Page 25 of You, Only You

"You're staring," he said without turning around.

Busted. Spectacularly, humiliatingly busted.

"You're making omelets," I said, recovering with what I hoped was dignity but suspected was not. I leaned against the doorframe, crossing my arms. "I thought you survived on a strict diet of scotch and the tears of your enemies."

A faint huff of air escaped him, not quite a laugh, but close enough that I felt unreasonably pleased with myself. He poured the eggs into a sizzling pan, tilting it with practiced ease.

"My mother taught me," he said, his voice quieter now. "She used to say a man who can't feed himself is half a man."

"She sounds wise."

"She was." He didn't elaborate, but something in his shoulders tightened almost imperceptibly. He flipped the omelet, a perfect golden half-moon that I could never have achieved in a hundred years and I'd tried, once, in college, and the fire department had gotten involved, and reached for a plate. "Coffee's on the counter. Mugs are in the cabinet above."

I poured myself a cup and tried not to feel weird about knowing where his mugs were. The coffee was excellent, because of course it was. I was starting to suspect Will Steele approached everything in his life with the same relentless competence, and I was going to have to make peace with that or lose my mind.

"Sit," he said, sliding a plate across the island toward me. "Eat."

"So bossy." But I sat, because the omelet smelled incredible and I wasn't stupid enough to turn down free food. The first bite made me close my eyes involuntarily. Fluffy, perfectly seasoned, with something herby I couldn't identify.

"Good?" he asked, and when I opened my eyes, he was watching me with an expression that was doing the opposite of helping my crisis.

"Acceptable," I said, because admitting it was delicious felt like giving him too much power. "The eggs are adequately prepared."

"High praise from the woman who nearly poisoned herself with C-rated lo mein."

"That lo mein was transcendent and you know it. You ate half of it."

"I ate two noodles. For quality assessment purposes."

"You ate six. I counted."

"You counted my noodle consumption?"

"I'm a forensic accountant. I count everything. It's a disease."

He actually laughed. Not the almost-laugh, not the ghost of amusement. A real laugh, short and startled, like it had escaped before he could catch it. It changed his whole face. Made the sharp angles softer, made his eyes crinkle at the corners, made him look like someone you'd want to sit across from at breakfast every morning.

And there it was. The thought I'd been dodging for days, landing in my brain like a bird on a wire, settling in, making itself comfortable.

Every morning.

I shoved a large bite of omelet into my mouth so I wouldn't have to respond to my own thoughts.

We ate in something that resembled silence for a few minutes, side by side at the island, watching the city wake up through those ridiculous windows. He refilled my coffee withoutasking, which I decided didn't count as a unilateral decision. It was coffee. There were limits to my principles.

"Your mother," I said, partly because I wanted to know and partly because asking about his family felt safer than sitting in the silence, which had turned warm and domestic in a way that was making my palms sweat. "When did she..."

"I was twenty-two." He didn't look at me, just kept his eyes on his plate. "Pancreatic cancer. It was fast. Nicole was sixteen."

The math assembled itself in my head the way math always did: automatically, mercilessly. "You raised her."

"Through her last two years of high school." A pause. "I was in my second year of law school. It was... a scheduling challenge."

A scheduling challenge. He'd been twenty-two and grieving and suddenly responsible for a teenager, and he'd just called it a scheduling challenge. I wanted to reach across the counter and shake him. I also wanted to hug him, which was confusing and unhelpful.

"The cooking," I said slowly. "That's from then?"

He nodded, still not meeting my eyes. "It was the one normal thing I could give her. Eggs and toast before school, no matter how late I'd been up studying. Something that stayed the same when everything else was... " He trailed off. Didn't finish. He did that, I'd noticed. Started sentences about Nicole and then stopped, like he'd hit a wall he hadn't seen coming.