“This kitchen is amazing,” she told me for the third time.
“Right?” I turned my head, grinning at her over my shoulder. “It was the thing sold me on the house.”
She looked around at the newly-renovated space, which still somehow managed to look appropriate for my 1894 Victorian. The white cabinets, soapstone counters, and farm sink looked like they could have been original, and even the professional-grade stainless steel appliances didn’t detract from the overall aesthetic. The previous owners had done a fantastic job with it.
“Really?”
I nodded as I stirred my sauce. “My realtor had to talk me into seeing this one. I was adamant that I didn’t want anything too big.”
She smirked. “So you weren’t shopping for the future Mrs. Morris and a passel of green-eyed babies when you picked this house?”
I laughed. “No. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I do want to get married and have a family one day.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Yeah?”
Something passed over her face that I couldn’t quite read, and I wondered if I was being insensitive, talking about marriage and family so glibly. Her husband had died young, before they could even start a family. But the emotion was gone, her expression wiped clean before I could think twice about it. She looked mildly curious again, so I cautiously continued.
“Sure.” I turned the burner off, moving the pan off the fire. “Someday. I’m not in a hurry.”
I stepped away from the stove, pulling plates down from a cabinet and grabbing cutlery from a drawer. Then I set them down on the island, where she was sitting on a stool, waiting for dinner to be ready.
“But anyway, it wasn’t really on my radar when I was house shopping. I just wanted something on the water with a big kitchen.”
She nodded. “Because you’re such a gourmand?” she teased.
I chuckled as I plated the steak I’d sliced a few minutes ago. “I’m hardly a trained chef. But I do like to experiment.”
She eyed me warily as I spooned the roasted potatoes and vegetables onto the plates next, then topped everything with the honey-balsamic sauce. “Experiment?”
I laughed at her fearful tone. “Not like that. I’m not just throwing things together for the sake of being clever.”
She smiled. “Good. Because I don’t really go in for pistachio foam, or whatever passes for fine dining these days.”
I laughed. “No foams or airs or essences here, I promise.” I took a seat next to her. “I just get excited about the science of cooking. Not just perfecting the ingredients, but understanding why they’re the perfect ingredients, and how to cook them to perfection. Understanding why onions are better when caramelized, and why steak needs to be rested before it’s served, and why the potatoes need to be roasted at a certain temperature to get the perfect texture out of them.”
She smiled at me, and I stared for a long moment. Her whole face really did light up with her smile, and this was the first time I was seeing it in person.
The pictures really hadn’t done it justice.
“So what you’re saying is you’re a total geek?” she asked.
I shook my head, trying to clear the razzle-dazzle effect of Larkin’s smile. It really was some powerful stuff, so it took me a second.
Finally, I smiled. “And proud of it.” I shook my napkin out, laying it on my lap. “Plus, I really like to eat.”
She laughed, and the husky sound did things to me in places that were not so friend-like.
“So tell me, science geek,” she asked, taking a tentative bite of her steak. And then she moaned. “Damn. That is good.”
Fuck. If the sound of her laugh had my pants growing suddenly too tight, the sound of her moan had me shifting in my seat in a desperate attempt to get more comfortable.
I cleared my throat. “Tell you what?” I asked, wanting to steer the conversation away from the apparently orgasmic qualities of my cooking.
She gave me a shrewd look as she forked some potatoes, like she could see right through my feeble attempts at hiding my lusty thoughts.
“Tell me how in the hell you ever got laid in high school when you’re such a nerd?”
I almost choked on the bite of steak I’d just taken. Her sharp words, delivered in such a casual tone, took me completely by surprise. But I should have been prepared. This woman had me on the ropes from the minute I met her.
I swallowed quickly, reaching for my beer and taking a long sip. When I turned back to her, her eyebrows were raised in amusement. She was enjoying my discomfort.
So I decided to turn it back around on her, for once.
“Who said I got laid in high school?”
Her cheeks flushed, and she reached over and poked me in the stomach, a little too low for my comfort. “Even I got laid in high school.”
Fuck. That had backfired on me in spectacular fashion. Because I did not want to think of her having sex. What she’d look like naked, what sounds she’d make, how she’d feel underneath me…
“Well,” I said, clearing my throat. “I was also on the football team, so the girls could overlook the fact that I was a nerd.”
She chuckled. “Should have guessed that.” Her eyes leisurely roamed my body, and I felt it everywhere.
Fuuuuuuuck. I shifted again, but there was no way I could stealthily reach down and rearrange myself. She was still watching me with those damn lavender eyes. The pupils were huge and dark and the lids were at half-mast. Her eyes were practically begging me to pull her into my lap and kiss her full lips. Lips that she was now licking slowly, luxuriously, as her gaze lingered on my chest.
