“Psh,” I say. “Come on, Kael. Everyone knows that.”
“No, no, no,” Roberta says, rushing over to take the scraper thing from my hand. “You’re going to fling the egg everywhere. Like this.”
She demonstrates a small, precise motion I miss entirely because Kael’s still blushing.
When he catches me staring, he smiles, and it takes all my self-control to stay standing here instead of doing the one thing I promised myself I wouldn’t. He seems into it, which I’m starting to suspect is Kael’s default setting for anything messy, tactile, or bad for my self-control. I’m the one who made the damn rule.
“I’ll try,” Kael says, scooting me aside to take the scraper Roberta’s wagging. “I don’t think Ash has ever made pasta before.”
“Well,” I say, because honesty, “that’s true. But whenever I’ve seen other people make it, it usually looks like this.”
I mime cracking sticks of dry pasta and dropping them into a bowl.
Roberta shrieks, slapping her own forehead as she abandons our station to help someone else.
After that, Kael takes custody of the dough. He keeps offering me pieces of the process like rolling it thinner, dusting it with flour, folding it into a loose log, or slicing it into ribbons. He gets flour on his wrist and the edge of his glasses, and every time Roberta corrects him, he looks delighted instead of embarrassed.
“The less I do, the better our odds of eating tonight,” I say.
“You sure?”
“I think I’m more valuable as conversational support and wine-pourer.”
I reach for his glass, but he’s barely touched it. Either he’s keeping pace with the one glass I’m allowing myself because I have to drive us back or he’s too absorbed in the class to remember the wine exists. Both possibilities settle low in my body, inconvenient and impossible to spreadsheet away.
He glances over while dropping our pasta into the boiling water. “You didn’t have to do this just for me.”
“I have a confession,” I say, watching him toss and loosen the last strands. “You remember that post-retirement list that wouldn’t load?”
“How could I forget?” His eyes go wide, smile carving those beautiful dimples deeper. “Are we doing one of your post-retirement dreams right now? Before you retire?”
“Not exactly. But number eighteen is learning how to actually cook, and this seemed like a step.”
He leans back, fist to his heart. “I think I’m honored to have pulled a tiny bit of happiness into your present-day life.”
He has no idea.
I’m moving too fast. The tightness in my chest belongs to a category of feeling no rational person should trust after this little time. That’s the reason for the rule. If I can sit beside him, talk to him, watch him laugh over a pile of flour and eggs, and still want him this badly after sex is off the table, then maybe what happened between us wasn’t only adrenaline.
Maybe it means something.
And if he keeps smiling like that, I’m going to have all the proof I need.
The only part of our date that I’ve been dreading arrives when I pull up outside his apartment.
“Well that was delicious,” Kael says.
“And only partly misshapen. Thanks to you.”
His smile goes soft, and the band that’s been tightening across my ribs all night pulls tighter.
“You want honesty?” he asks. “I’m surprised how much fun I had.”
“Me too,” I say, though it’s less a surprise than the confirmation I’d been hoping for.
It’s just one date, but it at least means “circling yes” hadn’t been completely baseless.
Kael turns the takeout container slowly in his hands, smiling at it like we made art instead of pasta.
