“You won’t. I’ll call you once the worst of it has passed. Bye, Rafe.”
“Do you have hot sauce?” Tucker calls out from the kitchen,breaking me out of my brief reverie. Suddenly, I’m very concerned about what he’s getting up to in there. Tucker’s head is buried in the fridge. When he returned home, he must’ve showered quickly because now he’s wearing black sweatpants and a faded black-and-red hoodie. Oh, I recognize that design.
“Is that a Nolan hoodie?”
Tucker dips around the open door. “Huh?”
I point at his hoodie, barely resisting reaching out to touch. “Is that a Nolan Hastings hoodie?”
“Oh yeah, from the tour I worked on. I have a few spare ones if you want one?”
Tucker goes back to digging through my fridge as if he didn’t just offer me the sweetest thing on earth. The man truly has no idea what he does to me.
“I’ll take one if you have one to spare… in my size, that is.”
Tucker turns around, eggs under his arm, hot sauce in the other, and with a very adorable quirk of his lips. He has some blond scruff today, which kind of works way more than it should. I wonder how it would feel against my cheek as he kissed me.
“I was going to cook,” I say in confusion as Tucker prepares to scramble some eggs.
Tucker points at the thawing pork chops on the counter. “I don’t eat pork.”
Oh. “Can you give me a list of what you can’t eat?”
Tucker sucks on his teeth as he thinks about it. “Gluten and pork, that’s it.”
“Why no pork?”
“When I was little, we had a field trip to this place that showed how people lived in the 1800s or whatever, and they had a petting zoo. The pigs weresosmart, and I asked the farmer dude about it, and he told me that pigs are some of themost intelligent creatures on earth. I couldn’t eat them ever again.”
“So you don’t eat bacon?”
Tucker rolls his eyes as he scrambles the eggs, adding some shredded cheese to them. “You sound like Pop. No, I don’t eat bacon, and I feel just fine missing out on it.”
“Well, I’ll eat your bacon.”
Tucker chuckles and winks at me. “Okay. Want some scrambled eggs?”
“I’m good.”
“More for me.”
Tucker plates his eggs, then takes a seat at the table as if he lives here. I join him at the table, close enough that I can smell the fresh clean scent of him. He smells tropical, like coconut and fragrant jasmine. I liked the smell of him earlier too, with a thin layer of sweat. I also liked the twinkle in his eyes as we prepared the outside. He eats in silence, and when he finishes, I take his plate to the sink, handwashing it before putting it in the dishwasher. When I turn around, Tucker’s standing behind me, hands on his hips.
“You got a spare bedroom for me in this huge fucking place or will I be on the couch?”
You can sleep in my bed.
Nope. I won’t say it.
“There’s a guest room.”
Tucker stares at me until I jump into movement, leading him down the hall, past my own bedroom, to the guest room a few doors down. It’s a pretty bland room, with dark blue walls, a mahogany bed frame, and a gold-accented mirror in the corner. Tucker tosses his bag on the bed, then reaches back to scratch his shoulder. The move is so human, so flawed, that it floors me for a moment that he’s in my house,and he’s going to sleep under my roof tonight as a hurricane moves over us.
“We should try to get some sleep before the hurricane hits. Probably going to get the worst of the weather overnight, and if we’re lucky, we’ll sleep right through it.”
“Right,” I say, because all other words have fled my consciousness.
Tucker stares at me until I back out of the room. Cupcake doesn’t follow though; she stays behind and climbs onto Tucker’s bed like that’s where she always sleeps. Which it isn’t. She has a very expensive and nice custom dog bed in my bedroom. She rests her head on her extended legs, licks her lips, then closes her eyes.
