Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Biscuit's tail thumped against the floor. Mia turned.
"Oh!" "How long have you been standing there?"
"Just arrived."
"You move like a ghost, you know that? One day I'm going to put a bell on you." She turned back to the stove. Casual. Easy. Playing the part of a woman for whom that morning hadn't happened, for whom he hadn't had his hands on her against this very counter eight hours ago. "I made risotto. Actual risotto, from scratch. I called Artem and asked him how, and he walked me through it, and it only took two and a half hours and three separate panic attacks, but it exists. It's real. I made food."
She was babbling. She always babbled when she was nervous, and the bravado of it, the performance of ease when he could see the tension in her shoulders and her hand gripping the spoon too tight, cracked something behind his ribs.
She was trying. She was standing in his kitchen making him dinner, and she wasn't pushing. She wasn't bringing up the morning. She wasn't confronting or provoking or grabbing his wrist. She was just here, offering him something warm and simple, and the gentleness of it was worse than any fight, because he had armour for fights and he had nothing for this.
"Sit down," she told him, still not turning around. "It's almost ready. And take off your coat. You're making the apartment feel like a boardroom."
He took off his coat.
He didn't know why. It was a small act of obedience, meaningless in the catalogue of compromises a man made in a day, but it felt larger than it was. Like putting down a weapon. Like admitting that this room, this evening, this woman with her back to him and her burnt risotto and her off-key humming, wasn't something he needed to defend against.
He sat at the dining table. The same table where he'd sat that morning with his tablet and his armour, pretending she wasn't there. She brought two plates over. The risotto was overcooked and slightly brown on one side and clearly the product of someone who had never made risotto before in her life and had attacked the task with the same reckless conviction she brought to everything.
"Don't say anything," she warned, setting his plate down. "I know it's not great. Artem told me to stir constantly and I may have gotten distracted by a video of a baby otter, but the point is I tried."
He picked up his fork. She sat across from him, and her eyes were on him, waiting, and the hope in them was so naked and so unprotected that he couldn't bear it.
He ate.
It was terrible.
"It's fine," he told her.
"You're lying. Your left eye does this thing when you lie."
"I'm not aware of a thing."
"It does! It sort of twitches. Very subtle. Very micro. I've been cataloguing your tells since I was sixteen. I have a mental spreadsheet."
He ate another bite. It was still terrible. "You've been cataloguing my tells."
"Someone has to. You're basically a vault with legs." She ate her own risotto, grimaced, and put her fork down. "Okay, that's truly bad. I'm so sorry."
"It's not your worst."
"Name something I've made that was worse."
"The scrambled eggs when you were sixteen. You used sugar instead of salt."
Her face broke open into a grin so wide it rearranged the whole room. "You remember that?"
He remembered everything. Every meal she'd burned. Every voicemail she'd left. Every exam she'd stressed about. Every time she'd fallen asleep on his couch while he worked late, and he'd carried her to bed, and she'd curled into his chest in her sleep and murmured something that wasn't quite words, and he'd set her down and left the room and stood in the hallway with his hands against the wall and his eyes closed.
He remembered all of it. That was the problem.
"I have a decent memory," he offered.
"You have a terrifying memory. You once reminded me about a dentist appointment I'd made eight months earlier."
"You would have missed it."
"I would have missed it," she confirmed. "Because I forgot about it thirty seconds after making it."
They ate in something that wasn't silence and wasn't conversation. It was the space between, the domestic hum of two people sharing a meal, and it was so ordinary and so dangerous that Alexei felt it in his teeth.
She didn't bring up the morning. She didn't push. She didn't mention the text. She told him about her first day at the clinic, about Dr. Vasquez and the broken espresso machine and the nine intake forms and the one she'd spilled coffee on. She talked about the counsellors, about the clients, about the courtyard with the fountain.
"I met someone interesting," she added, collecting the plates. "A client. Morgan. Blond, charming, very self-aware about his gambling issues. He actually brought up the dopamine-and-anticipation thing before I could explain it to him." She carried the plates to the sink. "I think he'll do well in the programme."