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“A British cooking show. It’s in a tent.”
I pinch my lips together, imagining him curled up in bed with socks on his feet, watching a damn cooking show. Of course, in my imagination I’m also there, wrapped around him and not off being miserable somewhere in a bar.
“Why is it in a tent?” I ask.
“Nobody fucking knows.” He says and I laugh, leaning my head back against the seat and just looking at him. He reaches up to loosen the knot of his tie slightly, undoing the top button of his dress shirt and exposing the hollow of his throat. A cry rises from the back of the plane and Corwin turns to look, making sure he’s not needed to run interference.
“Uno sounds dangerous.” I remark.
He eyes me, a small, playful tug at the corner of his mouth. “Johansson cheats, but nobody can figure out how.”
The flight attendant comes through, passing out meals and beverages, and the plane lapses into silence. Corwin, I notice, has a book tucked into the seat pocket in front of him like he had been intending to read before I sat down and started bothering him. I wave my fork at it.
“What are you reading?”
He plucks the book out, handing it to me. I stare down at the cover and my heart gives several slow, painful beats. It’s a French language dictionary. I clear my throat, glancing over at him, but he’s bent over his tray table, face ducked as he puts a forkful of food into his mouth. I let the book fall open to the bookmarked page, a postcard from Ireland tucked between the pages.
“You’re learning French?” It sounds like I’m trying to talk around a mouthful of rocks.
“Yeah.” He glances over at me, but doesn’t maintain eye contact. “I’ve been watching Bake Off with the French subtitles; I’ve seen the show so many times I don’t really need to pay attention, so I can use it more as a learning exercise.”
I stare at him, fingers clenched around the book in my lap. My imaginary scenario from earlier looks completely different now: us curled up in bed, watching his cooking show while I coax him through French sentence structure.
He must not know how to interpret my silence, as he rushes to explain. “I just thought, since you come over for dinner quite a bit, maybe we could talk in French since it’s your native language and you probably don’t get many chances to use it here.”
“So, you thought you’d learn.”Damnit, I want to kiss that serious expression right off his face.I blow out a shaky breath and let loose a string of rapid French. He widens his eyes.
“Oh, I can’t speak it that good. Or really at all yet.” He looks apologetic. “What did you say?”
Nothing I can repeat on this airplane.“Nothing.” I carefully close the book, handing it back to him and watch as he places it back in the seat pocket.
“Now you say something.” I nudge him, very lightly, with my elbow.
Narrowing his eyes, he sits up straighter like he’s about to be graded on his pronunciation. “Ajouter un peu de sucre dessus.” He stumbles over the vowels, unable to roll them together correctly, and his accent is truly atrocious. I’ve never heard anything sexier in my life.
“It’s possible I only know how to say things that relate to cooking.” Corwin admits, and I laugh helplessly.
“That was very good.” I tell him, and he shoots me a stern look because he knows this is a gross exaggeration. I rub a hand over my chest, and check the time on my phone. I do not want to be around anyone else right now; I want to go to Corwin’s house, put on sweats and listen to him speak bad French; I want to kiss him.
Corwin, who is blissfully unaware of the inner turmoil happening inside me, sighs and leans his head back. He falls asleep like that, and I watch him until the wheels touch the ground, eyes tracing his profile.
The jolt of the plane hitting the tarmac wakes him, and he looks out the window as we taxi to our gate. I’m just about to open my mouth and ask if I can come over when he beats me to it. “Want to come over for dinner?”
I follow him home this time, parking behind him in the driveway and bringing my bag inside so I can change again. While I head toward the bedroom I used last time, Corwin continues upstairs, presumably toward his own room.Another time, I tell myself as I long to follow him up the stairs, and I don’t bother closing the door before stripping out of my suit and into some sweats. Stuffing everything back into my duffel, I go back downstairs, dropping the bag by the front door and aiming for the kitchen.
Corwin must still be upstairs because the lights are all off back here, and I spend several fraught minutes fumbling around in the dark for light switches. By the time he gets downstairs the room is illuminated, and I’m standing at his bookshelf snooping.
“Alright,” he says, rubbing his palms together, “what are we hungry for?”
Nothing that can be prepared in a kitchen. He must be cold, because he opted for a hoodie over the t-shirt. One of the strings is caught in the neckline, so I walk over and tug it out, fingers grazing his neck unnecessarily. I try to be careful with how I touch him, but this one is well received and I feel a flush of happiness as he leans into it.
“We could just order a pizza, if you didn’t want to go through the trouble.”
He looks offended. “If you want pizza, I’ll just make one.”
Instead of sitting on a barstool, on what feels like the opposite end of the kitchen, I hop up onto the corner of the island. He has to walk by me to reach the refrigerator, and once he brushes his hand along the top of my thigh, making me smile. I remember suddenly that there was something I wanted to talk to him about.
“I didn’t hook up with anyone last night.” He fumbles the tomato in his hands, catching it before it hits the counter. “And I won’t be hooking up with anyone else while you and I are…having dinner.” I substitute dating for that last part, hoping it’ll make him smile, but it doesn’t.
