He lined up ingredients on the butcher block: eggs, a block of cheese, a small pile of green onions, a suspiciously perfect tomato, sourdough bread. He looked at me over his shoulder and said, “Do you like breakfast for dinner, or is that too on the nose?”
“Breakfast is my favorite dinner,” I said, still swaddled in towel, perched on the nearest barstool. “If you can make a decent omelet, you can have my soul. For three days, anyway.”
He cracked eggs with a single-handed flourish, no shell shards anywhere, and started whisking them with a ferocity that nearly matched the way he’d fucked me. The skillet heated, the cheese grated itself beneath his claws, and in less than five minutes he had a perfect, golden curd folding over itself on the plate. He layered in tomato and chive, then slid the whole thing to me with a proud, almost bashful smile.
I took a bite. It was flawless, creamy, the cheese barely melted inside so it oozed with every forkful. “Oh my god,” I moaned, louder than necessary. “You’re wasted on the bachelor circuit. You could run a restaurant with food like this. Five stars, would bang again.”
Samiel grinned, a slow, prideful curl of his mouth. “Give me another night. I’ll show you what I can really do.” The words came out dark and deliberate, like a promise—though I couldn’t be sure if he meant the food, the fucking, or both.
I dared him with a look, then devoured the rest of the omelet in greedy, undignified bites. By the time I finished, the towel was slipping dangerously low, and my skin had developed that prickly, post-hot-tub hypersensitivity that made everything feel faintly electric. I shimmied off the stool and let the towel drop to the floor, just to see if Samiel would react.
He did. His eyes flickered over my body in a way that was both clinical and avaricious, as if he wanted to log every contour for a report later. He wiped his hands on a towel, then stalkedtoward me with a predatory patience I was already learning to recognize as his baseline.
“You waited too long to eat,” he said, voice low but edged with something like scold. “You always do that?”
I rolled my eyes but couldn’t hide the flush. “I forget sometimes. Deadlines, distractions, existential dread. I’ll eat when I’m hungry, or when it’s in front of me.” I shrugged like it was nothing, but he didn’t let it slide.
He caught my chin between his thumb and forefinger, not hard, just commanding. “Don’t do that again,” he said, and the heat in his words made my knees want to buckle. “You’re not allowed to starve yourself around me. If you go more than six hours, I’ll hunt you down and make you eat whether you want to or not.” The promise was dark and unyielding, and for a second I wondered if this was what it felt like to be cared for, or possessed, or both. The scary part was—I didn’t hate it.
He watched my face for signs of resistance, and when he saw none, he released my chin and bent to pick up the towel. He draped it over my shoulders, infuriatingly gentle after all the predatory heat of his stare. “You’re going to need your strength for tomorrow, Annie. I have plans.”
I snorted, trying to play it off. “You’re giving me the full demon experience, aren’t you? Next you’ll be planning out my macros and hiding protein powder in my drinks.”
He flicked an eyebrow. “I could. Do you want a smoothie?” He said it with such serious intent that I laughed, a real, honest sound that bounced off the concrete and glass of the kitchen.
“I’m a nutritionist,” I reminded him, “and the only time I ever eat like a nutritionist is when I’m too tired to make food, or too stubborn to admit I need it. So yeah, breakfast for dinner is basically my superfood.”
Samiel’s brow creased, then smoothed. “You are a nutritionist,” he said, my statement jogging his memory.
I nodded, licking the last bit of cheese from my fingers. "I do remote consults for a lot of tech people—paranoid types, mostly, who want cheat codes for not dying young. Half my job is explaining to grown adults that coffee doesn't count as breakfast, and the other half is convincing them that the human body is not a blender you can run on Red Bull and existential dread alone."
He watched me push the empty plate away, his eyes tracking the movement. "So your whole job is telling people how not to kill themselves with their own appetites?" His claws tapped the counter, a touch so careful it made my heart spasm.
