He shook his head, laughing under his breath before sliding onto one of the barstools at the kitchen island.
“What’s for breakfast then?” he asked.
I checked the fridge, pulling out a carton of eggs and some sausage, ready to cook for him until he burst. I turned a burner on hot, letting the pan get warm before adding butter and turning down the heat.
“Can we talk about yesterday?” The sizzle of butter in the pan almost obscured the question, but as always, he heard me.
“If it makes you feel better.”
“Wouldn’t it makeyoufeel better?” I glanced at him before poking at the sausage with a spatula.
“I thought about it a lot when I was at dinner with Wes last night. Before I came back over. And I get it. I’m in a good place with it. Aren’t you?” Hendrix smiled and drank his coffee.
I rolled the sausages around the pan aggressively, avoiding a burn and avoiding the question. Instead, I pulled a second pan out of the cabinet and started frying some eggs. The toast had long gone cold, so I put two more slices of bread into the toaster. The coffee was cold too, so I topped my mug off, intending to sear the words out of my mouth before I said something stupid.
“I’ll take that as a no.” Hendrix broke the silence while I plated our breakfasts.
“I am happy,” I protested, taking the stool beside him and shoving a fork toward his hand. “I’ve just…never been forgiven so easily.”
“What’s to forgive?”
“I acted like a child.”
“You acted like a man who loves me. A man who was maybe a little jealous when my own feelings about him got called into question.” Hendrix stabbed his fork into the egg yolk, yellow goo running across his plate, into the sausage and toast. “I acted poorly the night you and Grayson went to the club.”
I couldn’t stop the laugh that bubbled out of my throat at his comment. “I was equally jealous then. The idea of you being with another man.”
“But you’re not a jerk about it,” he interrupted. “And you mean well with it. Like, it’s coming from a good place.”
“You’re being generous,” I countered.
“I love you.” He shoved a forkful of sausage and egg into his mouth, holding my stare while he chewed and swallowed.
“You didn’t want to love me.”
“And yet, here we are.”
“I knew I was going to fall in love with you,” I told him, mopping up yolk on my plate with a crust of toast. “From the gate.”
“Everything went according to plan.”
I dropped my fork, the clatter of steel against porcelain far too loud for the otherwise peacefulness of the morning. “Why are you being so calm about this?”
“I told you before I don’t date men younger than me.”
I scoffed, my own kind of quiet thank you for the reminder I’d never asked for.
Hendrix went on, unfazed, “I don’t date younger men because they don’t have as much control over their emotions or impulses that I’d generally prefer. But you do, and you always have. Even when you used to taunt me through the fence, that was you in control.”
“You hated that.”
“Not as much as I want either of us to believe,” he corrected, still working through the food on his plate. “And you being outwardly jealous, it’s just the tiniest slip on that control. It’s nothing to start a war over.”
“Because you were jealous too,” I said.
“I still am.” Hendrix swallowed, reaching for his coffee.
“Of who?”
