Chapter Eleven
Though he’d woken up starving after his nap, cooking his own dinner in front of everyone else in the whole retreat wasn’t exactly Sam’s idea of a relaxing evening.
He’d imagined that someone else would be cooking for them, but apparently, making a meal together was good for bonding.
That was fine for someone like Ben, who could throw a feast together from even the contents of Sam’s ill-stocked fridge, but Sam didn’t like cooking. He didn’t enjoy it, and he only did the bare minimum he had to in order to keep himself alive. Where possible, he let someone else do it, and he’d always been happy to pay for the privilege.
The idea of being judged on his cooking skills, even silently, put him on edge.
Now he knew how Ben had felt about the rock climbing.
“No one’s looking at you,” Ben said, not for the first time since they’d started. He’d promised to only pass off tasks that no one could screw up, although Sam felt that trusting him with knife work meant Ben had a lot more faith in his skills than the evidence suggested he should.
Ben probably thought Sam had learned a few things over the last decade.
He was wrong.
“Ifeellike they’re all looking at me,” Sam responded, lining up pieces of bacon on his chopping board. The recipe they’d been given was for a mercifully simple pasta dish, and Ben had promised to do all the cooking if Sam helped with the prep work.
The last thing Sam wanted was to be useless, but he knew that whether or not he wanted to be, he was.
“They’re too busy squabbling,” Ben said. “I never realized what a nightmare marriage was.”
“We’re doing okay,” Sam pointed out. So far, they hadn’t gotten into any fights, and things didn’t seem tense between them. In fact, they seemed to be getting on much better than Sam had expected.
He’d imagined one or two uncomfortable moments, offset by the value of getting important things of their chests.
So far, Ben had gotten one important thing off his chest, and Sam had been too afraid to say any of the hundred things he wanted to. It wasn’t even that he was telling himself there’d be time later.
He’d taken to telling himself that maybe he’d never have to say them. Maybe Ben would, at some point, magically figure them all out for himself.
“We’re not married,” Ben said, salting the pot of water he’d put on earlier and drizzling oil over the top.
Those were the kind of details that made him good at this, and Sam not.
Sam had never even been in a kitchen like this before, with huge, long benches and multiple stovetops to work from. He figured Ben probably hadn’t either, but he looked comfortable all the same.
That was an improvement on earlier, so at least something was going right for one of them.
Just as Sam was about to answer, the knife slipped and caught the top of his thumb.
“Fuck,” he swore much louder than he’d intended to. If people weren’t looking at him before, they were now.
Automatically, he stuck his thumb in his mouth, making a distressed little whimper.
“I’ll get a bandaid,” Robert called from halfway across the room, and then disappeared.
Sam was left looking at Ben, trying to apologize with his eyebrows alone. At least Ben didn’t seem particularly upset.
“You’re lucky the knife was sharp,” Ben said, taking it away and letting the water run over it for a handful of seconds before setting it aside.
Sam wasn’t sure what that meant, because right now, he felt as though he would have been much luckier if the knife had been blunt. Or, ideally, a spoon.
No one ever cut themselves on spoons.
“Put it under the cold water,” Ben instructed as Robert came back with a mini first aid kit, which seemed to contain little more than bandaids, antiseptic cream, and aspirin.
Sam looked between Ben and the sink, where the water was still running, and eventually worked up the courage to take his thumb out of his mouth to put it under the water.
