I set the handwritten recipe down, choosing to ignore the obvious reason the rice didn’t cook—she used a sixteen-quart stockpot for two cups of rice with a lid that didn’t fit properly. Instead, I held her face in my hands and attempted to calm her down. However, I didn’t actually think about the words before I said them. “Can you not cook? Is that why you’ve been feeding me Marie Callender’s for the last month?”
She gave me the death glare and tried to shove me away.
“Don’t be embarrassed. I’m not at all making fun of you—I swear. Hell, the only reason I know how to cook is because Matt moved out, and I had to learn. It was either that or starve. Well, I guess I did have the option of takeout, but I didn’t see the point in throwing money away. What kind of accountant would that make me?”
At least she stopped pushing me away. Her lips split into a wide grin, and it seemed as though her giggles refused to relent. “Dude…I’ve been feeding you Stouffer’s for weeks. Did you think I was just lazy and didn’t want to fix dinner or something?”
Her lips were mere inches away. Her body so close I could easily touch her. Realizing just how dangerous that was, I stepped away to give us space. I grabbed the pot off the stove and dumped the rice down the drain before setting it aside. “Honestly? I thought you were trying to prove a point. Kind of like you’ve done with everything else.”
“I will admit, at first, I fed you sandwiches to spite you. You made me feel like hired help, someone who’s at your beck and call for all the womanly duties of the house. You’d leave behind a list of things you wanted me to pick up at the grocery store without so much as a ‘could you please grab these things if you go out?’ And then you said you wanted dinner every night when you came home, like I’m technically your wife so I am expected to provide you these things. Your chauvinism bothered me. Pissed me off to the point that I sought revenge. I didn’t want to feel like that was all I was worth.”
“I thought we—”
“We did, Holden. That’s why I said at first. Then we called a truce, and after that, I can honestly say I gave dinner a genuine attempt. When you mentioned wanting to eat together, I figured you meant real food. Like…not macaroni and cheese from a box. I assumed that was your way of asking for real meals. Except I can’t cook real food, so the only option I had was frozen crap from a box—which you were never supposed to know about.”
Measuring water for the rice, I stood at the sink and asked, “Did you think I was under the impression you cooked all that? Yourself? From scratch? You do know I’ve eaten food before, right?”
She elbowed me before grabbing the stockpot from the counter. And rather than explain to her why we couldn’t use it, I moved around her and pulled a smaller pot from the cabinet and continued with the rice, knowing she was watching me and hopefully taking notes while we finished our conversation.
“Well…maybe not from scratch, but yeah. I thought it was good enough to fool you. I mean, I used the oven. There were a few things I made on the stove, and I opened some cans. Not to mention, I stored them in the freezer in the garage and threw the boxes away outside. How could you have possibly known?”
“Even if I couldn’t taste the difference between food someone prepared from scratch versus something that had been previously frozen and bought at a store? Janelle, I came home several times before you had a chance to move them from the cardboard they came in into a real dish.”
“Whatever. I put a decent effort into those meals. I can’t help it still sucked.”
I placed the lid on top of the rice to simmer and set the timer before turning my attention back to Janelle. With my hands on her face, I silently took her in. I admired her exotic and intoxicating beauty, how effortless it seemed to be for her. Even without all the paint on her face, she was…perfect.
“And I appreciated every single one of them,” I whispered, not having a clue as to where my voice had gone. Just then, we were interrupted by the obnoxious buzzing sound from her phone vibrating on the countertop next to us.
We both glanced over, probably reading his name at the same time. Never had two syllables bothered me the way those two did.
I stepped back, as if she had ignited into flames and burned me, while she lunged for her phone. It didn’t matter how fast she grabbed it, because the damage had been done. In fact, I didn’t even care if she ignored it or answered it.
My stomach had soured, and I couldn’t stop my mind from racing. Aside from randomly mentioning the money she’d get for marrying this asshat, we hadn’t spoken about him. She hadn’t brought him up or even said his name aloud. I had no reason to believe she wasn’t in contact with him, but for whatever reason, I had convinced myself she wasn’t. Which proved to have been a horrible idea, considering the truth could be crippling.
I excused myself from the kitchen, went to my room, and closed the door behind me to change clothes. It didn’t take me that entire time to put on something more comfortable to eat in, but I didn’t come out until I heard the timer on the oven go off. I refused to risk hearing her converse with him. I didn’t even want to acknowledge there had been a conversation I’d ignored.
When I made it back to Janelle, we both fell into place, moving silently around the kitchen as though this was our regular, nightly routine. I grabbed the pan of chicken from the oven just as Janelle reached around to turn off the burner on the stove. She got the dishes, I pulled out the silverware, and as if we were some well-oiled machine who’d done this for the last fifty years, we helped our plates and then made our way to the table.
I cut a piece of chicken, scooped up some rice on the fork, and much like every other night, hummed as soon as the food touched my tongue. “This is amazing, Janelle,” I mumbled between bites, like I did with every meal, after every first mouthful I took.
Normally, she’d smile and take all the credit for whatever meal she’d transferred from the freezer to the table, but this time, she didn’t. Rather than say anything, she sat there, fork in hand, food untouched on the plate in front of her, and stared across the table at me. Just stared. With a grin lazily tugging on her lips, and my heart beating with so much gusto I could hear it echo in my ears.
“Everything all right?” I asked with caution, worried about her reaction.
“Yeah. Everything’s great.”
“You’re kinda making me worried with the way you’re staring at me instead of eating. Like maybe your fork is going to haphazardly land in my chest instead of your chicken.”