“I called your nonna,” I say. “She walked me through it.”
“You called Nonna.”
“After Christmas. I got Gina’s number first. Gina gave me Nonna’s.”
He’s quiet. The man who rates everything, argues about everything, narrates everything, is standing in his kitchen with his hand on a coffee mug and his mouth open and nothing coming out. I turn around. His eyes are wet and his face is doing the thing it does when every feeling he has arrives at the surface at the same time and none of them are willing to wait their turn.
“They’re not right,” I tell him. “The edges cracked. The second bake went long.”
“Shut up.” His voice is rough. “Shut up about the edges.”
“I’m just noting that the structural integrity is compromised.”
“Isaiah.” My full name, which he almost never uses, and the sound of it in his mouth right now is a sound I am going to keep. He puts his hands on my face. Both hands, the way Nan does, the way his nonna probably does, the gesture that apparently lives inevery person who loves someone enough to hold them still and look at them.
“They’re biscotti,” I say, because if I don’t say something small and factual I’m going to lose the ability to speak in complete sentences.
“You called my nonna,” he says again, like the words need repeating to become real. “You called my eighty-one-year-old nonna and asked her to teach you to make biscotti.”
“She was very patient. She only yelled about the flour twice.”
He laughs. Wet and cracked and pressed into my neck. I put my arms around him and hold the laugh against me and feel it move through his ribs and into mine.
He pulls back. Wipes his face with the heel of his hand. Picks up one of the biscotti and bites into it and chews with his eyes closed and I watch him the way I’ve watched him taste everything this man has ever put in front of me, with the complete focus of a person whose verdict will be delivered with full ceremony.
“Seven,” he says.
“Seven.”
“Seven-point-two. For a first attempt. Nonna’s are a nine-four. You’re working with a significant handicap.”
“A handicap.”
“You have no Italian heritage and your kitchen skills are, by your own admission, limited.” He takes another bite. Chews. “Seven-point-five. The anise is actually close.”
“Your rating changed mid-biscotti.”
“New data.” He grins at me, the full grin, the one that fills his face and leaves no room for anything else. “You called my nonna.”
“You have to stop saying that.”
“I will never stop saying that. This is going to be the only thing I talk about for the rest of the week.”
“It’s a good thing I love you, because a week of this is going to test my patience.”
The kitchen goes quiet.
His grin doesn’t fade. It just freezes, still fully open, while his eyes catch up to what my mouth already said. I watch the recognition arrive on his face. The slight widening. The breath he takes and doesn’t release.
I hear the echo of it a half second after he does. The sentence replaying in the air between us, the three words sitting inside the dry delivery like they’d been there the whole time, waiting for a sentence boring enough to hide in. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t feel it build. It just walked out of my mouth the way true things walk out when you stop guarding the door.
Teo is silent. Complete silence. For the first time in the entire time I’ve known this man, there are no words, no theories, no ratings, no follow-up observations. Just his face, open and still, and his eyes on mine. The man who fills every room he enters standing in his kitchen with his mouth closed and his hands at his sides and the biscotti still in his fingers, and the silence coming off him is louder than anything he’s ever said.
“I’m going to need you to say something,” I tell him. “Because the silence is medically concerning.”
“You love me.”
“That appears to be what I said. Yes.”
