The contact sends a flush up my neck. Yesterday that would’ve been a nice moment. Today my body has a whole new filing system for what his skin against mine means, and every nerve ending is pulling from the updated records.
I focus on my plate like it’s a lifeline and dig in.
“This is incredible,” I say after the first bite. The sausage is perfectly browned and the sauce is rich, a little spicy, layered in a way that suggests real technique buried in whatever part of his brain is running the show. “You could’ve been a chef.”
“Or a line cook who got fired a lot.” He spears a noodle on his fork. “I feel like I had authority issues.”
“Shocking.”
“I wish we had spaghetti.” He frowns. “A red sauce like this deserves a long noodle.”
“Penne was the right call. You get sauce inside the tube and outside. Every bite is loaded.”
“Agree to disagree.” He shakes his head. “I can’t remember much, but I know this sauce deserved spaghetti. That’s where I’m at as a person right now.”
I laugh, and he grins back, and it’s so easy that I keep going.
Most of this week we’ve talked around the edges, kept things light and easy. Even after I told him about my family, we’ve kept our other conversations pretty surface level.
But something’s shifted between us today, and I find myself going deeper without my usual guardrails. He asks questions, and I actually answer them.
So I tell him about Anna. The good parts. The ones I carry with me like a blanket I refuse to let go of.
Falling asleep on the couch with my head in her lap while she watched terrible soap operas.
The time she tried to teach me to cook pelmeni and I set off the smoke alarm three times in twenty minutes.
Her hands over mine on the rolling pin, guiding me through it, patient when nobody else in my life ever was.
I trail off. The warmth turns bittersweet, the way it always does when I talk about Anna for too long.
“She sounds incredible,” Johnny says.
“She is.” Present tense. Always present tense, even though she wouldn’t remember half of what I just told him.
He bumps his knee against mine and takes another bite.
I could live in this cozy normalcy. Ten days ago this would have felt surreal. Now it just feels like mine. And that’s so much worse, because I know what’s coming.
The thought dims everything. Two months and I’m on a plane, and this becomes something I used to have.
Johnny must catch it. Whatever crosses my face, he reads it the way he reads everything about me. Too well, too fast.
“Hey.” He nudges my knee again. “Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere.” I take another bite. Force a smile.
“Don’t do that.” He says it gently, but he doesn’t let it go. “You’ve been doing that all night. You light up and then you shut it off, like you’re not allowed to enjoy it for too long.”
The bite I’m chewing turns to cement in my mouth. Because he’s not wrong. He just described my entire life in two sentences and doesn’t even know it.
His expression hardens. Whatever he sees on my face right now, it pisses him off. Not at me.
“When my memory comes back, I’m getting you out. Away from your family. Whatever it takes.”
I stare at him. My throat is doing something inconvenient and my eyes are threatening to follow.
“Johnny, you can’t just...”
