If he had never stopped loving me… Why had he turned me away? I didn’t ask the question now, afraid it would break this fragile, precious moment between us. I gave Miles a set of my pajamas to wear and they practically hung off him. I started to pull him toward my bed, then paused to ask, “Are you okay sleeping in my bed, or would you prefer one of the spare rooms?”

“Yours, if it’s not a bother. I don’t want to be alone right now.”

I heaved a sigh of relief at that. Everything within me rebelled at the thought of being apart from Miles right now.

I pulled back the sheets and he crawled in one side, and I crawled in the other. For the first time, I found myself cursing my king sized bed. There was way too much room between us. He lay on his side with his back to me, and I lay on my side facing him. I shifted a few inches closer, and he did the same. Wordlessly, we crept closer to each other until we were in the middle of the bed, and I wrapped my arm over him, pulling his body tightly to my chest. My body was practically quivering in anticipation, and if he didn’t realize what was poking against his lower back, he was more out of it than I thought. But I squeezed him tightly, pressing a kiss against his hair. “Sleep,” I whispered.

* * *

I woke up feeling strangely lonely, and it took me a moment to place what was missing. Miles. My bed was empty. I opened my eyes to confirm and rolled onto my back with a groan. Had I overstepped? I’d done my best to take care of Miles, to give him space to process the blow up with his parents while satisfying my instincts to care for him.

Something crashed in my kitchen, and for a moment, my adrenaline pumping, I thought it was burglars, but then a sudden bloom of hope thrust me out of my bed and I dashed down the hall, slowing to peek around the wall to a sight so satisfying, I felt as though I were dreaming.

Miles was cooking. Miles had never cooked much beyond macaroni from a box, but he was pulling something out of the oven, and it smelled delicious.

I stepped out and sat myself at the bar. “This is a surprise.”

Miles threw me a victorious grin, and I examined his face for anything negative: regret, worry, anger. He was simply happy, though.

“My roommate in law school was a culinary wonder, and she took my abysmal kitchen as a personal affront. I still can’t cook much, but she made sure I could nail at least one recipe for each section of the cookbook: breakfast, lunch, soup, appetizer, dinner, desert and the best French salad dressing you’ve had in your life.

My stomach gurgled as he closed the oven door. “So what is your breakfast masterpiece?” I asked.

“Quiche Lorraine,” Miles replied. “It needs to sit for about fifteen minutes before we can eat, but I’ve got some coffee ready.”

I grimaced. “I can’t imagine how good it is if you found it here. I ordered a bunch of staples when I first moved in, but I’ve eaten out more often than not, I’m afraid to admit.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Miles said, “but it is pretty terrible. But it’s caffeine. It will do until we can step out for something decent.”

I accepted an undoctored cup and ventured a taste. “This needs lots of sugar and milk.”

Miles made a face. “Even as awful as this is, I prefer it black. It’s insulting to the integrity of the milk and sugar to pollute it with this sludge.”

I laughed. “Feel free to tell me how you really think.”

Miles’s smile faded, and I could see him start retreating into himself again. I reached across the counter to take his hand, and a spark snapped between us. My eyes met his in surprise, but neither of us moved away. “I like it when you tell me what you think,” I said.

A timer buzzed and we both jumped, laughing nervously.

“Quiche is ready,” Miles said. “I was enjoying your balcony earlier this morning. Are you up for eating out there?”

“Sounds great.” My thoughts were still on that spark and the look in his eyes and the emotions I was tired of fighting. “But after we eat, we need to talk.”

Miles’s hand tensed under mine, but he nodded, and I let his hand go so he could prepare the quiche. I went to the fridge and found a couple of fruit cups that hadn’t reached their expiration date. They weren’t fancy, but it seemed like the kind of thing to round out our meal. As Miles plated the quiche, I drained and dumped the fruit cup into little bowls and Miles placed them on the plates next to the quiche.

“There,” he said in satisfaction. “You’d almost think I knew how to cook.”

I was glad to see he wasn’t dreading our conversation so much that he’d lost his sense of comfort with me. I wanted him to feel comfortable with me like I felt comfortable with him. In fact, I was having a hard time imagining living without him in my life again, and that was one of the many things we needed to talk about. I was fast losing my ability to tear myself away from him, and I needed to know what he expected from me. The past that had seemed so insurmountable when we were young hadn’t faded, but it had mellowed. We had grown. A younger me never would have been able to handle the situation with his parents as calmly as I had. It gave me hope that all the things I feared about myself were… maybe not gone, but managed.

But in the end, it didn’t matter what I thought so much as what Miles thought. Could he trust me again? Did he want to? I hadn’t been able to reconcile the fact that he said he had always loved me with the memory of him turning me away. I had a lot of questions, but in the end, they all drilled down to one: Why?