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“Can you cook?”
She grimaces and makes the “so-so” motion with her hand. “I’m pretty good with breakfast though. For some reason, dinner food confounds me.”
“Confounding food isn’t my favorite, but I like a good breakfast.” I look at my watch. It’s after midnight. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
She smiles. It’s a pretty smile. No, more than pretty. Her smile lights up the night.
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” she says.
My heart starts beating faster. I’m not sure what’s happening here, but I’m not bored anymore.
“So, breakfast?” I ask.
“Yes.” Her voice is soft. Gentle.
“Let’s go.”
We ride out of the city and into a suburb. I pull up in front of a pretty big house in a neighborhood of other pretty big houses. It reminds me of the house fromHome Alone. I often wondered what the McCallisters did for a house that nice. “Preschool teachers make more money than I thought.”
She takes my hand and pulls me toward the front door. “I’m house-sitting for my parents. They’re traveling now that I finished college. It’s great. Pretty sure they measured the booze before they left. I sleep in my childhood bedroom. I feel real grown up.”
“I’m thirty-four and my parents still wouldn’t trust me to house-sit for them, so you’re more grown-up than me.”
If she just finished college, that makes her, what, twenty-two? Twenty-three? Plenty old enough to...what am I even doing here?
The house is very nice and it gives me a chance to check out her family pictures on the mantle. She was a cute kid. The earliest photos show her with an impish glow in her eyes. Especially the ones with an older boy that looks just like her. Her high school portraits are a lot more reserved. I point to the guy she’s riding piggyback on. “This your brother? What’s he do?”
Mallory pales and swallows hard. “He died.”
“Shit. I’m sorry.”
I want to wrap her in my arms, show her that I’m here for her. But I’m scared that if I do, she’ll pull away. What do I know about comforting someone anyway?
“It’s okay. It was a long time ago,” she says.
It’s not okay. And maybe that explains the difference between her elementary school pictures and her older ones.
I take her hand and she leads me into the kitchen.
“Let’s make breakfast together,” I say, feeling way the fuck out of my comfort zone.
“Okay.”
“I don’t know how to cook.”
The eye roll she gifts me is a little over the top. “Maybe you should have led with that.”
“You could teach me. That’s what you do, right? Make confounding things less confounding?”
“Well, I teach the alphabet mostly. But I’m sure we can do this.”
She walks me through a cheese omelet. It’s not as complicated as I imagined. Neither is getting to know Mallory. She tells me stories about school, her brother, and her dreams for the future. We laugh and joke, and before I know it, it’s nearly four in the morning.
It’s been a perfect night. I’ve found something I wasn’t looking for. I’m not ready to let go.
I really like this woman.
“Show me your room,” I say, knowing I’ve put in the work. She knows me better than most anyone now. And that’s what she wanted, right?
