“Oh. Good.”
“I should have powered through,” she told him, “since it’s my strongest painkiller and I’m not supposed to build up an immunity to opiates in my thirties, but I was fed up with feeling my joints scrape together inside me like knives, so I have no regrets.”
He stared. “You really are a badass.”
She waggled her bunny slippers. “Yes.”
“Have you eaten?”
She shrugged, sipped her juice some more, and said in a suspiciously casual tone, “Not yet.”
Ah. She was one of those. He should’ve known. “I’ll put that another way: When did you last eat?”
Chloe’s face took on the shiftiest expression ever made by a human being in the history of the world. She hid guilt about as well as the average family dog. “I’m not sure.” As if on cue, her stomach rumbled. She looked down irritably and muttered, “Et tu?”
“Today?” he nudged.
She shrugged.
Oh, for God’s sake. “You haven’t eaten today? Are you serious?”
“I couldn’t be bothered,” she snapped.
“Right, sure. You’re too lazy to feed yourself. It’s not because you feel like shit or anything.”
“Oh, be quiet.”
He stood, and she looked up at him, something bleak and resigned in her gaze. In the second before she schooled her expression, he realized that she thought he was leaving. His heart constricted. He wanted to find every friend who’d ever ditched her, and especially her fucking fiancé, and force them all to walk barefoot across a room full of Legos for the rest of their lives. Not that he’d been thinking much about punishments.
“What do you want to eat?” he asked briskly, hoping she wouldn’t hear the emotion rumbling beneath his voice.
Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. “You—I don’t—”
“You like stir-fry?”
She shot him a mutinous glare, like he’d offered to piss on her PlayStation or something. “Red—”
“I mean, who doesn’t like stir-fry? Weirdos, that’s who.” He headed for the kitchen.
It took a second or two, but she stumbled after him, her blanket wrapped around her like a cape. Cutest, prissiest Batman he’d ever seen. When she said, “Red, you’re not cooking for me,” he smiled to himself, just a bit.
*
The flat’s little kitchen, all tiles and steel, always seemed cold to Chloe—but today, the air vibrated with sultry heat even before the stove was turned on. That was Red’s fault. He stood in front of the fridge looking horribly sexy in his usual T-shirt and jeans, bending over at an angle that should be illegal for men who had backsides like his. She sat in her comfortable little kitchen chair and fiddled with the neckline of her pajamas. Maybe her current haze, partly feverish fatigue and partly the patch on her back pumping drugs through her skin, was a blessing in disguise. If she weren’t feeling so rubbish it would be much, much harder to ignore how pretty he was.
“Who does all this food prep?” he asked, popping up from the fridge door with far too many boxes balanced in his arms. What was he making, gourmet chow mein?
“Eve.”
“The rainbow girl? Really? She’s . . .” He put the boxes down and waved his hand in a way that conveyed Eve’s chaotic vibe perfectly. “If I’d had to guess one of your sisters, I would’ve said—what’s her name, Danielle?”
“Danika,” she corrected automatically. Being around him was so incredibly easy, she forgot how strange their relationship was sometimes. How he didn’t know basic things about her, like her sister’s full name, but he knew she loved Smudge and didn’t trust and wanted to be brave.
She wished he knew more. Wished he knew everything. Wished she could share it all with him. That wasn’t a desire Chloe felt often, or at all, but he made everything . . .
Safe.
“Christ, woman,” he spluttered, interrupting her thoughts and bringing a smile to her lips. “Why do you have a kitchen drawer full of fancy pens?” He shut the offending drawer in disgust and turned toward another. “Where are your spoons?”
“Red. Don’t. I don’t want you to cook for me. And that’s not—”
Too late. He’d opened the next drawer, which was full of her spare medication. But he didn’t gawk at the countless colorful boxes, old painkillers she’d abandoned because they made her mouth too dry to talk, or because she’d gotten used to them and upgraded like an addict grown accustomed to the hit. He didn’t ask about them, either, or slam the drawer shut and give her a part-pitying, part-worried look like her mother would. Instead he shook his head and said, “You got everything in this kitchen but cutlery, Chlo.” Then he turned to the next drawer, discovered the spoons, and carried on as if nothing had happened.
Funny. Chloe was used to seeing her life and her illness as normal, but she wasn’t used to other people acting the same way.
“Now,” he said, popping the lid off one of the boxes and grabbing pre-sliced peppers. “If you really don’t want stir-fry—because, let’s face it, you are a weirdo—this is your last chance to tell me.”
“You are not cooking for me.” There; that sounded firm, reasonable, and mature. Kind of.
“Why not?” he asked just as reasonably while he rifled through her cupboards.
“Because you’re not a bloody home helper!”
He turned to look at her. “Chloe. Language.”
“Oh, for—”
He interrupted, his tone serious, his words quiet. “Stop worrying, okay?” His search of the cupboards abandoned, he crossed his arms over his broad chest. Her gaze absolutely did not catch on the shift of his biceps or the raised veins on his strong forearms. Well, it did, but only for a second. “You think this is a big deal because, no offense, you’ve had a lot of people in your life who claimed to care about you but didn’t act like it. That’s not me. I can cook, and right now, you can’t. So I’m doing it for you because that’s how people should behave; they should fill in each other’s gaps. Don’t think about it too hard.”
She nodded slowly, staring at her clasped hands for a minute as inconvenient, mushy emotions flooded her. Then she released a slow, shaky breath and finally said what she’d wanted to say for a while, but hadn’t been able to force past her clenched teeth. “Thank you.”
“No worries,” he said easily. And she didn’t even wonder if he meant it. There was no doubt in her mind that he did.
Red found a wok and opened more boxes; poured oil into the pan and yanked out what seemed to be every seasoning she owned. Then he ran a hand through his hair, rolled his eyes as if at himself, and said, “You got a hair tie?”