I squinted at the label. “Is that like … baby broccoli?”
“The seedlings, anyway.”
“How very …”
“Healthy?”
“Sure,” I agreed. “And super bougie.”
He chuckled. “I don’t have to get them.”
“But do you like them?” I asked, trying to keep the dubiousness from my voice.
He shrugged. “Yeah. They’re good in salads and in smoothies.”
“Then sure. Get the fancy baby broccoli.” I grabbed the cart handle and started pushing. “But when I’m still hungry after your rabbit food, I don’t want to hear you complain about the sounds coming from my stomach.”
“Counterpoint,” Sebastian said. “When you realize how much better you feel after just a week of eating healthy like me, I want to hear you admit I was right.”
“You’re the worst,” I said, laughing.
The truth was, I ate plenty of vegetables. I just liked fucking with him.
He smirked at me and tossed the container into the cart, along with a couple of pints of cherry tomatoes, a cucumber, and several bunches of fresh basil, dill, and chives.
We moved on to the meat section, where I loaded up on steaks, chicken thighs, and hot Italian sausage. Sebastianstudied the seafood case and asked for a pound each of monkfish and shrimp.
“I thought you were sticking to salads,” I teased, eyeing the monkfish dubiously. It was ... not a pretty fish. “You know how to cook those?” I gestured toward the butcher-paper-wrapped packages the woman was handing him across the glass case.
“Thank you,” he told her before turning to me. “Unlike you, I actually know how to cook.”
“Of course you do.”
Sebastian Carruthers had always been the type of person who oozed competence. I’d once watched him fix a broken lamp chain with a paper clip and talk his way out of a parking ticket by politely citing the relevant municipal code. “You’re good at everything.”
“I mean … kind of. Yeah.”
“And so humble,” I snarked.
“And yet you love me anyway.” The second the words were out of his mouth, his eyes went a little wide. “Umm, you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I do,” I said, my pulse racing.
I could have meant “I understand what you’re trying to say” just as easily as I could have meant something a lot more honest than that. And from the way Sebastian’s gaze held mine for half a second too long, he knew it, too.
I huffed out a breath that was somewhere between a laugh and me trying to cover up the way those words made my heart skip.
I grabbed the cart handle and walked quickly toward the next aisle. “Okay, what else? Pasta? Yeah, pasta sounds good,” I babbled.
There, I grabbed a box of store-brand penne, which Sebastian immediately swapped out for a different brand. “Trust me,” he said. “This is way better.”
“Is this going to be a running theme—you trying to turn me into some bougie foodie?”
“Only when I’m right.” He grinned. “Which, as we’ve established, is most of the time.”
“You realize when you’re wrong, I’m never going to let you hear the end of it?”
I heard the assumption in my own words—whenhe was wrong, notif. Like we’d have time for more grocery runs. More cooking.