I gulped in air, expelling it in a noisy, ragged gust. Friends, Morris. Friends.
When she was finally done with her perusal, she looked up at me with a goofy smile. “Tight end?” she asked, giving me a cheesy wink.
And that was all I needed to knock my ass out of this haze of desire. I let out a hoarse laugh, grateful that she’d broken the spell – because another minute of her eyes on me, and I might not have been able to.
And that was not what I wanted. I really was determined to keep it friendly with her. No matter how much I might want a peek under that Ramones tee shirt, I would not go there with her.
Not yet, anyway, my lizard brain whispered.
I did my best to ignore myself. “No, offensive line.”
She looked surprised. “Really? You’re not nearly refrigerator-sized enough for that.”
“Well, I’ve slimmed down a bit since then.” I grinned. She was funny. I hadn’t laughed so much with a girl in a really long time – maybe ever.
“This is slimmed down?” she cried, poking me in the biceps. “You look like you have a Bowflex in your bedroom. Just twenty minutes a day got you the body you’ve always dreamed of.”
I snorted. “Nah, I keep it in the basement.”
She laughed. “No shit, really? You actually have one of those?”
I smiled, spearing a piece of asparagus with my fork. “No, I go to the gym seven days a week, like a normal millennial.”
She shook her head, still laughing. “You’re not a normal millennial. You own your own home.”
I spread my arms, as though showing off my lovely home. “And I didn’t even have to sacrifice my daily avocado toast.”
She giggled as she took a sip of her beer. “Congratulations.”
I poked her in the biceps, because I needed to touch her, too. Just a little. In a friendly way.
“Besides, you own your own home, too. And you’re even younger than me.”
Her laughter stopped abruptly at that. She looked away, blinking rapidly in what I now recognized as an effort to stave off her tears.
Damn it. Stupid, stupid me. She’d probably bought that house with her husband. The perfect little starter home on the beach for them to start their life together.
“Shit,” I muttered. “I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “It’s okay.” She took a deep breath, then started shoveling more food into her mouth. She chewed rapidly, then swallowed roughly. “It’s just, it’s not my money, you know?” She looked back at me. “It wasn’t even his money. And he definitely did not want it. Neither of us did. It came from his grandparents. He got this huge inheritance when they died, about five years ago now.”
“Some people would call that a lucky break,” I ventured.
She shook her head. “But in a way it was tainted, you know? See, his mom came from money.” Her eyes went soft, unfocused, like she was thinking. “She married an immigrant, a mechanic from Mexico. They eloped to Vegas two weeks after they met.”
I smiled. “Sounds like a whirlwind romance.”
She hummed as she took a forkful of food, chewing slowly. “It was. But her parents flipped out. Called him a gold-digger, said he was just looking for a green card. They said some really awful, racist shit. It was this huge blow-up. They threatened to cut her out of the will if she didn’t get it annulled.”
I sucked in a breath. “That’s harsh.”
She nodded. “And of course she refused. She was young and in love for the first time. She thought it could withstand any hardship.” She smiled sadly, and I knew she must be thinking of her own love story. She’d married her high school sweetheart as soon as they were legal. She must have known a thing or two about the power of that first love.
Weirdly, I almost envied her. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely never wanted to have to go through the pain of losing a lover, like she had. But at least she’d gotten to experience the ecstasy before it had all been taken from her.
As for me? At thirty-one years old, I’d never actually been in love. I’d had a few girlfriends here and there, but nothing serious. I’d never lost my heart to someone.
And you would never hear me admit it to my busybody little sister, but I kind of wanted to. Ellie often teased me that marriage and family were just items I wanted to check off my to-do list, like getting the oil changed in the Jeep, or renewing my Prime subscription.
But the truth was that I wanted to know what it was like to give your heart to a woman so completely, and to know she’d given you hers in return. It made me a total sap, I knew that. But I didn’t care. I wanted to fall in love.
And maybe I wanted to prove, to the little doubtful voice in the back of my mind, that love could fill you up without consuming you entirely, without destroying everything that was good in you.
“So the entirety of their estate passed to Daniel once they both died,” Larkin said, pulling me out of my thoughts. “He’d never even met them. They refused to acknowledge their daughter’s marriage, refused to even see their grandkid. It was like he never existed for them.” She huffed. “Until they died.”
I let out a low whistle. “I can see how that would be complicated.”
