For seven fifteen on a Tuesday in the Cascades, she was absurdly overdressed. For standing in my kitchen with morning light coming through the window behind her, she was a problem I was going to have.
“Good morning.” Her eyes went to the coffee pot. “Is that French press?”
“Just coffee.”
“I can work with that.” She poured herself a cup, took a sip, and her expression went polite—restraint I recognized. She reached for the sugar I kept in the cabinet above the stove.
“Manual’s in the binder,” I said. “I got to page thirty-one.”
“Section three, subsection C?”
“If that’s the one about kitchen protocols.”
“It is.”
“Then that’s where I fell asleep.”
She set her coffee down and opened the cabinet next to the stove. Then the one below it. Then the drawer beside the sink. She was looking at my kitchen the way I’d once watched a structural engineer look at a condemned building—assessing damage, planning renovation, calculating the cost of bringing it up to code.
“Your spices aren’t alphabetized,” she said.
“No.”
“And your dry goods are mixed in with your canned goods.”
“They’re all food. They get along.”
She was already moving the oregano. By the time I’d finished my second cup, she’d reorganized the spice shelf, separated my pantry into what she called “logical clusters,” and was studying the utensil drawer with an expression that suggested it had personally offended her.
I leaned against the counter and watched. She was close enough that I caught whatever she’d put on that morning — warm, expensive, nothing I could name, and it cut straight through the coffee and the firewood smell of the kitchen. Her hands moved with a focus that was almost hypnotic, quick and certain, and her sweater had slipped off one shoulder and she hadn’t noticed. I noticed. The line of her collarbone, the small hollow at the base of her throat, her frown at my spatula placement. My cock stirred, which was not the reaction I’d planned on having to a woman rearranging my pantry.
I turned away. Poured a third cup of coffee.
“You don’t have a garlic press,” she said.
“I have a knife.”
“A knife is not a garlic press.”
“A knife has been pressing my garlic just fine for three years.”
She looked at me the way you’d look at someone who told you they did their taxes by hand. Which I did, but that was a conversation for another day.
My phone buzzed at noon. I checked it in the kitchen while she sat at the dining table with her laptop, doing whatever consultants did on computers. She’d been working since nine, fingers moving fast, occasionally murmuring numbers to herself, and I’d gone out to the outpost to check gear for a client group later in the week and come back to find she hadn’t moved.
Drew’s name on the screen. I stepped onto the porch.
“How’s married life?”
“Not even a day.”
“That’s enough time for initial data. How’d she sleep? How’d you sleep? Any preliminary compatibility indicators I should log?”
“Drew.”
“I’m coming tomorrow. Quick check-in. Fly in, see you guys in your element, fly out. Easy.”
It wasn’t easy. Nothing about him was easy. He showed up to things the way weather showed up—suddenly, with enthusiasm, and without much concern for whether you were prepared.