"That, and making them feel okay about having one in the first place." I dabbed at the corner of my mouth with my finger, catching the last bit of egg. "I mostly see clients by Zoom. It's all spreadsheets and shame spirals." I paused, realizing I'd just demolished his perfect omelet without coming up for air. "It's weirdly intimate, telling people how to eat. You get to see all their secrets, you know? I watch them hoard their granola bars and guilt like it's currency. That's the fun of it—getting to see how people really live, not how they want you to think they do." I ran my finger along the empty plate, collecting the last traces of melted cheese, and considered the demon in front of me, who was already eyeing the fridge like he was planning his next culinary seduction. "Honestly, you're the first person who's ever made me eat after sex. Usually it's the reverse."
After a while, the edge came off. I slumped over the counter, resting my forehead on the cold marble. “I’ll have to get my license transferred if this thing sticks,” I said, a lazy mumble.
The words were half-joking, but Samiel’s gaze sharpened. “You’d move here? Permanently?”
He waited, not breathing, not even shifting his weight, as if a single wrong move would scatter the hope so palpable between us.
I didn’t mean to say it yet, but it was out in the open now and there was no taking it back. Hell, it had been the point all along, hadn’t it? I’d applied for the nutritionist job at the stupid Lake Purgatory wellness center before I even bought my bus ticket. I’d researched the licensing board and filled out the paperwork. I’d stalked the town’s sad excuse for a social media presence just to see if the grocery store carried oat milk or if I’d have to settle for the shelf-stable kind. All these little acts of hope, stashed away as insurance in case I met someone who wasn’t a disappointment. And now, with Samiel’s eyes locked on me, I realized I’d been pulling for this outcome the whole time, even when I was pretending to be too cool to care. If I was honest, I’d been more afraid of not finding something worth staying for than of the valley itself. The rest was just inertia and self-defense.
“Hey.” His voice was softer than I expected. Samiel reached across the counter, gathered my fingers into his hand, and just held them—thumb stroking the backs, claws kept carefully away from skin. “You don’t have to decide.” He said it like he meant it, but there was a tremor there, a hunger to believe maybe he wasn’t just a one-night monster after all.
“You’d like it here,” he said, voice soft as the dusk outside, but then, catching himself, straightened his back and went for casual. “The town’s small but weird. Nobody cares what you wear or who you fuck.”
I looked up at him, at the face that should have scared the shit out of me but instead made my teeth ache to bite. His eyes—open, raw, almost pleading—held mine like he was afraid I'd vanish if he blinked. My heart hammered against my ribs.
"Is it always like that for you?" I asked, voice barely above a whisper. "When you're with someone, I mean. Or was that..." I trailed off, letting the question hang between us, not sure if I was ready for the answer, but needing to hear it, anyway.
For a second, Samiel looked at me like I was the last train out of the city, and he was the only idiot left on the platform. His mouth curled, uncertain. "That was my first time," he said, which was almost laughable, except the words hit with the force of truth.
I tried not to choke. "You mean, first time with a human?"
He shrugged, a self-conscious roll of muscle under skin. "First time with a bride. First time it felt like it mattered." He looked away, his gaze catching on the dark window as if he expected to see his own reflection and didn't want to. "Most demons don't get picked. Or they get picked by someone who wants the tourist version—a weekend of stories, a novelty. They don’t…want us for us. It's easier to stay on the bench."
I didn't know what to say to that. I’d always thought of myself as the benchwarmer, the second-string girlfriend or the rebound or the good story, if you wanted to look edgy without actually committing to the lifestyle. The idea that Samiel—seven feet of muscle and menace, with wings that could block out the sun and claws that could rip through steel—could feel unwanted almost made me want to laugh. Except he said it with his eyes cast down at his own massive hands, voice dropping to a rasp that cracked at the edges, and the crimson flush that spread across his cheekbones said he'd never meant to let that vulnerability slip.
