Page 20 of Lost With My Enemy

"Your mom had years of practice."

"I've been making this since I was fifteen." He stirs the vegetables, tosses the chicken in, and adds hot sauce in a quantity that makes my eyes water from four feet away. "Trust me."

Trust. The word sits in the apartment between the kitchen counter and the balcony door. Jaxon says it casually. As if trusting another person's instincts over your own measured judgement is something people just do.

My parents trusted each other once. Stood in a church and said vows and bought a salad bowl on their honeymoon. Trusted that the plan would hold.

The rice comes out perfect.

"Told you," he says, spooning it onto two plates with an expression of mild smugness that is, against my better judgment, attractive.

We eat on the balcony. The river moves below, lazy and brown, reflecting city lights. The stir-fry is good. Better than good. The hot sauce has a slow burn that builds until my eyes water.

"Too much?" he asks.

"Perfect." My voice is hoarse. "I'm crying because it's perfect."

He grins, and the city lights catch his face, and I look away before I do something stupid.

How's Winnipeg?

Sloane. Checking in, as she has every night since Ottawa.

Fine. He cooked dinner.

HE COOKED FOR YOU?

It's stir-fry, not a proposal.

Elise Marie Boyd. You are eating a home-cooked meal on a balcony overlooking a river with a man who has been driving you across the country for eight days. Do you hear yourself?

I hear a woman eating stir-fry.

You hear a woman falling for someone and trying to file it under "logistics."

My thumb hovers over the keyboard. Through the balcony door, Jaxon is washing the dishes. He didn't ask, didn't make a production of it, just picked up both plates and took them to the sink. The dream catcher is visible through the apartment window, hanging from the truck's rearview mirror in the parking lot below. Blue and white threads in the streetlight.

I'm not falling for anyone. I'm getting a ride to Calgary. Plus you faked a whole engagement for a week in Virginia, you can’t do logistics without feelings involved like I can.

Sure babe. Keep me posted on those logistics.

My phone goes dark. Jaxon comes back out with two mugs. Tea, because he remembered I drink it in the evenings, and coffee for himself because the man would drink coffee at midnight and sleep like a log.

"Sloane?" he asks, handing me the mug.

"How'd you know?"

"You get a specific look when you're texting her. Fond but exasperated."

"That's my permanent expression."

He sits in the other balcony chair, stretching his legs out. His feet are bare. His flannel is unbuttoned over a faded t-shirt, and his hair is messy from the wind, and I need to stop cataloguing the details of this man.

"Can I show you something?" He pulls out his phone, scrolls, and turns the screen toward me.

It's the photo I took. His profile against the Manitoba sky. The dream catcher is slightly blurred in the foreground, his jaw is set, and the light catches the line of his nose. Behind him, the prairie stretches to infinity.

It's a terrible photograph, technically. The exposure is wrong, the composition is off-centre, and my thumb is a pale blur in the bottom left corner.