“Maya.” He leans in, his hands braced on the counter on either side of my hips, his face close enough that his cedar soap cuts through the smoke. “The cooking is going to kill us. Sit on the counter and drink your wine and let me save dinner.”
“I was saving dinner.”
“You were creating an insurance claim.”
Cole crosses the kitchen, opens the wine, and pours me a glass. He puts it in my hand, kisses my forehead with one quick, warm press, and then he is at the cutting board re-dicing my tomatoes with a competence that is, frankly, insulting. Dante dumps the ruined oil, starts fresh, and adds the tomatoes to the pan before my pasta timer can start screaming.
“The pieces need to be uniform,” Cole says. “Dante gets weird about it.”
“I don’t get weird. I have standards.”
“He once measured a bell pepper with a ruler.”
“The recipe said half-inch dice. Half-inch means half-inch.”
I sit on the counter with my wine and my nicked finger and burnt oil still scratching my throat, and I watch them take back the kitchen. The choreography resumes around me, Dante at the stove and Cole at the cutting board, moving around each other without needing to look. Dante reaches past Cole for the olive oil, and his hand trails across Cole’s lower back, casual, unconscious. Cole leans into the touch for half a second before returning to the tomatoes.
“You have garlic under the refrigerator,” Dante says.
“I’m aware.”
“It’s going to bother me.”
“Let it bother you.”
“It’s going to bother me until I move the refrigerator and retrieve it.”
“Dante. Leave the garlic. The garlic has made its choice.”
Cole laughs, and the sound fills the kitchen, bright and full enough to make the smoke feel less like evidence.
His laugh makes strangers feel included. With me, it gets under my ribs before I can brace against it.
Dante’s mouth twitches. He fights the smile and loses, and the loss feels like its own kind of victory. Dante smiles in his kitchen while Cole dices tomatoes and I sit on the counter in his jersey, holding wine with a cut finger.
“Come here,” I say to Dante.
He comes, standing between my knees, his body fitting into the space mine makes. I hook my fingers into the front of his shirt and pull him closer. When he leans in, I kiss him softly, and his mouth is warm and tastes like the wine he was drinking before the smoke summoned him.
“Thank you for letting me try,” I say against his mouth.
“Thank you for not burning down the house.”
“It was a small fire.”
“There’s no such thing as a small fire, Maya.”
I kiss him again. Harder. My hands slide up his chest, over his shoulders, into his hair, and he answers me with his palms gripping my thighs. The kiss deepens until smoke and burnt oil disappear under the heat of his body against mine.
My hand drops from his hair, down his chest, over his stomach. I find the waistband of his jeans and slide my fingers below it. My thumb traces the first barbell through the denim, the ridge of metal I have memorized by touch. Second. Third. I press the fourth, and his hips jerk against the counter between my legs.
“These are mine,” I say against his mouth.
His breath catches. His grip on my thighs tightens.
I trace the fifth. The sixth. Slow. Possessive. My thumb stays there long enough to make him feel it.
“Sauce is going to burn,” Cole says from behind Dante, amused and not even slightly concerned about the sauce.
