She didn’t say anything. Just reached into the bowl of sugar and flickeda spoonfuldirectly at me.
I stopped laughing — immediately.
She froze. “Silas.”
A grain of sugar slid down my cheek.
“You just made a tactical error.”
She backed up. I advanced. Slow. Deliberate. Predatory.
“Don’t you dare,” she said.
“Oh, I dare.”
She shrieked just as I lunged for the mixing bowl. Handed it off to her like a grenade. She twisted, darting away — too late. I swept her in, pinning her back against the counter with my hips, flour-dusted, sugar-streaked, and breathless.
“You’re unhinged,” she whispered, but she wasn’t pushing me away. Her hands were already on my chest.
“And you like it,” I said.
Her fingers curled into my shirt. She looked up at me, and there it was again — that same flicker from earlier. Something soft. Scared. Wild.
“We’re going to ruin the cookies,” she murmured.
“There’s no power. We can’t even put them in the oven, yet..”
She didn’t move. Neither did I.
But shelaughed. Really laughed. “Fine,” she said, slipping out from under me. “But if these end up tasting like chalk, it’s your fault.”
“You’re the one who threw sugar at me.”
“I regret nothing.”
And she didn’t. I could see it in the way she reached for the chocolate chips like she’d lived here forever. How she still couldn’t meet my eyes for more than a second without blushing.
We ate most of the dough before either of us could wrap it up. We kept brushing past each other, reaching around each other, touching like we didn’t know how not to.
And when she stood on tiptoe to grab the cling wrap, I didn’t stop myself from leaning down and pressing a kiss to the back of her shoulder.
Just a light one.
Just enough to say:I think I’m ruined for you, and you don’t even know it yet.
She was humming — a tune I didn’t recognize, probably something she made up on the spot — while licking chocolate off her thumb. I was leaning against the counter, half just watching her, half bracing myself for the way my chest kept pulling tight every time she smiled.
We weren’t ready for it.
The lights flashed.
Then flared back to life.
The refrigerator groaned awake. The oven beeped. The heater rumbled. And in the corner where her phone hadnotbeen charging on the ancient side table — a dozen notifications lit up at once.
We both froze.
Her iffy little reality, the one we’d been living in like it was a shared dream — warm fires and flour fights and 2 a.m. confessions under blankets — shimmered and broke.
