He laughed. “It’s your house, Locke. And the fridge is in here.”
When I stepped into the small room off the back of the kitchen, childhood memories came flooding in. “Oh,” I said, reaching out for the wide glass bottle on a nearby shelf. “My grandmother used to keep lemonade in this.”
I twisted off the metal cap and imagined I could still smell the tang of it inside. “She made it extra sweet when Celeste andI were here.” I let out a laugh. “Or she had the kitchen staff do it, I guess. There was a chef one time who added cut-up cherries to it. We thought we’d won the lottery that summer.”
Jett looked at me over the arm he held the fridge door open with. “You enjoyed it here.”
I nodded. “It was like a break from reality. And my grandparents were so… normal compared to my own parents. They didn’t fight. Didn’t express their frustration with my presence—” I stopped myself, realizing too late that I’d ventured into too-personal territory. “Yes. I loved it here. Still do.”
Jett pulled the container of sorbetto from the freezer while I searched the shelves for the little cookies. We took our booty out to the kitchen and began looking for utensils. Jett knew exactly where they’d be.
“How do you know where the ice cream scoop is, for fuck’s sake?” I asked.
He smiled up at me sheepishly while he rinsed it under hot water. “I’ve done reconnaissance. This sorbetto mission wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing, Jerome.”
After scooping some into the bowls I found, he returned the container to the freezer and waved me over to the small table in the corner. “Bring those cookies. I want more than one.”
“You must be starving,” I said. “I can make you something more substantial.”
“Do you cook?” he asked in surprise.
“I mean… no. But I could wake someone.”
He snorted. “You’re lying.”
I nodded and grinned. “Not sure what it says about me that you believed me. I may not be a great cook, but I can scramble some eggs and make a grilled cheese.”
Jett plucked up a cookie and scooped it into the sorbetto before putting the entire bite into his mouth and groaning. “Fuck. I’m going to marry that man.”
“You’ll have to go through his wife first,” I said with a laugh that quickly faded out. “You’d like her, actually. She’s a nurse. She helped care for my grandmother before she died. Lung cancer. She came here for her final months a few years ago.”
Jett eyed me over the spoon as he dragged it out of his mouth. If only he knew what that did to me.
“It sounds like you were closer to your grandparents than your parents, yeah?”
I nodded. “They were incredible people. Never stopped trying to make life better for everyone around them.” I thought back to some of the amazing moves my grandfather had made in Paxis tournaments over the years. His generosity and goodness had helped the entire fucking world, not that anyone would ever know it.
I swallowed and dug into the sorbetto again. “My grandfather taught me Paxis, too,” I said, lifting the conversation out of deeper places. “So I’ve been thinking of him a lot this week.”
Jett’s eyes were still on me. “Will you teach it to me?”
“Paxis?” I asked in surprise.
“Yeah. I’m kind of good at games, actually. And I already know how to play chess.”
“You know how to play chess,” I said, ignoring my excitement.
He tilted his head at me the way he did when he was going to tease me. “Don’t take my word for it, Maris. Let’s see what you got.”
Which is how we found ourselves on the floor of our suite a couple of hours later, dressed in pajama pants and arguing over the placement of his rook.
“You said I could move it onto the yellow board,” he accused. “This is my home rook, and yellow is the fire board, right?”
“Yes, but the blue player played his requesting pawn. And you’re responding with?—”
“With my home rook,” he said. “Because I’m offering blue my home.”
“Babe,” I said, not realizing what I was saying. “You want to use your resource rook instead.”
