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He looked over his shoulder as he wandered to the fridge and looked inside. “You want a beer?”
“Ah, no thanks,” she said and wrinkled her nose as she followed him into the kitchen. “Beer isn’t really my thing.”
“You don’t drink?”
“Wine, occasionally.” She was only half paying attention as she tried to subtly take in the rest of the house. It was bare and unadorned, but tidy. He wasn’t big on decoration and his space only looked half lived in but at least he wasn’t a slob. “I won’t turn down a sweet and bubbly white if it’s offered.”
“I’ll get some,” he said. “In case you decide you still want to come back after you taste my spaghetti.”
She leaned on the counter and eyed him skeptically. “Can’t you cook?” Her eyes wandered over his tattoos as he took a quick drink of his beer and her fingers itched to touch them. She wanted to ask him what they meant and why he’d chosen them, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to hear the answers.
“In theory?” he asked, bringing her attention back to the question she’d asked. He lifted the beer to his lips but failed to hide his smile. “No, not really.”
“So you were just gonna toss a jar of cheap sauce on some noodles and hope I didn’t notice?” She raised an eyebrow at him but he didn’t look ashamed of himself and she was less annoyed than she should have been that she’d been tricked.
“Something like that,” he admitted.
“With noodles that were still a little crunchy?”
“Probably.” He looked over once, assessing her reaction to his confession. “But offering you dinner did get you here, so I don’t feel too bad about it. To be honest, I should have just asked if you wanted to have something delivered.”
She laughed, relaxing even as her instincts warned against trusting him too much and too quickly. “Well, everyone should know how to make at least one basic meal and there’s no time like the present to learn. Turn on some music and we’ll make spaghetti.”
“You’re not supposed to be the one cooking dinner.”
“Maybe not,” she acknowledged, shamelessly opening the doors to his cabinets, and hunting for ingredients among the boxes and bags of prepackaged food, “but I would like to be able to eat it.”
He had the sense to look embarrassed as he walked away to turn the music on, and it only took five minutes of quiet arguing for them to decide on a compromise on the radio station.
“You really listen to classical?”
She turned the water on to boil and smiled at the horrified tone of the question. “Yes, it’s soothing. Better than that noise you blast out of here every day.”
He grunted. “We’re gonna have to agree to disagree on that one, sweetheart.”
“Why do you insist on calling me that?” She blew out a quick, hard breath to get the stray hair out of her eyes as she worked and pinned him with a look.
“Sweetheart?” He seemed surprised, thumbnail picking at the label of his beer bottle.
“Yes, you call me that every time I see you.” Sometime since she’d met him it had lost the original mocking tone but he still persisted. It was almost absentminded, like an endearment you used on a long-term lover. Did she remind him of an ex-girlfriend, perhaps?
He lifted a shoulder, more to hide his face than to shrug, and kept his eyes firmly away from her. “One of the few things I remember about my dad is that he always used to call my mom that. I guess I picked it up from him. Now I use it on pretty women with a tendency to bust everyone’s balls.”
She paused, pleasant heat rising to her cheeks as she watched him clumsily chop vegetables for a salad. There were so many questions about his past she could have asked him just based on that one small piece of information but everything felt too personal, too much after such a short acquaintance. Instead she settled on the other part of what he’d said. “Is that how you see me? A ball buster?”
Her cheeks flushed harder–almost painful now—from saying that out loud. Her mother would have washed her mouth out with soap for such language and she’d never developed much of a cursing habit—but he didn’t seem to notice.
“Is that not how you see yourself?”
“No,” she said flatly. The idea would never have occurred to her and even hearing it from him, it felt alien and unobtainable. She was too anxious for that, too easily twisted by her fears and worries, by other people’s opinions. There was a standard, a level of achievement she needed to obtain and boundaries for her behavior that she had been conditioned to follow. Moving here, settling for a small house in New Orleans instead of staying at home or getting an apartment in a bigger city like New York or LA, had been the biggest rebellion she’d been able to muster in her entire life. It had taken all of the fight she had to do that relatively small thing and she had nothing left.
“How do you see yourself?”
She frowned, but he was watching her curiously, calm and patient, and the truth bubbled up inside her. “Frightened,” she admitted. “Like I have to control everything all the time or something terrible will happen.”
“That sounds tiring.”
She swallowed, letting the unexpected understanding of that settle over her. The tension in her shoulders, her unconscious flinch as she waited to see how he’d respond, evaporated. “It is.”
