AllFreeNovel
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“Easy does it, champ.” I drag the cookie container back my way.
Ziggy gapes at me. “I’ve had three!”
“Three?” I crunch into another cookie. Jesus Christ, these are a fucking dream. How they’re gluten-free is beyond me. “Yeah, that number’s accurate if you multiply it by an exponent of three.”
“You butthead.” She shoves me in the hip with her foot. “I’ve had three.”
I grin, putting the book back in my lap as I pop the rest of the cookie in my mouth. “Whatever you say, Ziggy dear.”
She sighs, plopping her book back in her lap, too. It’s quiet for a couple minutes, nothing but the soft shush of paper as we turn pages, the occasional crunch as I bite into another cookie.
But then, in a move of pure stealth, Ziggy grabs the container, steals another cookie, then shoves the whole thing in her mouth.
“Woman!” I lunge for her, laughing as she shrieks around her cookie and bolts upright, taking off down the aisle. “Those are my gluten-free cookies!”
“That I special ordered for you!” she yells around her bite, taking the bend of the aisle sharply and whipping around it.
I nearly catch her, rounding the aisle just a second later. “You’d deprive a chronically ill man the simple joy of eating three dozen chocolate cookies filled with buttercream icing and almond meringue biscuit? For shame.”
She cackles as we round the bend back to my end of the aisle where my cookies wait, like delicious little sitting ducks, poised for her to steal them all.
“Swear to God, Ziggy, if you take them—I love my chocolate cookies.”
She hops over the container, then spins, flushed and smiling as she meets my eyes. I stare at her, warm and worked up, aching to tug her into my arms again and touch her, learn her, make her flushed and smiling for an even better reason.
Slowly, she bends and picks them up, then snaps the lid on.
“I’m glad you love the cookies.” Her voice is quiet as she peers up at me. “Because there’s lots more where they came from.”
I take the container from her, peering down at the cookies through the lid, then back up. “Where did you get them, anyway?’
“Viggo,” she says.
I scowl. “Goddammit.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to like him. But I think I’m going to have to, if he baked these.”
She smiles. “Viggo’s a piece of work, but everybody always ends up loving him. You will, too.”
“I don’t love anything except hockey,” I remind her.
Ziggy’s smile widens as she reaches for my hair and smooths her fingers down my temples. Then she spins her wrist, opening up her hand. A chocolate cookie sits in her palm. She picks it up, then offers me a bite. “Says the man who just admitted he loves these cookies.”
I give her an icy look, softened by a grin. Leaning in, I bite off the cookie.
“Looks like,” she says, “a few other things might have found a place in your heart.” And then she pops the rest of it, right in her mouth.
Outside her apartment, Ziggy turns and faces me. “Thank you, Sebastian. Tonight was really…” She blushes, smiling. Starlight turns her hair cool auburn, makes her eyes sparkle like emeralds in a deep cave. “It was really lovely.”
I clasp her hand, then squeeze how she likes, how she always squeezes mine. “It was.”
Our eyes hold for a beat too long. Ziggy blinks away.
“So,” she says. “This week, your schedule”—we have a shared Google calendar now, because it made it easiest to plan publicity outings—“is bonkers. So is mine.”
I nod. “Yeah. No time for angry yoga.”