She nodded. “The thing is, Ernesto – his dad,” she explained, when I raised an eyebrow. “He didn’t deserve any of their abuse. He was the best man I’d ever known. Always so kind and supportive, and so hard-working. He wasn’t looking for a sugar mama. He just fell in love.”
I frowned as I watched her tell me about her father-in-law. She looked so sad, and I couldn’t help but notice that she used the past tense.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
She frowned. “He died four years ago. Heart failure.” She sniffed, pushing her plate away. “Daniel was devastated. It came out of nowhere. He was only forty-five, and healthy as an ox.”
I sighed. “Heart problems can happen to anyone, even if they seem healthy.”
I thought of my mom, who had been active every day of her life. Walking all over town in all weather, swimming all through the summer, climbing the stairs in our little two-story house with the vigor of a woman half her age. Until one Sunday, when she was in the garden. She’d been picking herbs to make spaghetti and meatballs.
Ellie and I had been coming over for dinner every Sunday, ever since we both moved back to New York after college. We loved spending time with her, but we also both felt the need to check up on her. Ellie would sit and crochet with her, cheerfully grilling her about her health, while I did whatever needed to be done around the house. In fact, I’d been changing out the light bulb over the stove when I saw Mom through the window, clutching at her left arm as she fell to the ground.
It had been the first of three heart attacks that summer. The last one had ultimately taken her life.
Larkin nodded. “Yeah. Turned out, it was some kind of congenital defect. He didn’t even know about it until it was too late.”
“What happened to his mom?” I asked.
“She moved to Florida a few months after Ernesto died. Took some of her parents’ money and made a new life for herself.” She stared into the distance again. “Haven’t seen her since Daniel’s funeral.”
“That’s sad.” I wasn’t sure what else to say.
She hummed. “Yeah.”
We were quiet for a while, both lost in our thoughts. I finished eating, while she merely picked at her food. When it became clear that she wasn’t going to eat any more, I got up, taking both our plates with me. I loaded everything up in the dishwasher, then ran the disposal.
“I’m sorry,” she said, when I was done.
I frowned. “For what?”
She gestured to the sink. “For not finishing my dinner. You went to all this trouble to cook, and I didn’t eat it all.”
I shook my head. “You did pretty good.”
She gave me a wry smile. “Thanks, mom.”
I chuckled. “I mean it. You ate almost all of it.” I reached into the fridge, pulling two more bottles from the six-pack of craft beer I had stashed in there. I popped the tops off, then motioned for her to follow me as I crossed to the French doors leading out to my backyard.
“Yeah, I guess I did,” she said, sounding surprised. “I was actually pretty hungry tonight.”
“You say that like you haven’t eaten all day.” She made a face, and I stopped, handing her a beer. “You didn’t eat all day?”
She shrugged, her shoulders folding in on herself in a defensive move. “I had a banana this morning.”
I laughed. “It’s eight o’clock!”
She checked her watch. “Seven forty-seven,” she corrected.
“Whatever.” I smiled. “A banana is not enough sustenance for an entire day.”
She looked at her watch again. She did that a lot, and I wondered why. Somehow, it didn’t feel like she did it out of boredom or impatience, like most people. Her expression when she did it was one of concentration. Maybe she was keeping track of something? But what?
“Especially not if you spent the day doing doorbell-killing exercises, right?” she asked.
I laughed. “Strength training does require protein to fuel the workout.”
She looked up at me, her eyes smiling. “I guess a gym rat like you knows all the tricks of the trade, huh?”
I winked. “Stick with me, buddy. I’ll beef you up in no time.”
She smiled. “Well, if involves eating stuff like the meal you just made, then sign me up.”
We’d reached the end of my property and the beginning of the canal, and I gestured for her to sit. She did, dangling her legs off the bulkhead. I settled myself next to her, taking a sip of my beer.
“Good thing the water doesn’t come too high,” she said, peering over the edge of the dock, noting the salty stains in the boards that had been left by the high tide. They were probably a good ten inches below her dangling feet.
“Easy for you to say, your legs are shorter.”
She snorted. “Jealous, Stretch?”
I gave her a long look, top to bottom, pretending I was unimpressed. “Nah. I’m good.”
She smiled. “I don’t know if I’d go as far as ‘good.’” She gave me the once-over, too, then shrugged like she was bored. “You’re all right.”
“Keep telling yourself that, shorty.”
“I am not short.” She stuck her tongue out at me.
“Everyone’s short to me.”
She laughed, and I joined her. Man, it felt good to just sit here, laughing with this woman. The conversation tonight had been all over the map, but this was a good place to land. Eventually the laughter died down, and we continued to sit for a few minutes, just enjoying the light breeze blowing in from the water.
