This was heavy in ways she didn't know how to carry. This was him making her breakfast and her using his shower and him asking her to stay and her actually considering it.
What am I doing?she asked herself.What am I actually doing here?
She didn't have an answer.
Eventually, the water started to cool, and practicality won out over existential crisis. She turned off the shower, dried herself with his stupid heated towel, and realized she had no clean clothes.
A folded pile sat on the bathroom counter.
One of his shirts—soft grey cotton, large enough to be a dress on her. A pair of her own leggings, which he must have retrieved from her bag in the guest room. Fresh socks, because apparently he'd noticed she always complained about cold feet in the mornings.
He'd noticed, and he'd done something about it without being asked, without making a big deal of it or expecting anything in return. The feeling that swelled in her chest was dangerously close to something she refused to name.
She dressed quickly and followed the smell of coffee to the kitchen.
Tarmek was at the stove, shirtless, making what appeared to be pancakes. Actual pancakes, from scratch, with a precision that suggested he'd memorized the exact measurements and was executing them with military accuracy.
The protein shake mess had been cleaned up. The table had been wiped down. Her tank top, shorts, and underwear were folded neatly on a chair.
He looked up when she entered. Took in his shirt hanging past her thighs, her wet hair dripping onto the collar, her bare feet on his clean floor.
Something in his expression softened.
"Sit down," he said. "These are almost ready."
"You really didn't have to?—"
"I know." He flipped a pancake with practiced ease. "I wanted to."
She sat.
The kitchen was different in daylight. She'd seen it before, of course—had spent hours in here over the past week, raiding his fridge and rearranging his cabinets and generally driving him insane. But she'd always viewed it through the lens of a temporary borrowed space. Someone else's home that she was just passing through.
Now it felt different.
Now she could see where her coffee mug had left a ring on the counter (she'd never used coasters, to his ongoing horror). Where the color-coded magnets she'd scrambled had been returned to their original positions, then scrambled again, then returned again in what had become an ongoing silent battle. Where her favorite tea had been added to his collection, tucked between his precisely organized coffee pods.
He'd made space for her.
Not just physically—though yes, there was the guest room and the bathroom shelf he'd cleared and the drawer he'd grudgingly allocated for her art supplies. But mentally. Emotionally. He'd adjusted his rigid routines to accommodate her chaos, her noise, her tendency to leave her mark on everything she touched.
"How do you like your pancakes?" he asked.
"What?"
"Toppings. Fruit. Syrup. There's also—" he paused, seeming almost embarrassed. "There's Nutella. I bought it because you mentioned once that you liked it."
He bought Nutella because I mentioned it.
She'd said that once, in passing, during a conversation about breakfast foods that she barely remembered having. And he'd filed it away. Remembered. Acted on it without ever mentioning it.
"Nutella," she managed. "Nutella is good."
He nodded, retrieved the jar from another perfectly organized cabinet and set it in front of her along with a plate of perfectly golden pancakes.
They were shaped like circles. Exact circles, like he'd used a compass. Of course they were.
"You're staring at the pancakes," he observed.
