I dressed in my pajamas—similar to the ones Drew had seen me in when we’d first met and I’d twisted his nipple—and made my way back to the kitchen using his comb to brush my hair. Drew was just placing bowls of hot soup on the table. I noted that two slices of homemade bread were also at each place.

“Where do you keep your utensils?” I walked to the drawer closest to the dishwasher and opened it, searching for spoons.

“On the end, top drawer….”

Something about the way he said drawer made me stop and look up. He was frowning at me.

“What are you wearing?”

I glanced down at myself then back at him. “My pajamas.”

“Are you staying the night?” His voice was tight.

I shrugged, growing irritated, my neck heating. “How am I supposed to know? I didn’t know I was going to be eating here either. This is all Cletus packed. It’s a bag full of pajamas and no bras.”

He did that slow-eye-closing thing again and his chin dropped to his chest. When he spoke next, he spoke to the floor. “Would you feel more comfortable in one of my T-shirts?”

I studied him for a beat, a bit taken aback by his reaction to me in my PJs. I noted the tension in his shoulders, the way his hands were balled into fists. Sandra’s words of warning echoed in my head while I tried to bat them away with facts.

Fact One: His perpetual grumpy face whenever I was around.

Fact Two: If he were interested in me, then why had he disappeared and avoided eye contact for the last two weeks?

Fact Three: Fiction-handsome meant vessel of Satan.

I knew I wasn’t making any sense. I had no idea in that moment what I thought—about Sandra’s prediction or anything else—other than food smelled really, really good for the first time in almost three weeks, and I was going to eat it and like it. I’d just flashed a bear Mardi Gras style and fought off a rabid raccoon. I was starving.

Drew might be attracted to me. As well, he might find me crass, trashy, repugnant, and annoying—a nice piece of ass, a pretty face, with a low class accent. His propensity to avoid looking at me could mean either of those things, especially since we were about to eat.

Because I found the former theory (attracted to me) inconvenient and outside the realm of my comfortable reality, I decided to embrace the latter (annoyed by me) instead.

I rationalized it this way: better to be oblivious to a flirtation than mistake kindness for flirting. One made you clueless; the other made you pathetic.

And none of this mattered, because he lived in Tennessee and I lived in Chicago, and nary the twain shall meet.

Therefore, I asked, “Would you feel more comfortable if I were wearing one of your T-shirts?”

His eyes lifted to mine, his mouth a firm line. He looked both bothered and hot…or maybe hot and bothered. I couldn’t tell which. Drew nodded.

“Fine.” I crossed my arms over my chest and glanced at the stove, feeling tremendously self-conscious. “Go get me a T-shirt. I’ll grab the spoons.”

***

I wore one of his clean T-shirts—extra-large, black—and again I was swimming in it.

We ate in silence until Drew volunteered—after my second helping of chicken soup—that we weren’t eating chicken soup. It was pheasant soup, not to be confused with peasant soup, which is what I thought he’d said at first.

This conjured images of Drew the Viking chopping up serfs for dinner.

“Many of the local hunters like to leave gifts of game for the rangers and wardens.”

“Well, either way—peasant or pheasant—it tastes like chicken. My patients bring me gifts too. Things like gift cards…and viruses.”

Finally, Drew cracked a smile, his eyes losing some of their wariness. I was relieved that my comment seemed to break the weird tension that had plagued the evening since I’d walked into the kitchen wearing my pajamas. Eating in shared silence usually gave me heartburn.

He surprised me by asking, “So, you like poetry?”

I paused, my spoon halfway between the bowl and my mouth. I didn’t know Drew well enough to know why he’d asked the question or where we were going with it, so I decided to say, “Yes, I like poetry.”

He nodded, stuffed a piece of bread in his mouth.

“Do you?” I prompted, trying to encourage discussion. “Like poetry, that is. Do you like poetry?”

He didn’t answer right away, opting instead to chew slowly and drink his beer. At length he responded with a dodgy, “Yeah.” Then silence.

