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The aroma of melting cheese fills the air and it almost succeeds in driving out the wet smoke smell still clinging to my clothes. As she flips the sandwich on the griddle, my gaze slides down to her ass. The soft cotton of those pajamas would be so easy to?—
I catch myself just in time. Right before the images in my head spin out into fantasies I can’t control. Thankfully, she turns around a few moments later and presents me with a fat grilled cheese oozing from all four sides.
I take it and murmur a wordless grunt of thanks. She perches on the next stool over, closer than her previous seat. “Well?” she asks after I’ve taken my first bite.
“It’s delicious,” I say once I swallow.
Wren blushes, quietly pleased with my praise. “I perfected that sandwich over many late drunken nights. Not my drunken nights,” she hurries to correct. “Rose went through a phase right before she met Jared. I’d force some food into her when she got home to sober her up.”
I cringe. Why do all her stories involve her sister in some way, shape, or form? It’s almost like she knows I’m hiding something and she’s trying to draw it out of me.
As if realizing the same thing herself, her blush morphs and she hides behind the curtain of her hair. “Anyway. How, er… how’d you get into cooking?”
I take another bite of the sandwich. Now that my taste buds are awake, I am suddenly ravenous. “I wanted to impress—” I stop just short of saying Elena’s name. I’ve got to be careful with this one; she has a way of lulling me into a sense of security and it makes me want to say shit I would never have otherwise said. “—Bee.”
“Oh.” A tremor runs across her face that looks suspiciously like sadness. But when she looks up at me, she’s wearing a soft smile. “It clearly worked.”
A fog of melancholia hangs over Wren’s head tonight. If only I could see what’s going on inside of her.
That had been so much easier with Elena. She told me everything she was feeling, everything she was thinking. And even when she didn’t, she wore her emotions on her face, clear as day.
“Do you have a vision for the wedding?”
My gaze recoils to hers before I realize that she’s talking about my wedding to Bee. I shouldn’t be so surprised. I suppose it’s taking longer than I would’ve expected to accept that Bee and I have only weeks left until we’re husband and wife.
“Whatever Bee wants,” I demur gruffly.
“You must have some opinions.” Her knee is bouncing softly, but I have no idea why she would be nervous. “If I’m going to be planning this wedding, I want to do something you’ll both appreciate.”
“I don’t have opinions.”
It’s not necessarily true. I might have had opinions—if this wedding was real. I did have opinions when it came to my marriage to Elena. She wanted my input for every single decision that was made. It was how we ended up saying “fuck it” to the elaborate ceremony we’d spent years concocting and did it all instead on the steps of Town Hall—me in a shirt, no coat, her in a knee-length white dress with daisies in her hair that I bought from a nearby florist a few minutes before the ceremony. Bee and Aleksandr were our witnesses and afterwards, we sat on the curb and ate churros and ice cream.
It was perfect.
I shudder and snap back to the present when I realize Wren is watching me carefully. “Well, I’ll get them out of you in time,” she threatens with a weak, wobbly smile to let me know she’s joking.
I clear my throat. “What are you doing up so late?”
“I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” she admits, glancing at the antique clock on the wall. “Aw, dammit, it’s past two.”
“Go to bed. You need your rest.”
She pinches her nose. “I agree. But if I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep.”
“I’ll talk to Liza. Maybe there’s something she can give us to help you sleep through the night.”
Wren leans back scowling and the t-shirt stretches across her burgeoning belly. I’m overcome with this need to touch it. It’s about my son, I tell myself. It’s not about her.
“I don’t want to take a pill to sleep, Dmitri.”
“Must everything be a fight with you?”
She blinks, taken back. “It’s not a fight. I just have different opinions than you do. And as far as my body is concerned, I get to have a say.”
I drop the half-eaten sandwich in my fingers back onto the plate. “Are you getting at least eight hours of sleep each night?”
“Are you?” she retorts without missing a beat. “Honestly, I’ve never seen a couple more intent on avoiding sleep.”
