“I’m not sure.”
“Are you embarrassed?”
I think about it and try to answer that in a way that won’t put that panicked look back in her face, andwe’ll never be embarrassed in front of one another because I’m going to watch you shit on a table while birthing our children and you will be picking me up from my colonoscopieswon’t cut it. “No, I don’t think that I would be embarrassed to do anything in front of you.”
“Wait,” she says suddenly, taking the spatula from my hand and placing it on the counter. She turns me around, and the ease and the familiarity of it is almost painful. “Let’s make a video!”
“Right now?” I consider my whole rig. “We don’t have time. We gotta be out of here in an hour, and I can’t get all my camera stuff unpacked and repacked by then.”
“Can I use my phone?” Annie is adamant and earnest and enthusiastic about this in a way that I haven’t seen before.
“Maybe?”
“What’s wrong?” She squints at me before her gorgeous eyes light up like a damn pinball machine. I think this is Impulsive Annie Li. “Can I do it with you?” she asks excitedly.
There is a sudden roaring in my ears. “No.”
She frowns. “What do you mean, no?”
No—from this moment forward, I am the only one who is ever allowed to see your naked body. “I don’t want you to,” I tell her instead.
It’s in this moment that I learn that sayingnoto My Annie Li is the equivalent of telling hertodo it, and do it more and harder.
“Well,” she announces to the kitchen, “now I’m doing it. More, and harder.”
“I just said ‘no.’”
“You promised me ‘yes’ to everything for the rest of our lives!” she fires back.
There is a new roaring in my ears, and it’s the sound of shocked silence as we stare at one another, digesting this thing that has permeated the air around us since I released it last night.
The smile that spreads across my face is slow and measured. “You ready to talk about it?”
She throws the hood of my hoodie on. “Never mind. We don’t have to make a video.” She tries to move around me to leave the kitchen, but I don’t let her.
“We don’t have to talk about it right now. But what should the video be about?” I ask her gently, reaching down to the hem of my hoodie and peeling the whole thing off her body, grateful when she lets me. “I just did one on breakfast foods, and this stuff is done already.” I rub the various love bites I’ve left on her body, and the nonsensical animal in me is soothed knowing that anyone who sees her naked body will know she is mine.
Annie melts in my arms. “It has to be fast, right? Easy?” She scans the kitchen. “Coffee? Tea?” Her eyes light up again. “Caffeine Chemistry.”
I ponder this, running through factoids in my brain. “There are a bunch of specifics with brewing coffee and tea that I don’t remember off the top of my head. Things like water temperature and steep times for different grinds or types of tea. I’d have to look those things up, so I don’t think I can just do those things off the cuff.” I keep scanning the kitchen. “How about add-ins?”
Annie’s already moving through the kitchen, gathering things like a sous-chef hurricane. “Milk,” she says, opening thefridge. “Wow. They have whole, skim, half-and-half, oat, and almond.”
“That’s perfect. Those all do different things that I can talk about.”
She moves to various cabinets. “Sugar. Spices?”
“Cinnamon,” I say, after a moment. “And cardamom is used in Turkish coffee.”
“Oh,” she exclaims. She takes one last thing out of the cabinet and slams it on the counter.
“A supersaturated solution.” I grin. “Good girl.”
TWENTY-THREE
Nico
“—howdifferent milks make coffee taste better,” I say towards the phone that’s propped up on the counter.