“It’s a beautiful night,” I observed. It was warmer than usual for late October, and though the light pollution meant you couldn’t see many stars, the sky was a mosaic of inky blue and purple trails, and the nearly full moon caught the edges of the clouds, turning them a shimmering silver.
“That it is,” she said, her tone heavier than it had been a minute ago. She sniffed, and I looked over at her. Her chin was wobbling, and her eyelids were moving at a rapid-fire pace.
Shit. She was about ten seconds from bursting into tears.
“Hey,” I said, bumping her shoulder with mine. “Talk to me.”
She shook her head, biting her lip. She was obviously struggling to get herself under control. Her knuckles were white as she gripped her beer bottle, and I gently took it from her hands, setting it to the side.
“Hey.” I put my arm around her shoulders. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
“No. No I’m not,” she gasped, just as the tears began to fall.
God, I hated this. She was sobbing, her whole body shaking violently, and I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t know what to say to make her sorrow go away. I’d tried to help her forget, plying her with steak and beer and meaningless banter until she was smiling and laughing with me. But it hadn’t worked.
So I did the only thing I could think to do – I pulled her into my lap, wrapping my arms around her and holding her as tight as I dared.
After an interminable amount of time, her shaking stopped, and I found I was rocking us both, murmuring nonsense words, telling her she was okay. Which was bullshit. Clearly she wasn’t.
“We had a fight,” she mumbled, the sound muffled by my shirt.
My hold tightened on her for a fraction of a second as I inhaled. But I breathed out again, relaxing ever so slightly. Still, I didn’t dare speak for fear she’d stop talking.
“We had a fight,” she repeated in a stronger voice. “That morning.”
I didn’t have to ask which morning. She was talking about Daniel, about the day he’d died.
“God, it was bad.” She cleared her throat. “Knock-down, drag-out. A fight to end all fights.”
She sniffed, wiping her face on my sleeve. I didn’t care. She could get all the snot and tears and whatever she wanted on my shirt. It would wash out. The more important thing was that she washed this out, this pain and grief. She needed to talk about this, and I was happy to listen.
“I have always had a temper.” Her voice was faraway, distant, like she was still trapped in her own head. “I’m not an easy person to love. I’m antisocial. I’m argumentative. And I have this contrary streak, my dad says. You say up, I say down. You say white, I say black.” She sniffed again, but it sounded more like a huff of laughter. “My brother and I fought like cats and dogs when we were growing up. Still do, really.”
She was silent for a minute, and I waited her out, afraid to even breathe too loudly. I just continued to rock her, lulling her into a sense of security. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to be a safe place for her to lay her burdens down.
“But then Daniel came along, and it was like he swept away the anger, you know what I mean?” She didn’t wait for me to answer before continuing. “It wasn’t like I was changing myself for him, or trying to become a different person to please him. It was like he brought out a side that was always there, waiting for him.”
She was quiet for a beat, and I silently held her, waiting her out.
“All of a sudden, there just wasn’t anything to argue about. From the minute we met, we agreed on everything. What to eat, where to go on a Friday night, what movies to watch. It was like we shared a brain. If I said we should watch He-Man, that was his favorite cartoon. If he wanted enchiladas, that was all I’d been craving for days. It was bizarre, how in sync we were.” She snorted. “People hated us. We were too perfect.”
I frowned. I kind of hated them, too. Well, hated him. It was stupid, I know, being jealous of a dead guy. But if I’d learned anything in the last twenty-four hours, it was that Larkin’s husband cast a long shadow.
“That morning, I told him I wanted to paint the guest bedroom green. I had a swatch all picked out. I was so excited to show him.”
It was seemingly a non-sequitur. But the tension in her shoulders and the agony in her voice told me we were getting close to the truth of it, the hemorrhaging center of her grief. She was silent for a long time, and I could feel her heartbeat racing against my chest. Eventually, I cleared my throat, unable to contain my curiosity any longer.
“He didn’t like the color, I take it?”
For a long minute, I thought she wouldn’t answer me. But when she did, her tone was leaden.
“He loved the color green. He even teased me about it that day, said I was sucking up to him by suggesting his favorite color. He used to love to say, ‘Man, you’ve got it bad, Lark.’” She looked up at the sky, and I watched her eyes grow heavy with sadness, her mouth pinched. “And then I fucked it all up.”
I ran my hand through her hair, trying to soothe her. I combed my fingers through it, gently working out all the tangles. Just waiting her out.
“I told him that I thought green was a good color for a nursery,” she continued, so quietly that I almost didn’t hear her. “I said that when we had kids, I didn’t want to find out what the sex of the baby would be. I wanted it to be a surprise.” She sniffed, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “I thought green would be a good color either way. Wouldn’t matter if it turned out to be a boy or a girl, we’d be set.”
