He slid me a look. “You and your father... You are close?”
“Yes. I mean, he wasn’t around a lot. Because he was deployed.” I watched Eric fold eggs gently from the cooked edges to the center of the pan. “But this one time, in high school, I had this cross-country meet? And he was waiting for me at the finish line.” I flushed, embarrassed by the wave of remembered emotion. I’d cried. “Total surprise. I wasn’t expecting him until the next day. It was a moment. Like something on YouTube.”
“Bryan is on the football team. Soccer,” Eric corrected himself. “He has a tournament over the holidays, yeah? And Alec has play practice. The boys cannot come to me. So...” Eric shrugged his big shoulders. “I go to North Carolina.”
I was oddly breathless. “When?”
“Christmas.” He concentrated on the eggs. “Denise invited me to spend the holiday with them.”
Denise? His ex-wife. Oh.
Oh. Whatever stupid fantasies I might have entertained about seeing Eric at Christmas, introducing him to my family, died a swift, embarrassing death. Not that I was jealous or anything, but... Fine. I was totally jealous.
“That’s very... civilized.”
“We are parents, yeah? It is best for the boys if we get along.”
I nodded. That didn’t sound like he was still hung up on his ex. But what did I know?
He slid the eggs from the pan, yellow as sunshine, soft as a cloud. The kitchen smelled like toast, like coming downstairs to breakfast on the first day of school with a new book bag full of sharpened pencils and the air rich with coffee and promise.
I slipped my phone from my pocket.
“What are you doing?” Eric asked.
I tapped the screen.Perfect. “Taking a picture.”
He gave me a look of controlled patience.
“What?”
“Jo. Every night we work to get dishes to the tables on time. Everything on the plate à point, the right texture, the proper temperature. And then some idiot pulls out his phone to take a picture and the food gets cold while they frame their fucking shot to impress their friends.”
I grinned. “You sound like my mother.” Except my mother never dropped the f-bomb in her life.
He raised an eyebrow.
“Eat, before your eggs get cold,”I explained.
His smile broke. When he smiled like that, with his whole face, I felt warm all over.
Encouraged, I continued. “Anyway, isn’t that why you became a chef? To impress people with your cooking?”
“To impress you. I cooked foryou. The point of making food is to feed people, yeah? The ones you care about.”
My cheeks got hot. Meaning... He cared about me? Well, me, and everybody who ever ate in his restaurant.Let’s not get carried away here.
We sat down to eat at my alcove desk table. I stuck a fork into the eggs. They melted on my tongue, the promise of butter, a whisper of salt, the taste of home.
“Oh,” I said, a soft note of discovery.
Another smile. He looked pleased. Like my opinion mattered. “Wait until I cook you dinner.”
“You cook dinner all the time.” It was the highlight of the day, when he cooked for the staff. Most of us couldn’t afford to eat his food otherwise. I ran bread over my plate, wiping up the last smear of silky goodness.Wait. “You mean, like, here? Tonight?”
“I thought we would go to my place.” He watched me carefully. “Unless you would rather go out.”
As if spending the day together, the night together, was a foregone conclusion. I swallowed. With Trey, I’d learned to always be on my guard, holding tight to my definition of who I was and what I wanted, constantly braced against the moment he would lunge ahead, dragging me with him.
