“Little weird to help yourself in someone else’s kitchen.”
“You help yourself to the Cheerios every morning,” I point out.
“It’s different using a stovetop, and you know it,” he says. “Can you make me some?”
“Make it yourself!”
“It’s always better when it’s made with love.”
Well, fuck. He has no right to say things like that, sending a shockwave plummeting straight down to my gut.
And I have no right to react like this, heat furiously rising in my cheeks and flushing the back of my neck.
I’m overthinking. I’m constructing narratives of things Iwantto be true, not things that are. I’ve written this whole love story in my head in the wake of our faded rivalry. Jamie and I flitting toward each other like moths to light and—
And what? Falling in bed together? Being unabashedly happy for each other over every accolade, even when it means we failed? Is Jamie going to hold my hand at every MRI and give me sponge baths when I’m immobilized?
Or am I just spinning out in fantasies I somehow dredged up in just over a week together, a whole world I’ve constructed for myself where everything’s perfect and there’s always a happy ever after?
“Plus, it’s Christmas,” Jamie adds, reminding me that we are—in fact—in the middle of a conversation right now.
And I guess he’s right. If last night was Christmas Eve, then that does make this Christmas Day. Wait. Was I supposed to get him a present? Did he getmea present?
“You’d better make it, then,” I say, trying to go for a lighthearted tone and probably failing miserably. “Since it’s Christmas and all. We all know how much you adore yourself.”
Jamie falls for the ploy and rolls his eyes at me, grinning. ButCongrats, Goldie, you played yourself,because that grin only makes that electric storm in my chest flare brighter.
After breakfast, Jamie does the dishes—Stop being such a simpfor guys who clean—and we switch back to piano mode, me at the Bösendorfer and Jamie lounging on the couch some distance away with his headphones, making notes on sheet music.
When it’s time to switch up, I hesitate before putting on my own headphones, listening to the first measures of Jamie’s Liszt étude.
“What?” he says, breaking off sixteen bars in. “I can’t focus when you’re staring at me like that.”
“Nothing. Sounds good, that’s all.”
“Uh-huh.”
I put the headphones on and hunch over my laptop before I can make myself look any stupider. But Jamie hasn’t given up, and these headphones aren’t noise-canceling—it messes with the sound purity—so I sigh and shove them down again. “What did you say?”
“I said if you want to hear me play, you should come by the restaurant tonight. I play every Saturday.”
There’s something about the way he says it. About two seconds later, I pin it: Jamie’s nervous.
It’s an emotion I’ve never seen him wear before. Anxiety looks good on him.
I make him wait it out another few agonizing moments before I say: “All right. That sounds fun.” And this time, I go for it. “It’s a date.”
That flush on his cheeks is sweet vengeance.
I kind of hate how I spend the whole rest of the day in impatient anticipation of night. It’s not seeing Jamie play; I’ve seen Jamie play so many times I could—and have—seen him play in my sleep.
No. It’s different this time. I muse on it later over lunch,picking at my sandwich lettuce and trying to figure out the origin of this feeling. I decide it’s because the location was surprising. If I had to imagine what Jamie Larson does when he isn’t at Parker, neither going to a boxing gym nor playing piano at a restaurant would be on the list. In fact, the list would 100 percent consist of him in his dorm or in a practice room, poring over scores and scheming.
Ever since he came to live here, I’ve learned more and more ways in which Jamie defies expectation.
“So what kind of place is this, anyway?” I ask that evening, once we’re done with practice and cleaning up the sheet music that has somehow ended up scattered across the top of the piano (and the rest of the living room). “Like, do I need to go in an evening gown, or…?”
He laughs. “It’s just a restaurant. The kind of restaurant that has a live pianist, so I guess it’s nice. Probably not as nice as you’re used to, though.”
