“About anything.”
I glance up before I slice my fingers off. His knives, like the rest of the house, are no joke, expensive and good quality. “You mean about you?”
He’s got his granite face on, and it gives nothing away. “I want you to feel comfortable here. I know you’ve likely heard things about me.”
“Actually…”
“I know you took the job because you needed the money for college. I’m not going to pretend you would have left your family and your hometown and wound up here otherwise. The offer was too good to refuse. You said so yourself.”
You might be too good to refuse.
Wait. Damn it!
“I think it was my granny who said that, actually,” I murmur, making a fresh, concerted effort to get these sandwiches together before I spontaneously combust and grill them with the flames from the fiery human inferno. “She got her meatloaf, by the way. We ordered from this little mom-and-pop shop that specializes solely in it, and Granny even got to pick out the shape she wanted. She picked a horse, but it looked more like a roadkill deer when it came.”
He laughs while I keep cutting the cheese. The flames are percolating deep inside me, and I can feel their sparks shooting off into my bloodstream.
“Was it good though?”
“Delicious,” I reply.
“I’m glad to hear that.”
I get his sandwich assembled and slide it into the pan. After grilling it on his state-of-the-art gas stove for a few minutes, I slide it, perfectly golden brown served with a few slices of what is probably the world’s fanciest pickles, into the space directly in front of him.
He inhales, sighing in appreciation.
Forget about combustion. I think I’m going to spontaneously ovulate over here.
“I hope it tastes okay. The bread is kind of funky.”
“It’s low carb.”
“Ooh, that would explain a lot. I figured someone who, um…looks like they could handle four thousand pushups followed by eighteen thousand crunches and twenty-two million burpeeswouldn’t have a diet of ice cream and crackers and cheese, but you know, those things are good too. Sometimes. Okay, all the time.”
He takes a bite, and his eyes close in what can only be described as a foodgasm.
I whip around before I can experience what can only be described as a…complete mental break.
“You do realize that even if I did a burpee every second, it would still take around six thousand hours to do twenty-two million of them?”
“Did you just do that math in your head?” I slip the second sandwich into the pan, giving him my back.
“You can break it down easily.”
I still can’t turn around. I’m far too flustered. I don’t have his granite countenance down. The only thing my face has down is down for the count. “I guess that’s why you’re CEO of a business. You would have had to take intense math classes for that, I’d imagine. Even if you didn’t, it’s probably your everyday thing now. Reports and mathing and such.”
“I’m CEO because it’s a family business, and it was always clear that when my dad retired, I’d step in, just like he did for his father and his father did for his grandfather.”
“Holy sausages, I didn’t realize refrigeration is that old.”
“The first air conditioning was invented at the turn of the century. But I didn’t major in business. I’m a mechanical engineer. I was always more fascinated by how things worked than by the office side of the business.”
“Oh. That’s handy, though. Isn’t it? Or does it just make doing something you don’t really want to be doing suck extra?”
“I made my peace with it.”
The second sandwich is done, and I can’t just stand here eating it and not face him, so I slowly pivot around. I keep the islandbetween us and nibble at the corner. After I finish a few bites, I figure I owe him something.
