She was like water running through his fingers. If he closed his hands over her too forcefully, there was a distinct possibility that she might slip past him out of reach forever.
Not wanting to broach the subject of Jake further, he said, “Where do you want to go for dinner?”
“I don’t. I’ll cook something. We have all that food we brought back from my apartment. I don’t want it to go bad.”
He didn’t want her cooking. Not when she seemed to think that he wanted her as his live-in possession. “I think I can afford to lose a few tomatoes. They’re, what, twenty cents each? Let me take you out. The guy who owns that Afghan place wants to give you his baklava.”
“It’s not generosity if you give me more than what I want.”
“Well, I don’t cook,” he said gruffly. “I don’t expect you to do the same for me.”
“I don’t do it because I want something in return,” said Jay. “I cook because I like cooking. You really don’t cook? At all?”
“Not unless you count the microwave.”
“What did you do in college?”
“Ate in the dining commons like a normal person.”
“You are not a normal person, Nicholas. Normal people don’t try to buy people apology paintings—” he couldn’t helpit, he laughed “—and have casual prix fixe dinners on a whim because they don’t know how to use their ovens.”
“I know how to use my oven. I use it to make pizza sometimes.”
“Oh my god,” said Jay. “Stop trying to rationalize your insane amount of privilege.”
Nicholas hid a smile at her playful scolding as he pulled into the driveway, knowing that she wasn’t really angry. When she was yelling at him in earnest, her face got all flushed, and she got these three little lines between her eyebrows. Now she just looked sexy and cross.
“I don’t like that look on your face, either,” Jay said.
“You’d like what’s in my head even less then,” he said absently as his eyes swept across his property. The satisfaction of owning it was tinged with the darker knowledge of what it had cost him, and how it had almost lost him the woman sitting in the car beside him.
His mother’s flowers glowed whitely in the moonlight, filling the air with a fragrance he could detect as soon as he had opened the car door. For years, his father had talked about ripping out the jasmine, lilies, and roses, and he had been forced to pretend at indifference to the matter, knowing that if he revealed just how much that would have devastated him, his father would have done it that much sooner.
He always destroyed what he couldn’t have, he thought, glancing sidelong at Jay.Especially if it was beautiful.
The cross expression had left her face as she hopped up the raised levels of the walkway with the same little skip in her step that she’d had when she was fourteen. She had smiled more over the last couple days than he had seen her smile at home in years.
Because she was unhappy.
Maybe he was more like his father than he thought.
Impulsively, he bent down and plucked a sprig of jasmine free. White sap leaked out, staining his fingers. He reached over and tucked the flower in the dark curls of Jay’s loose hair. It stuck, and she reached up to touch it with a startled sound.
“Hey! What are you doing? What is that?”
“Jasmine. It comes alive in the dark—just like you.”
The smile on her face faded and she looked at him with solemn eyes.
“What?” he asked, defensive.
“You’re so surprising.” She said it quietly, as if she hadn’t meant to say it aloud at all.
“In a good way?”
(Stop begging for her approval like the fucking dog)
Jay lowered her hand, leaving the flower in her hair. The white petals were striking against her dark curls. He didn’t dare breathe, afraid that the wrong response would send her running.
