The problem being that my culinary skills exist on a spectrum that begins at "cereal" and ends at "cereal with fruit on top" and does not extend to any territory that involves heat, seasoning, or the operation of cooking equipment more complex than a toaster.
Which I have also burned things in.
I open the mini pantry.
The contents are organized with the specific, systematic precision I have come to associate with everything Archie touches. Pasta boxes aligned by shape. Canned goods grouped by category. A section dedicated to baking supplies that includes flour, sugar, vanilla extract, and a set of measuring cups arranged in descending size order on a small shelf that suggests this man not only cooks but bakes, which is information my brain is going to need to process at a later date when my emotional bandwidth has been expanded.
I scan the shelves.
Eggs in the fridge. Butter. Milk. A punnet of blueberries that still carries the grocery store sticker. Maple syrup in a glass bottle that is actual maple syrup and not the corn syrup impersonator that my communal housing experience taught me to accept as a substitute.
Pancakes.
I can make pancakes.
This is the single culinary achievement in my repertoire that does not carry a fire risk rating above "moderate." My father taught me the recipe when I was eleven, standing beside me at the Holloway kitchen island with the same patient, methodical coaching cadence he used to teach me edge transitions, demonstrating the batter consistency and thegriddle temperature and the exact moment to flip based on the bubble pattern forming on the surface.
It is the one thing I can cook that will not result in property damage.
And it is the one recipe that carries my father's voice in every measurement and every instruction, his presence embedded in the technique the way his coaching is embedded in my skating, surviving in the muscle memory of a daughter who learned to make breakfast the same morning she learned that love is sometimes communicated through flour on your nose and a spatula placed in your hand with the instruction to "trust the bubbles."
I pull the ingredients from the pantry and the fridge. Arrange them on the counter with the organizational focus of a woman who is about to attempt a culinary operation that carries personal significance beyond its caloric value.
Flour. Eggs. Butter. Milk. Sugar. Blueberries. The maple syrup set aside for serving, its amber contents catching the morning light through the glass with a warmth that matches the sunlight filling the kitchen.
I locate a mixing bowl in the cabinet beneath the island. A whisk in the utensil drawer. A griddle pan in the lower shelf that carries the weight and the seasoning of cookware that has been used with care and stored with intention.
Alright, Sage. Put your Omega pants on.
CHAPTER 24
Protein Cereal
~ARCHIE~
The ding of my phone drags me out of sleep like a hook through water.
My hand moves before my brain does, patting the mattress in the blind, grasping search pattern of a man whose muscle memory knows where his phone should be and whose semiconscious awareness has just discovered that the phone is not there. My fingers find warm sheets. The indentation of a body that previously occupied the space beside me and has since vacated, the fabric still carrying a faint thermal signature and the concentrated residue of peppermint and cherry blossom that tells me the vacancy is recent but not immediate.
She is not here.
But she was here. The pillow beside mine is dented. The duvet on her side is pulled back rather than thrown, which means she extracted herself with care rather than urgency. And the scent she left behind is still alive in the bedding, fresh enough to suggest departure within the last hour rather than the distant past.
I lift my head. The phone is on the nightstand, which is where I left it last night and which is approximately eighteen inches from the location my hand has been searching, because sleeping next to an Omega who scents your pillow in her unconscious apparently recalibrates your spatial awareness alongside your circadian rhythm.
I groan. Drop my head back to the mattress. Decide that checking the phone requires a commitment to consciousness that I am not prepared to make, because the quality of sleep I just experienced is foreign enough to warrant investigation and the residual calm in my body is too valuable to surrender to a notification that is probably a campus newsletter about dining hall hours.
I slept.
Not the fragmented, vigilant, three-hours-at-a-time sleep that has constituted my nightly experience for twenty-four months. Actual sleep. Deep, uninterrupted, REM-cycle-completing sleep that left my body feeling like it has been serviced rather than survived.
The melatonin alone does not produce this result. I have been taking the supplement since the facility recommended it, and while it shortens the onset time, it has never neutralized the nightly playback of memories that typically fragments my sleep into segments separated by periods of ceiling-staring and breathing exercises.
Last night, the playback did not run.
Her scent blocked it. Her warmth displaced it. Her presence in my bed, which I did not invite and she did not consciously choose, rewrote the environmental conditions that my trauma requires to operate and replaced them with a chemical profile that my nervous system processed as incompatible with threat.
She made me safe enough to sleep.
