“You’re absolutely smiling.” I gesture at the chaos around me. “This is a disaster. A complete and total disaster, and you’re standing there smiling about it.”
“I’m not smiling about the disaster.” He moves into the kitchen, carefully stepping around the flour on the floor. “I’m smiling because you have flour in your hair. Like, a lot of flour. You look like you aged forty years in the last five minutes.”
I reach up and touch my hair. “This is not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
“It’s not.”
“Kiera.” He’s directly in front of me now, and he reaches out to brush some flour off my shoulder. “It’s definitely a little funny.”
I want to argue, but then I catch sight of my reflection in the window. I look absolutely ridiculous. Like I lost a fight with a bag of flour and then rolled around in hot water for good measure.
A laugh bubbles up before I can stop it. Just a small one at first, but then it grows, and suddenly I’m laughing so hard I have to lean against the counter. Which is a mistake because now I have more flour on my jeans.
River starts laughing too, and the sound fills the kitchen—warm and genuine and completely at odds with the disaster surrounding us.
“Okay,” I say, wiping tears from my eyes and probably smearing flour across my face in the process. “Maybe it’s a little funny.”
“Here, let me help.” River grabs a clean dish towel and starts wiping up the counter.
“You don’t have to?—”
“I want to.” He’s already scooping up handfuls of the powdery mess. “Besides, this is partly my fault. I’m the one who put the flour on the top shelf where it could fall.”
“I’m the one who knocked it over.”
“Semantics.” He dumps a load of flour-tahini paste into the trash. “We’re in this together.”
I grab another towel and start working on the stovetop, soaking up the pasta water. We work in silence for a minute, both focused on damage control.
Then River reaches across me to grab more paper towels from the holder on the wall, and his arm brushes against mine. I look up, and suddenly we’re very close. Close enough that I can see the little flecks of gold in his eyes. Close enough that I’m acutely aware of how good he smells even in the middle of this disaster.
“You have flour on your nose,” he says softly.
“I have flour everywhere.”
He reaches up and gently brushes his thumb across my nose. The touch is light, careful, and it sends electricity crackling through me.
We’re standing in his disaster of a kitchen, both of us covered in flour, and all I can think about is how badly I want to kiss him.
But I don’t. Because we’re taking things slow. And I’m scared. And I’m not even sure that last night wasn’t a mistake.
River’s hand drops back to his side, but his eyes are still on mine. “We should probably finish cleaning up.”
“Right. Yes. Cleaning.” I force myself to step back, to put space between us. “Definitely should do that.”
We get back to work, and this time I’m very careful not to brush against him or stand too close or do anything that might lead to another one of those charged moments.
By the time we’ve cleaned up the worst of the mess, twenty minutes have passed, and I’m behind schedule. But the kitchen is functional again, even if there’s still a light dusting of flour in places I’m sure we missed.
I turn to him. “Can I borrow a shirt? This one is kind of… covered.”
He raises one eyebrow. “You want to wear one of my shirts?”
My heart picks up speed, and I tell myself to stop it. I need a shirt for functionality. That’s all. “Please?”
River grins at me. “Follow me.”
