“I’m not good at cooking, but I can heat up water,” she says.
“Barely, so I hear,” I tease her.
My mother tsks at me for making a joke at my wife’s expense, and Katerina tosses a smirk over her shoulder and scrunches her nose. In my defense, that’s what she told me.
“Would you like a cup, Mrs. Easton?” Katerina asks.
“I would love one, sweetheart, but call me mom, or ma. You’re family now.”
Katerina’s eyes shoot to me and then back down to the tea kettle, and I see a ghost of a smile stretch across her face.
It has me wondering what her reaction would be if I told her I wanted her to be a part of our family permanently. Would she smile? Would she frown? Would she grab the keys to the rental car and take off for the nearest airport back to Russia, and turn herself in, rather than spend a life with me? I can’t take my eyes off my wife as she’s filling the kettle with water under the faucet and then sets it back to heat, Moose following her every step.
“I’ll take a cup of coffee if anyone is worried about me getting dehydrated over here,” my father calls out.
“You’re a cripple, Arny, not dead. Get your own cup of coffee, you ol’ coot. Our daughter-in-law is our guest.”
Katerina’s head snaps toward me so fast I almost choke. The look on her face is priceless–shock, confusion, a little alarm, like she’s trying to figure out whether she just walked into a hostile kitchen or a comedy sketch.
Before I can reassure her, my dad wheels himself straight over to my mom, grabs her by the waist, and yanks her onto his lap with a strength no one expects him to still have. Though I know he’s been lifting weights with my uncle to keep his upper body strength so it doesn’t shock me at all.
“I’ll show you what an ol’ coot can still do,” he says, and then proceeds to kiss her like they’re teenagers sneaking around behind the barns at a county fair.
Katerina’s eyes go comically wide. I have to bite back a laugh as I stand out of the stool and head towards her where the coffee caraff sits and poor myself and my dad a cup.
“Welcome to breakfast at the Eastons,” I murmur as I set the mugs down and angle closer, sliding a hand behind her back to draw her in. I dip my head and press a brief kiss into her hair. It’s easy, familiar, like it belongs there. “It’s… interactive.”
She lets out a soft, stunned laugh once she realizes this is just how my parents flirt. It’s not fighting. It’s foreplay.
Then her gaze lifts to mine. She doesn’t pull away; she leans into my touch, and for a second we just look at each other, something unspoken stretching tight between us. I want to tell her so much, but the kettle whistles and breaks the moment. Fuck. I want what my parents have. And I want it with her.
Not just the heat of it but the longevity, too.
I want the version of us ten, twenty years from now—me with a bad back and a worse shoulder from too many seasons on skates, her giving me hell in Russian in front of our daughter-in-law. Still bantering. Still grabbing at each other like we can’t help it. Like my parents.
Like, forever isn’t a scary word for her.
We settle into the kitchen once my dad finally lets my mom off his lap. He wheels over to me as I hand him a cup I poured for him and myself, and then I follow him across the kitchen andsit with him at the table while he launches into a story about a neighbor’s dog getting stuck in a storm drain again.
And Katerina? She drifts to my mom’s side like she’s been stepping into this kitchen her whole life. Passing utensils, tasting a sauce, leaning in to hear a whispered instruction. She is easing into the rhythm of my family like she already knows it’s one of her well-practiced performances.
She laughs at the right moments, follows up with questions, gets perfectly good blackmail stories about me as a kid that I’m sure she’ll use to her advantage later, and listens like she belongs.
The idea that this might be the only time I ever get to see her in this kitchen, that after today this could all go right back to temporary, hits me hard enough that I have to swallow it down.
Anika was right. When this is over, it’s going to hurt like hell. I just didn’t want to admit it.
My mom catches me staring at Katerina and lifts her brows in that knowing, smug, mom way.
One of those ‘you love her’looks.
Moms think they know everything.
Unfortunately… mine’s right this time.
After another fifteen minutes, the house starts to hustle awake, and Katerina and I have a flight to catch.
We step out to the porch as we’re leaving, and Mom touches my arm.
