She’s ushered into the kitchen, where Aunt Sheila is surrounded by what looks like every mixing bowl in the state of Oregon. Babs jumps immediately into the fray, and Marie crosses the kitchen to the far wall, where two aprons are hanging on hooks. She picks them up and holds them out to Alice. “ ‘Kiss the Chef’ or ‘I Like Big Buns’?”
Alice blinks. Well, she definitely can’t do “Kiss the Chef,” not with Van around. “ ‘Buns,’ please,” she says, reaching out for the hideously pink apron with a drawing of some kind of cinnamon bun on it.
“Nice,” Marie says with a sly smile, and Alice wants to die. She puts it on anyway, and Marie forces her mom and Aunt Sheila to stop banging around for long enough to take a selfieof all four of them in their aprons (Babs’s reads “Queen of the Kitchen” and Aunt Sheila’s is hard to make out but Alice thinks it says something about the Latke Flippers’ Guild).
Alice can’t help but notice the gender dynamics and wonder where Van is. There isn’t another apron on the hook—so either Alice is wearing Van’s, or Van isn’t expected in the kitchen with the rest of the women.
After satisfying herself with the picture, Marie heads over to the pantry. “Alice, you said you wanted to make cinnamon cookies?”
Alice joins her, immediately overwhelmed at how well stocked it is. She always has only the bare minimum ingredients she needs for whatever she’s making, but Babs’s pantry is overflowing with multiple different types of flours and sugars, three different kinds of chocolate chips, several jars of sprinkles, countless ziplocks of things Alice doesn’t even recognize.
Alice tentatively takes what she needs, letting Marie’s happy chatter wash over her as she tries to stay out of the way of the dual boomer tornados. It isn’t until her dough has come together and she’s starting to roll it out that she hears the front door open and feels a gust of cold air.
“Whew!” That’s Steve’s voice from the living room. “It’s a cold one out there!”
“How are the lights?” Babs yells toward the living room, and it’s only a moment before Van appears in the doorway, and she takes Alice’s breath away. She looks taller and broader than usual, her cheeks flushed pink with exertion, her thick blue jacket zipped up to her sternum. Her eyes are dancing, and there are water droplets on her black hair.
“Great,” she says, sounding a little breathless. Alice tries not to focus on how this is exactly what she’d sounded likeafter kissing Alice to within an inch of her life in the hospital bathroom. “It was pretty slippery up there, but we managed to get it all nailed down hard.”
Is it just Alice, or does that sound impossibly dirty? Probably her mind is in the gutter because Van is so hot and Alice is such a mess, but, like, really? Nailing something down? Being slippery? Come on, Vanessa Altman, cut out the porn talk in front of your mother!
“Van, taste this,” Marie says, holding out the bowl of chocolate icing she’s mixing up. “Does it need more vanilla?”
Alice turns away in an act of self-preservation, resolutely not watching Van lick chocolate off her finger. But this means that she doesn’t realize Van is coming toward her until she feels a warm, looming presence behind her, smells rain and wet grass and the familiar spice of her cologne.
“Nice apron,” Van says, soft and low, right into Alice’s ear, and Alice takes in a big breath through her nose, trying to keep herself from leaning back and melting into Van’s body, letting Van pick her up and abscond with her into a bedroom.
“Thank you,” she manages to murmur. She’s wedged in the corner, a wall on her right, and on her left, Marie, who is currently turned away, arguing animatedly with Babs about cookie cutters. Van slides her right hand forward to rest on Alice’s hip, and Alice sucks in another breath, this time clearly loud enough for Van to hear it.
All Alice can think about is how Van’s hands felt on her body for those blissful five minutes before Nolan woke up—warm and strong and demanding in all the best ways.
“I do too, for the record,” Van whispers, and it takes Alice a second to come back to the present enough to figure out what she means. They’d been talking about the apron, and oh. It says“I Like Big Buns,” and Van said,I do too,and she’s extremely close to Alice’s quite sizable buns at the moment, and fuck.
God, Alice is going to hell for this, but she lets herself press backward, just for a second. The merest brush of the back of her pants against the front of Van’s, but it’s enough.
It’s Van who makes a sound this time, a sharp breath, and Van’s fingers that twitch against Alice’s hip, like she’s barely able to stop herself from grabbing hold and pulling Alice fully into herself.
But that little twitch is enough for Alice to remember the other thing about Van’s hands, how she opens and closes them when she’s tired, how Alice read in one of her anxious fits of research that having pins and needles in your hands is a common MS symptom.
That’s enough for the horny filter in her brain to dissipate, and for her to remember why she’s not allowed to give in to this. Right. Van has MS, and Alice simply cannot sign herself up for another decade or two or four of caretaking, of watching the one person she loves slowly die in front of her.
She presses her hips forward until the counter is digging into the flesh of her stomach. “I, um, I have to roll these out before the dough gets too warm,” she says, and Van backs off.
“Can’t have that,” she says, but her voice sounds tight, and Alice knows she clocked the rejection. She hates herself for being so inconsistent, so unable to keep her hands—and ass, apparently—to herself. She knows she’s giving mixed signals, that Van doesn’t deserve any of this.
Alice needs to get it together, stat. That’s easier said than done, though, because she’s under constant scrutiny here. Babs keeps checking in on her cookies, giving her unsolicited but helpful advice, Marie keeps leaning into her shoulder—Alice’sheart certainly isn’t exploding, she’s fine—even the men are popping in and out of the kitchen to grab more snacks or high-five everyone about football-related things Alice doesn’t care to understand.
Even worse, it turns out that Aunt Sheila is not only one of the chefs, she’s apparently also the official photographer. All afternoon, she snaps picture after picture on her iPad, and Alice is sure most of them must be horribly unflattering. Sideways shots from below of Alice frowning down at an icing bag, Alice and Marie mid-bite, Van halfway through clipping Frank’s leash on. Alice just hopes she isn’t getting any of Van staring sadly at Alice, of Alice looking like she desperately wants to wrap herself around Van like an octopus and never let go.
But it’s sweet, honestly, that Aunt Sheila wants to capture the mundane moments with her family. And if Nolan happens to be in more than his fair share, well, who can blame her, really? He’s home, he’s alive, and you can’t tell from the pictures that he has amnesia.
“Alice,” Aunt Sheila says after taking a whole series of the three men on the couch that Alice has silently namedThe Patriarchy Is Alive and Well,“go sit with Nolie.”
“Uh, sorry?” Alice pretends she didn’t hear, that she’s absorbed in her work piping white icing onto cookies with Marie at the dining room table, but Aunt Sheila is, of course, unperturbed.
“Go sit with your boyfriend, honey,” she says, grabbing Alice’s arm and practically throwing her at the couch.
Alice manages to get her apron off but it gets caught in her hair, and she can see the way Nolan’s eyes linger on her frizzy tangles. She tosses the apron to Marie to hold for her, and she tries not to wonder if Nolan likes big buns the way Van does.She tries not to think about how she has a great view of Van’s buns right now, because Van is turning away from her, hurt clear in the set of her head, the way her shoulders are creeping up to her chin.
