I wanted to lick it. I wanted to feel it dragging over my clit.
I dragged my eyes up to his, my cheeks warming when I saw his raised eyebrow. So he’d noticed that I was already a horndog tonight. Great.
He slid into the booth and grabbed a laminated menu from where it was tucked between the ketchup bottle and the napkin dispenser. “I’m glad you were game for meeting tonight,” he said, beaming down at the menu. It was one of those classic Kallum smiles, a smile like there could be no better day thantoday, no better moment than right now. I blinked and looked away. His warmth and sweetness were sometimes almost painful to me, in a way I couldn’t even explain to myself. They made me feel worthy and unworthy at the same time; they felt like gifts when I’d given nothing in return.
“So what are you going to get?” Kallum asked, oblivious to his effect on me. His eyes were still on the menu. “I’ve only eaten here a few times, but everything I’ve had has been good.”
I looked back down at my own menu, and my stomach sloshed unhappily as I scanned through the options. Nothing sounded good because nothing had sounded good to eat for months now. Even peanut butter sandwiches and green smoothies had lost their luster for me—I’d been choking down bananas and protein bars to get by. (So much for morning sickness getting better in the second trimester.)
“What’s wrong?” Kallum asked, and I realized I was visibly pouting at the menu.
I made an effort to be mature about becoming the world’s pickiest eater. “I think I’m not that hungry, actually. I’m just going to have some ice water. But you should get whatever you want.”
“Winnie,” he said, with the gravity of a brain surgeon. “What sounds good to you?”
“Really, I just—”
“Not on the menu,” he clarified. “Like at all. If you could eat anything right now, what would it be?” His tone was very firm for Kallum: less cinnamon roll and moreI’ll keep you bent over my lap until you’re a good girl.
And holy heckballs, Bossy Kallum really,reallyworked for me, because that voice was making me squirm in my seat.
I decided to obey Bossy Kallum. I closed my eyes and thought about it. “Maple syrup,” I said. “And, um. Bacon. String cheese, maybe? And a pear! A pear sounds delicious.”
I opened my eyes to see Kallum pushing out of the booth and standing. He gallantly extended a hand to me and then pulled me to my feet.
“Wait, what are we—”
He didn’t answer, but started pulling me to the back of the diner, past the empty tables, past the low red counter and to the kitchen, where a bored line cook was flipping a water bottle onto the stainless steel prep table.
Kallum pulled several bills from his wallet and pressed them into the line cook’s tattooed hand. The cook—somewhere older than college but younger than twenty-five—blinked at us both with hazy-eyed confusion and then blinked down at the money in his hand.
“I think you deserve a break,” Kallum suggested, and then the kid got the hint.
“Yeah, sure,” the cook said, stuffing the money into his pocket and stripping off his apron. “But if someone comes in while I’m gone, you gotta make their food. And probably serve it too, because I haven’t seen Linda around for a while. Sometimes she leaves to go check on her parrot when it gets slow.”
With that he left, and Kallum picked me up and plonked me onto the prep table.
“Stay put,” he told me, and then went and found a clean apron, tying the strings with the intensity of a knight readying himself for battle. And then he began rummaging through the glass-doored commercial refrigerators, and then the open shelves nearby.
“Now can you tell me what we’re doing?” I asked.
“Youare going to sit there looking adorable,” he said, pulling a plastic-wrapped ball of dough off a shelf and pressing on it with his knuckle. Whatever he saw made him sigh, but he still set the dough on the counter. “And thenI’mgoing to make you dinner.”
“Oh, Kallum, you don’t have to—”
“I want to,” he said firmly. The look he gave me was somewhere between Bossy Kallum and the Kallum who gave me his coat on the ski lift. “You need dinner. And I want to see you eating my food. The worst part about being on set is never having time in the kitchen. So hush.”
Smiling, I pressed my lips together in a visual promise to do as he said. Satisfied, he turned back to the kitchen, and—whistling—began assembling ingredients. A bottle of syrup. A package of bacon and two containers of cheese in different shades of white.
And a pear. Pale green and mouthwateringly pretty.
Kallum dusted a nearby counter with flour and dropped the dough in the middle, deftly flattening it into a disk with his fingers. He then used his fingers to slowly work and stretch the dough open—in a way that wasn’t intentionally suggestive, but in my orgasm-denied state was practically pornographic. (Also pornographic? The way the muscles and tendons in his forearms flexed as he expertly tossed the dough into a familiar shape.)
“Are you making me a custom pizza?”
“Yepperoni pepperoni, baby.” He moved over to a stove, and with a few easy movements, had a skillet over a burner and was draping pink ribbons of bacon over the surface. They started sizzling.
“Ah, the sound of the delicious forbidden,” he said, cleaning up the package and going to a sink to wash his hands.
