“Eggs…scrambled. Maybe. They were supposed to be over easy, but there was an incident.”
“An incident.”
“The yolk broke.” He frowns. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
I bite my lip to keep from smiling. “Can I help?”
“No.” He points the spatula at me over his shoulder. “Sit down. I’m doing this.”
“Okay.”
“I watched a video.”
“A video.”
“On my phone. At four thirty this morning. A French woman was very specific about the butter temperature, and I’m following her instructions, so don’t intervene.”
I raise my hands in surrender and sit on the barstool. Cavall abandons his post to come press his head against my knee, and I scratch his head and watch the man I love wage war against a carton of eggs.
The result is…not bad.
The eggs are slightly overcooked and could use salt and the toast is a shade past golden, but the fruit is perfect because you can’t really mess up cutting fruit, and the coffee from the French press is actually, genuinely good, and when he sets the plate in front of me with an expression that’s trying very hard to be casual and is failing entirely, my heart does something it’s been doing a lot of lately.
It settles.
Not races or clenches or aches or breaks. Just settles, like it’s found the place it’s supposed to be and isn’t planning to move.
“It’s good,” I say, and I mean it.
“You’re lying.”
“The eggs need salt. The toast needs thirty fewer seconds. But the intent is there, and the coffee is a miracle. Andyoumade it, which means it’s perfect.”
“The French woman said room-temperature butter.”
“The French woman was right.”
He sits down across from me and eats his own plate with the quiet focus he brings to everything, and I watch him and think about all the mornings that came before this one. The mornings I woke up in my studio apartment and ate alone. The mornings in Boston, staring at rejection emails and wondering if I’d ever cook for anyone who mattered again. The mornings in this cabin when Lance was a locked door down the hall and I didn’t know yet that behind it was a man who would rearrange his entire life to give me as many seven seconds as he could.
“Percy asked if he could bring a friend next Saturday,” he says between bites. “Kid from his school. Having a rough time at home.”
“Of course. I’ll make extra.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Lance.”
“Yeah?”
“I want to.” I reach across the table and cover his hand with mine. “That’s the whole point of having a kitchen. You fill it with people.”
He looks down. Then he turns his palm up and threads his fingers through mine.
“My mom never cooked,” he says quietly. “Not once that I remember. Beverly did sometimes when Chef Aaron had the day off. She’d make breakfast, and send us off to school, and…”
He stops. I squeeze his hand.
“You’re not her,” he says. “I know that. I just—sometimes the wires cross. Safety and someone taking care of me. It’s still new.”
