“I get it, I get it,” Boone interrupts. “I didn’t finish mine, either. I’m not offended.”
“How mad would you be if I took over the kitchen tomorrow?” I ask.
I’m scared to look inside the fridge and the cupboards, but surely, I could patchwork some kind of Christmas Eve meal that was palatable. Enjoyable even. My cooking skills aren’t expert level, but I’d challenged myself for a year to cook every single meal I had, and just like anything I made a challenge, I’d conquered it with no mercy or room for grace. I hadn’t slipped up once.
My friends hated me that year. I refused to go out, but eventually they just began showing up at my apartment for dinner, knowing whatever I was cooking was just as good as what they’d order elsewhere. And it was free.
I got the company. They got the food. It was a win-win situation.
“I’d be the samelevel of mad I am that you didn’t eat your soup,” he answers.
“You really don’t care that I didn’t like it?” I question.
“I’d be more concerned if you did.” He laughs while rinsing the bowls out in the small kitchen sink.
“Do you mind if I peruse the kitchen and get a feel for what I’m going to be working with?” I stand up, and the wooden chair shrieks on the tile floor as if I’ve just dragged my nails across a chalkboard. I wince.
I watch from behind as his shoulder muscles pull up into a shrug. “My mom tries to keep me in food up here. I’m not sure that you’ll find what you’re used to.”
“Does she live close by?” I ask, curious about the mother he said he loved on the phone.
“She lives in town. It’s about forty-five minutes away,” he answers while squirting some clear dish soap into the sink. I note the lack of blue dye in the soap. This man cares about what things are made of.
“See her a lot?” I ask as I walk over to the fridge and open it. It resembles a grocery store that has been ransacked by crazy people reeling off the fear of being told the world is ending, except for the coffee creamers. There are plenty of those, hinting at the fact that I’m probably not the only one in the room surviving off coffee.
“A couple times a week,” he answers.
I shut the fridge. “And how bad is that snowstorm exactly?”
At this question, he marches over, grabs my hand, making it tingle again without my permission. Then, he pulls.Hard. Dragging me behind him like I’m some sort of sled instead of a woman.
He swings the front door open, and snow literally plummets inside to the floor. Boone has been neglecting his shoveling duties to keep me in coffee and company.
“Right,” I say with gritted teeth, partly because this image really solidifies how stuck I am and partly because Jack Frost snuck in with the snow and is beginning to nibble at my earlobes.
Boone shuts the door, and the snow instantly dissolves to puddles on the wooden floor, glistening from the glow of the fire from across the room. “But what do you need?”
This time it’s me that grabs his hand, pulling him behind me back to the kitchen. “Where’s the pantry?”
He steps in front of me and opens a single cabinet door, revealing even fewer items than were in the fridge, but they are at least staple necessities that you can build a recipe from. Flour. Sugar. Baking Soda. A few spices and canned goods.
“If you had some eggs…” I mutter, my finger tapping against my lips as my brain begins to grab information to construct recipes that just might create us at least a partial Christmas feast.
“Give me a few minutes,” he answers matter-of-factly before taking two large strides out of the kitchen. He’s pulling on a large parka and his boots before I catch up to him.
“Give you a few minutes? Are you going to go lay one yourself? Because I hate to break it to you, but thinking like a chicken doesn’t make you a chicken. Your body can’t suddenly develop the ability to form a yolk and then build the shell around it as it exits your body. Plus, it takes twenty-four hours for a chicken to lay anegg. I need eggs right now. Plural. Not just one,” I spout, my palms now pressed up against my hips.
And there’s that smile again that slowly crawls out from his lips, extending until the dimples press firmly into his cheeks. The man can’t lay an egg, but he sure can smile. I’ll give him that.
“I’m going to the coop,” he answers.
“The coop?”
“The chicken coop, where chickens live. I’m not a chicken, but I do have them,” he explains, tugging a knitted stocking cap over his unruly hair that curls around the wool almost immediately, as if his hair follicles are more accustomed to him wearing a hat than not. “Also, how do you know the process in which an egg is made?”
“My nephew has detailed it out to me too many times. It’s permanently engraved in my brain. I may forget how to sew a button on, the last name of my high school boyfriend that liked other girls more than me, and how to speak French after three years of classes in high school, which emboldened me to believe I could traipse across France. The French make some killer gelato and baked goods, but I’m pretty sure they invented the eye roll because they sure preferred that over helping me figure out what words to say. However, I will never forget how a chicken lays an egg.”
He nods his head at me, and I feel like I just saw questions pass through his ice blue eyes, but instead he sighs. “I’ll be right back.”
