Chapter 3: Reflections

The dining room still looked a mess. Plates, glasses, the salad bowl with a few leaves of lettuce and a stray crouton or two clinging to the side. Tyler removed his dress shirt so as not to get it dirty and worked in jeans and nothing else, which felt like a dress code violation I was enjoying far too much, and started running water. I bumped him aside with my hip and took the sponge.

“You cook, I wash is traditional,” he complained.

“You ate the cook. The social contract is void.”

He snorted and started drying. We moved around each other in the small space with an ease that should have taken years to develop and instead seemed to come naturally after only one night and a dryer. He flicked water at me. I threatened him with a wooden spoon. He caught my wrist and stole the spoon, kissed me with it still in his hand, and called me dangerous before swatting my ass hard with it. I called him a monster for beating the chef with her own cooking utensils. He swatted me again and said maybe the chef deserved it for making such a mess with the dessert. The whole thing was stupid. The whole thing made my chest feel so full it hurt.

I was happy.

Not the sharp, intense guilty spike of sexual pleasure I had been living on the last few weeks. Not the afterglow that always curdled on the drive home. This was different, quieter, overwhelming in a way that scared me because it did not feel like a mistake in motion. It felt like joy; natural and unforced;t like companionship. I loved the way he watched me while I talked. I loved the way he laughed at the dumb things I said like they were actually funny. I loved the attention, the specific, undivided focus of it, and I loved, most dangerously, how easy it was to stand in my own kitchen with him and pretend the rest of the world had agreed to wait outside.