The cutting board wobbles like it’s alive. The knife slides off it once, twice, but I catch it with the reflexes of a rockstar who’s survived mosh pits and bad hotel beds. Ethan’s arrival is thirty minutes away, and I already feel like I’m hosting some culinary hostage situation.
“Alright, Lucky Vale,” I mutter to myself, “you got this. You can adult. You’re fine.”
Confidence: 100% in my head. Actual skill: zero.
The first challenge: peeling a carrot. Simple, right? Carrot. Knife. Peel. Easy.
Except the carrot escapes. It rolls across the counter, as if it knows my panic and mocks me silently. I lunge, catching it in a desperate, elegant, totally not graceful ballet of flailing limbs. It’s the kind of move that would earn me Olympic points if there were a medal for “kitchen mayhem.”
Next step: the pasta. Water. Pot. Stove. Salt. Stir. Perfect.
Wait?
Where’s the lid? I find it, but now the water looks… suspicious. YouTube said salt. How much salt? Enough to taste like dinner or enough to induce a coronary? I sprinkle cautiously, wobbling on the balls of my feet.
The water is boiling over like it has its own vendetta against me. Steam rises, fogging the window, and my socks are suddenly soaked. I pat it all down with a dish towel, flinging droplets across the floor. Graceful.
I’m stirring furiously, wishfully imagining Ethan walking in, seeing me, thinking, “Wow. Domestic goddess. She’s perfect.”
Instead, I honestly imagine him seeing me in real-time: cardigan slightly singed at the hem because I flirted too close to the burner, water threatening to boil over, a carrot peel stuck to my hair.
Next, I shove something vaguely dinner-shaped into the oven. Meat? Casserole? Honestly, who knows? The smoke alarm hasn’t gone off yet, which either means I’m a genius or a disaster in progress. Then I smell it—the faint, increasingly assertive scent of burning. I fling the oven open and get hit with a plume of smoke. My cardigan flaps dramatically in the haze.
Pan on the stove. I toss some garlic in. Flames leap up. I scream like a banshee, flail my arm, and somehow manage to set the towel right next to the stove. I snatch it before it ignites and fling it onto the floor. It lands in a puddle of boiling pasta water. Perfect. Brilliant. Dinner is officially a war zone.
I glance at the clock. Fifteen minutes. Ethan. Fifteen minutes. My fridge is sticky, my countertops look like a crime scene, and I am wearing a cardigan that smells faintly of burnt optimism.
I take a deep breath. I can do this. I can. I am doing this.
Then the pasta bubbles over again. A scream somewhere between Janis Joplin playing in the background and a fire alarm escapes me. Water. Everywhere. Steam like a small fog machine for dramaticeffect. I bang the pot back onto the stove, sending a small cascade of water onto the floor. My socks are soaked. My dignity? Ruined.
And yet. I laugh. Because this is my life. This is Lucky Vale, domestic goddess. And if Ethan can survive this, well… maybe, just maybe, he’s patient enough to like me anyway.
The doorbell rings, and my stomach drops like it’s auditioning for a rollercoaster. Ethan. He’s actually here. I take a deep breath, shove my hair into a slightly less disastrous bun, throw off my battered cardigan, thank God I’m wearing a vest, and fling open the door.
Shit, my arms…it’s too late. But if he hasn’t figured out who I am, I doubt he will with my ink.
He’s standing there, arms crossed, calm as a saint, with that faint smirk I’m slowly learning to interpret as enticing danger. He steps inside, eyes scanning the kitchen like it’s a crime scene.
“Oh,” he says softly, almost amused. “I see… domestication is… going well?”
I groan, gesturing helplessly. “Yes. Totally. Look at this. I’m… I’m a domestic goddess. Clearly.”
He doesn’t say a word. He smirks and tilts his head, hands in his pockets, watching me flail over the oven smoke and the sticky countertops.
“Do you… need help?” he asks carefully.
“No!” I snap, then immediately regret it. “I mean… maybe… no! I’ve got this! Totally fine!” I gesture at the burning pan on the stove like it’s a prop in a horror movie.
He chuckles quietly, that low, amused sound that makes my chest tighten. “Alright,” he says, still silent otherwise, and moves closer to inspect the chaos.
I spin around, stirring pasta that’s threatening to escape the pot, while flames from the garlic pan lick the air. My confidence is collapsing faster than the cardboard box I just threw the towel onto.
Ethan steps up, casually grabbing a spatula and a pan, and starts taking over. He moves with precise, calm efficiency, flipping, stirring, seasoning… quietly, deliberately, like he’s dismantling my kitchen panic one step at a time.
I hover like a frantic ghost, heart thudding, cheeks flaming. “I—uh—I never learned to cook,” I admit, half-defeated, half-mortified.
He glances at me over his shoulder, still working. “Cooking’s like music,” he says, voice calm, precise. “Trial and error. You experiment, make mistakes, and adjust. You improvise.”
