Page 9 of Use Me Up

“Fine,” I say.

“Dumb question,” he mutters.

It’s quiet.

“So, did it, um, did I hurt you?”

“No,” I say very immediately. I look up and study his profile, his perfect profile, his curls hanging over the dark slashes of his eyebrows. It’s hard to exist in the same room with this man. He’s almost unworldly in his attractiveness. My mouth is dry.

“I don’t know why I…” He sighs heavily. “We obviously just could have said it happened without it actually having happened. That was really shitty of me.”

“It’s fine,” I say. “It was… fine.” Okay, find another word, Hannah. I blow out air and look around the room. “Maybe I should make breakfast or something.”

He gets up from the couch. “I can do that.”

I look up at him. “You cook.”

He shrugs. His shoulders are bare. My gaze gets snagged on them.

He laughs. “Okay, uh, yeah.” He goes into the kitchen part of the room and starts opening up cabinets. “What you think of me has been sort of obvious, and it was really shitty of me to take advantage of it, but it’s… I mean… it’s flattering.” He’s grinning.

“Fuck you,” I say. Obvious?

“I mean, you have some kid crush on me, and I knew that, and I just don’t understand why you’re still…” He finds a box of pancake mix. “Maybe you did like it.”

I get up and come over to the kitchen. “You’re the worst person in the world,” I manage.

He shrugs at me. “Sorry.” He sounds actually sorry, which makes it worse somehow. “But, I mean, maybe it makes it okay in a way. I don’t think you’re suffering.”

I pull out one of the stools in front of the breakfast bar and perch on it. “You don’t have to cook, seriously.”

He opens my refrigerator, pokes his head in, and pulls it back out. “You don’t have milk?”

I shrug.

He looks back inside. “You don’t have eggs.” He shuts the refrigerator and leans against it. “So, what sort of breakfast were you thinking about making?”

I point to the freezer. “There’s mini quiche. You put them in the oven. They’re good.”

He raises his eyebrows, turns around, and opens the freezer. He gets out the container of mini quiche and reads the back.

“It’s, um, three hundred seventy-five degrees for fourteen minutes,” I say.

He turns on the oven and opens the drawer below. Finding a cookie sheet, he begins putting mini quiche on it.

“You were saying something about, um, pictures?” I said. “On my socials? You want to make it look like we’re, um, like we’re…”

He opens the oven and puts the cookie sheet of quiche in. “Yeah, like we’re dating.”

“You have to preheat the oven,” I say.

He shrugs. “I always just set the timer for a couple extra minutes. It comes out fine. I’m impatient.”

Okay. I don’t think that’s the right way to do it, but I guess I’m going to let that go, all things considered.

He sets the timer and turns to me. “You’re all right with that?”

“So, you want us to fake date,” I say.