I froze with my hands still in her hair, holding my breath, waiting for what she’d say next.
“He lost his shit. Completely and utterly lost it. I had never seen him so angry. Not ever. He was always such an easy-going guy, but not that morning.” She gulped, blinking again. “He grabbed me by the shoulders and demanded to know if I was pregnant.”
I let out the breath I’d been holding, taking another one in quickly. “Were you?” I asked, hating the desperate edge to my voice. My gut was heavy with a dread I didn’t even fully understand.
She shook her head, and I exhaled loudly. “No. And I tried to tell him that, but he wouldn’t listen. He kept screaming that I was going to get an abortion, that we were never having kids.” The tears started falling again. “I swore up and down that I was just talking about the future, I didn’t mean anything by it. But he just kept going. He could not calm down.”
She swiped at her cheeks, but the tears were falling faster than she could keep up.
“So of course, I lost my shit. I started screaming right back at him, telling him he’d betrayed me.” She looked away, watching the lights from the houses shimmering on the water. “We always said we wanted kids. We talked about it even when we were kids ourselves. We talked about how many we’d have, how close together we wanted them, even discussed names. We were waiting until after we finished college and the business stabilized, because that seemed more responsible. But we both always knew where the future was headed.”
I frowned, feeling less and less guilty for hating the guy. Pulling the bait and switch on her like that, and over something so important? Dick move, Daniel. Dick. Move.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know why he flipped out. He never said. Just insisted that we were never having kids.”
She went quiet again. I resumed stroking her hair, sifting the soft strands through my fingers.
“So then what?” I asked, when she didn’t speak for several minutes. I didn’t want to push her, but I felt like she needed to be pushed. She needed to get it all out.
She shuddered. “I went for a run. I was so angry. I needed to get out of the house and away from him. We’d both said some really awful shit to each other, and we needed to cool down.”
“And he went out, too?” I prompted, remembering what Taylor had said last night, about how he’d died.
“I told him to wait for me,” she whispered. “I told him to wait until I got back.”
I frowned. “But he didn’t.”
She shook her head, letting out a pitiful whimper. “He took his bike out, even though it was storming.” She started to shake again. “I don’t even know where he went with it. I didn’t see him, and I ran all up and down the boardwalk, where he usually rode. I don’t know. We must have missed each other. I didn’t see-” She sobbed. “I didn’t know, until they rang the doorbell, and told me that he, he was-”
She couldn’t finish, her tears overtaking her, stealing her voice. I tightened my hold on her, holding her while she wept.
“My fault,” she sobbed. “All my fault.”
“Hey.” I squeezed her gently, and she clutched at my shirt. “It’s not your fault.” I kissed the top of her head, trying anything I could to comfort her. “You had a fight. People fight all the time. It doesn’t mean you caused this.”
She wailed. “But it does. I pushed him out into that storm. I killed him.”
“No.” I gripped her as tight as I dared. “You weren’t driving the car. You had no control over what happened. It was an accident.”
But she couldn’t answer me, not anymore. All she could do was cry. And all I could do was keep holding her, until finally the tears subsided. We sat in the moonlight while the tide lapped at the soles of my shoes.
It seemed to work, though. Eventually her body went heavy as the deep, slow breath of sleep overtook her.
I stood up carefully, still holding her in my arms, trying not to jostle her awake. I breathed a sigh of relief when she let out a snuffling breath, burying her head in my chest. Then I carried her into the house, upstairs to my room. I lay her on the bed, pulling her shoes off. Her limbs immediately curled inwards, save for one arm, which she lifted and tucked under her head. Then she turned her face into the pillow, letting out a deep, sleepy sigh.
I frowned at the sight of her in my bed. This wasn’t exactly how I’d pictured it in my dreams last night. But I didn’t care right then. I simply kicked my own shoes off and climbed in beside her. A huge yawn escaped me as I grabbed the blanket at the end of the bed, settling it over both of us. It had been a rollercoaster of a day.
But despite my bone-deep exhaustion, I had a hard time falling asleep. I lay there for a long time, just watching her sleep. She looked so peaceful, and I wondered if it was because she had unburdened herself a little. I hoped it was. I really hoped she’d feel better now, even if just a little bit.
Before I finally drifted off, a little nugget of guilt pinged through my head. Because despite the horrible circumstances that had led us here, I was still happy to be here in my bed, lying next to the most fascinating, complex woman I’d ever known.
In fact, there was nowhere else I’d rather be. This was heaven.