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For the next few minutes, we clean up together in the strange, inefficient way two people do when only one of them knows where anything belongs. I rinse, Flora loads the dishwasher, and every few dishes she has to hold something up to ask whether it can go in before I wave her toward the top rack or tell her to leave it in the sink. At some point, she opens the drawer by the stove looking for a place to put the serving spoon and finds the collection of takeout menus, batteries, two screwdrivers, a birthday candle, and approximately eleven pens instead.

She looks at me, and I feel my cheeks heat immediately. I make it almost ten seconds before she starts laughing.

“It’s a useful drawer,” I say, and Flora’s smile turns into the most breathtaking grin I’ve ever seen in my life. “Everyone has a junk drawer in their kitchen.”

I bump my hip against her on the way to the sink, and she catches me around the waist before I can move away.

It happens so naturally that I don’t even realize what she’s doing until I’m standing between her knees where she’s leaning against the counter, her hands resting loosely at my hips.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi.”

I put my arms around her neck, and this kiss is different from the ones on the porch. Different from Saturday night, too. There’s nowhere for it to go, no adrenaline beneath it, no moment we’re trying to reach. Flora kisses me once, then again, slower, and when I pull back, I don’t go far.

Her nose brushes mine.

I could stay here for a while.

So I do.

Later, we end up on the couch with the television on, although neither of us pays enough attention to know what’s happening. Flora has tucked one leg beneath herself, and mine is stretched across the cushion until our knees overlap somewhere in the middle.

We talk about nothing important.

Or nothing that should be important, anyway.

Somehow we get on to food, which turns into Flora telling me her mother refuses to accept that anything sold as an empanada in Seattle deserves the name.

“She’s from Argentina,” Flora explains. “She has very strong opinions.”

“About empanadas?”

“About everything. But especially food.”

I laugh, and Flora tells me that most of her family is still in Argentina, that she grew up going back whenever they could afford it, usually for long enough that she would settle into being there right before it was time to leave again.

She speaks Spanish with her mother. With Fausto, too, although apparently the two of them have reached the point where neither notices which language they’re speaking anymore.

“If we’re fighting, definitely Spanish.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Better vocabulary? Expletives sound better in Spanish, I guess.”

I laugh hard enough that I snort. The sound is unmistakable, and I immediately stop laughing.

“Oh my god.” I cover my face with one hand. “No.”

Her laughter gets worse, and when I peek at her through my fingers, her nose is scrunched up with the force of her smile.

Which is⁠—

Well.

“You have a cute nose,” I tell her.

Flora’s laughter softens. “I have a what?”