I waited for him to continue, since—after all—he’d been the one to broach the subject. But he didn’t. He just looked at his food like it was the most interesting thing in the room. Maybe to him it was.

Tired of the silence, I said a little too loudly, “Well, that’s good. Look at all the things we have in common, Drew! Poetry and…T-shirts.” His eyes flickered to mine then back to his soup. If I was reading the sparkle in them correctly, he was amused.

Amusement was preferable to soundless stoicism, so I carried on. “We even use the same soap—at least today we did. I bet we even use the same brand of razor. So tell me more about yourself.”

“What do you want to know?” He said this without looking up.

“Anything I guess. Where are you from?”

“Texas.”

“And where did you go to school?”

“Texas A & M for undergrad; Baylor for postgrad.” Drew stood, grabbed my empty bowl, and put it in his. He stacked all the dinner dishes into a tidy pile and carried them to the sink.

“Any hobbies?” I called after him.

He grabbed two new plates from the cupboard. Like before, I watched him walk around his kitchen. His movements were graceful and unhurried, paradoxically lazy and efficient. It struck me that so many things about Drew were contradictory.

Earlier today, he’d stroked my hair, called me sugar, rubbed my back; then, a few minutes ago, he’d glared at me with heated irritation when I walked in wearing pajamas. The last few weeks he’d been avoiding me, not making eye contact; then today, he covered me with a blanket while I slept. When he yelled at me for spending too much time in the den, and he sent Cletus out with fried chicken and potatoes.

He held my mother’s power of attorney and was the executor of her will, but he paid our house bills out of his own pocket. I couldn’t figure him out.

Drew returned to the table carrying two dessert plates, a knife, two forks, and the pie.

Once settled in his seat, he cut into a lovely pecan pie, one of my favorites, my absolute favorite being lemon meringue pie made by my mother.

At last he responded, though I was so focused on the pie that I almost forgot I’d asked a question.

“I like to cook…and read.”

Finally, something!

“Me too.” I accepted the generous slice of pie and immediately took a bite. It was really, really good. I pointed to him with my fork and said, “Well, I like to eat, which is like cooking. This is good pie. I do like to read. See, that’s another thing we have in common—pie and books. So, what are you reading now?”

“Nikola Tesla’s biography.”

“I haven’t read that. What about fiction? What’s the last good novel you read?” I ate two more bites of pie.

His subtle smile flattened and his eyes finally lifted to mine and held. “I don’t like fiction.”

I blinked at him, and I’m sure my eyebrows were doing an interpretive dance of what was going on inside my brain. “You don’t like fiction?”

“No. Never cared for it.”

“Any fiction?” I chewed on a pecan as I considered him. “You’ve never enjoyed any fiction? How come you’re always reading fiction to my mom?”

He shrugged. “Because she likes it.”

“What about movies?”

“I’m not really interested.”

I gathered a slow, deep breath and studied his face. This explained a lot about him, why he was so joyless. A perfect vessel for Satan. Also, I’d finished my pie. So my expression of disappointment was two-fold.

“Do you like fiction?” he asked.

I nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes. I love novels. I love getting lost in someone else’s story, thinking about life from their perspective, living their experiences.”

“Why don’t you live your own experiences?”

I wrinkled my nose at this question. “Why would I do that when I can be a hundred different people a year? Live a hundred different lives. Love a hundred times without worrying about danger or risk. And all from the comfort of my reading chair.”

Drew’s frown was severe and, unlike the other times he’d recited Nietzsche, he sounded a fair bit impassioned as he quoted, “‘There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.’”

I stared at him, his serious face, and his serious silvery eyes.

Drew was an odd possum.

“Okay,” I said, twisting my mouth to the side. “Well, I guess we’ve found something we don’t have in common. And for the record, I dislike Nietzsche.”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“Maybe.”

“Why? Does it make you uncomfortable when someone challenges you?”

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