“Food’s here. Don’t move.”
He disappeared into the kitchen. Cabinets opened and closed. Plates clinked. Something rustled.
Then more rustling.
Then a lot more rustling.
He emerged carrying two plates stacked withpad see ewandpad Thai, set them on the coffee table, then disappeared again.
Green curry.
Then dumplings.
Then crab Rangoon.
Then soup.
Then two boxes of fried rice.
I stared at the coffee table, which now looked like a Thai restaurant had exploded on it.
“Sky, how many people are coming to this dinner?”
“Just us. Why?”
“Because you ordered enough food to feed my entire bar on a game night.”
“I panicked. I didn’t know what you’d want, so I ordered everything.” Something sheepish crept across his expression. “Okay, not everything. I skipped thetom kha gai.”
“Oh, well. Restraint. I’m impressed.”
He shoved my shoulder. “Shut up and eat yourpad see ew.”
I kicked off my shoes, and we ate cross-legged, facing each other, plates balanced on knees. Thepad see ewwas excellent. I’d been going to that place for two years, and it had never let me down. What surprised me was Skyler studying his first bite with the analytical focus of a man breaking down an opponent’s flaws before his eyes went wide and he shoveled in three more forkfuls without breathing.
We debated whether thepad see ewwas better than Rosa’scarnitas, landing on the only diplomatic solution: different categories, both elite, no comparison necessary. Then we sampled everything else while our knees pressed together and our shoulders bumped and the distance between us shrank to nothing.
This was what I’d been missing for two weeks.
Not Skyler—though, God, yes, Skyler—but this ease of being together.
I’d had good dates before, fun dates, dates where everything ticked all the right boxes, but I’d never felt so certain I was where I was supposed to be, not even on the best of dates.
“Can I ask you something?” I said, setting my plate on the coffee table beside the mountain of containers. “Yesterday, when you kissed me, what made you ask me to trust you instead of explaining what you were about to do?”
“I guess . . . I didn’t have the right words . . . or I wasn’t sure if I did. I’d been trying to figure out what to say for weeks. Nothing felt right. Everything sounded either too casual or too dramatic or . . . not enough.”
“So you skipped the words and went straight to the action.”
“Was that okay? The whole ‘trust me’ thing was kind of intense. I was trying not to be dramatic but ended up more dramatic than daytime TV.”
“It might’ve been the scariest ten seconds of my life,” I said through a grin and a mouthful of dumpling. “I thought you were about to tell me you were transferring to another team, or that you’d found out I’d been tracking your team’s privateplane and were filing a restraining order.”
“You tracked our plane?”
Well, shit. Had I said that out loud?
“That’s not the point.”
