughly air this place out. Maybe even hire professional cleaners.
It certainly didn’t smell like tacos. More sour, with notes of… was that honey?
I sidled up next to her at the stove. “Can I help?”
She shook her head, bopping around to Taylor Swift. “I’m good. I just need more time.”
“Okay. Thought I’d workout for a bit. Like thirty minutes?”
She waved a hand at me, shooing me out of the kitchen. “Sounds good.” Then she whirled around and got back to work.
I jogged up the hill to Henri’s to warm up, then hit the weights and did some mobility work. When I returned, Hazel had set the table, and, impressively, the kitchen was even messier than when I’d left.
She pushed a lock of hair out of her face and gave me a weak smile from where she stood next to the table. “I hope this isn’t weird. But I was home and figured I should make dinner. That’s a normal thing to do, right?”
I nodded, filling two glasses with water and dodging the dozens of pans and plates piled in the sink. “Yes. Thank you. We can’t survive on pizza alone.”
“Here.” She pointed at the table, which had several bowls of unidentifiable food on it.
Once I was seated, she passed me a tray of tortillas that looked perfectly normal. One couldn’t mess those up, right? So I plated a few.
“What kind of tacos are these?” I asked, eyeing a bowl full of a reddish-brown soup-like substance.
“Just regular beef.” She shrugged, dropping a tortilla to her plate.
I stirred the mixture with the spoon she’d stuck in the bowl, and sure enough, tiny bits of ground beef floated to the surface.
“I’m not sure why the meat is so watery. I followed a recipe. I promise.”
“It’s great.” After I’d held the spoon to the edge of the bowl to drain the liquid and scooped the beef onto my tortillas, I reached for the bowl of a brown pasty substance. Beans, maybe? Every item was a different color and texture, but none of it resembled food. Still, it was sweet that she’d tried to cook. One of us certainly had to figure it out, and she was way smarter than I was.
We looked at one another sheepishly before simultaneously biting into our tacos.
My mouth protested and my nostrils burned. My brain went haywire, registering the array of textures and tastes and even temperatures. One bit was piping hot, and the next was ice cold.
“This is really terrible, isn’t it?” she asked, dropping the tortilla onto her plate and watching as the filling oozed out.
The earnest look on her face made me want to lie. To make her feel good about herself. It was a strange sensation, worrying so much about someone else’s feelings.
