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So he braced.
As Elena tended to do, she shocked the shit out of him by taking a sip of her wine. No, he’d call it a gulp, like a kid drinking Kool-Aid and it was cute as fuck. She took that gulp, lowered her glass, looked behind him. “Should I make a salad while you grill the steaks?”
It was Lance’s turn to blink.
“Should I make a salad while you grill the steaks?”
Yeah, she just said that.
He’d thought it wasn’t possible for her to get under his skin anymore. But that, right there, that did it.
Not trusting himself to speak, he took his own gulp of wine, shit he hated but he’d drink because she’d poured it for him. The corner of Elena’s mouth turned up slightly and her eye twinkled but otherwise, she didn’t remark on his action.
He nodded once against the burn at his throat that had nothing to do with wine.
“Yeah.” He could only get one word out, it was thick and uncomfortable.
Not trusting himself not to do something stupid, he turned his attention to the steak, made short work of getting out of the fucking kitchen so he could grill them.
The air was muggy, fresh, but it didn’t do anything to whisk away the smell of honeysuckle and Elena. Neither did the scent of charring steaks.
Nothing would.
He’d be smelling that shit on his deathbed.
Elena
I didn’t have an excuse for what I did.
Not a logical one at least.
I did have reasons for what I did.
Many of them.
Like a thirty-dollar bottle of wine. Like steaks cooked to perfection. Like a car with working AC. Like a son asleep in his room, home, safe and sound. Like the words he’d spoken to me, right in my kitchen, showing me something deeper about him. Something damaged. Something beautiful. Something I wanted.
Needed.
That was why I reacted the way I did. That’s why I didn’t press him for more when that was all I wanted… more. I wanted to jump on him. Kiss him. Have him fuck me on my kitchen counter.
But I had a son who sometimes wandered into the aforementioned kitchen for a glass of water or a snack at all hours and I really didn’t want to scar him for life.
I also sensed something about Lance, about how rare those snippets of information were, how precious those collections of sentences were. They were meant to be handled with care. He was meant to be, no matter how unbreakable he seemed.
So I made the salad.
Drained my entire glass of wine in the time it took to make it, get out the rest of the fixings to go with the steak, set the table and put out appropriate condiments.
Then I poured another one as he came in with the most delicious smelling steaks I’d smelled in my life. I refilled his glass too, as it was empty.
All this without words.
All of the food was put on our plates without words too. Eaten that same way. Well, there may have been an embarrassing groan of ecstasy that came from me with my first bite of steak. I couldn’t help it. It was pure heaven. Cooked to perfection. Melt in my mouth. Even better than that seventy dollar one from the fancy place. Maybe that was because Lance had bought it for me, cooked it for me, and his words had served as an appetizer.
Because the rest of the meal was just as mouthwatering.
You’d think it’d be awkward, eating an entire meal with someone you were borderline obsessed with and crazy attracted to in complete silence.
Somehow it wasn’t.
It was a strange gift for me, that silence to contemplate my thoughts, to savor my food. To savor the company. Never did I get to sit down and eat a meal in silence. Heck, I barely ever sat down and ate a meal, period. Breakfast was usually coffee, a bite of whatever Nathan had. Lunch was standing up in the kitchen at work. Dinner was snatched bites in between getting Nathan ready for bed, or while cleaning up after he’d gone to bed.
And the sit-down meals we had semi-regularly with Eliza and Karen were far from silent.
So yeah, a quiet meal with Lance was little more than heaven. For once, the quiet didn’t bring with it all of my problems that I had to dwell on, panic about. I didn’t think about Robert, about money, about my son’s safety, because it was all taken care of by Lance. For this moment at least.
I read somewhere that a moment was exactly ninety seconds, well, not exactly since the length of a solar hour depends on the solar day which varies with the season, but ballpark.
With Lance, a moment was for however long that silence lasted.
It lasted the meal, the cleanup and the rest of the bottle of wine.
