“Were you?”
“Terrified. Did it anyway. Fell off, caught a piece of rebar on the way down.”
She smiles. “So you’ve always been terrible at saying no to women.”
The joke lands softly.
She presses her face into my chest and breathes, and I hold her. Sometimes the answer to pain isn’t words. Just presence.
We’re quiet for a while.
The light moves across the kitchen floor, afternoon deepening toward gold. Real.
“What happens now?” she asks against my skin.
She’s not asking about breakfast. She’s asking about the collar in the church, the parish expecting Father Gabriel on Sunday, the life I built versus the life I’m lying in.
“I don’t know.”
“Is that okay? Not knowing?”
I think about it. Feel the weight of uncertainty, the terror of not having a plan.
“It’s terrifying,” I tell her. “But it’s honest. And I’ve been dishonest for too long. Terrifying and honest is an improvement.”
She lifts her head again. Studies my face. Then something happens that hasn’t happened in forever. I smile. Not the almost-smile I’ve been fighting at the food pantry, not the wry twist I allow sometimes. A real, full smile that cracks my face wide open.
She kisses me, quick and light. Then she turns back to the counter, already reaching for the eggs, comfortable in my spacein a way that makes my chest tight with want and wonder and the bizarre realization that this is allowed now.
She hands me a mug. Our fingers touch on the ceramic, our old language, except now it’s not a substitute for contact. Now she can touch the mug and then my hand and then lean up to kiss my jaw because the distance is gone.
“I’ll scramble the eggs,” she says. “You can do the toast.”
“I can manage toast.”
“Can you though.”
The toast burns. Not slightly — charred through, a solid black brick, smoke curling from the toaster before the eggs are even done. “Shit.”
She laughs, pulling the toaster plug from the wall and dropping the evidence in the sink. “Every time.”
“The smoke detector’s about to…” she starts.
The shriek cuts through the kitchen. She’s on a chair, fanning it with a dish towel while I open windows, both of us laughing like idiots.
We eat the eggs standing at the counter, her hip pressed against mine.
The knot between my ribs, the one that’s been there so long I forgot it wasn’t supposed to be, finally loosens.
The late afternoon stretches like honey, golden and slow.
She commands the kitchen with the authority I use for parish logistics, turning my barren space into something that smells like home. Steam fogs the window as she stirs something complex on the stove. Cumin, definitely. Garlic. Something green and bright.
“Stop hovering,” she says without turning around. “Do your parish work.”
I retreat to the table, spreading out supply requisitions that should matter but don’t. How can I think about next week’s food pantry schedule when she’s right there, humming something lowand rhythmic as she cooks? Her body sways slightly to whatever melody lives in her head.
“Tell me about growing up in Miami,” she says, tasting from the spoon, adjusting something. “Before everything got complicated.”
