Page 84 of Stalkers Anonymous

He frowns at the corkscrew. “I have opened many bottles of wine, Hailey.”

“Successfully?” I tease.

“Mostly.”

I turn back to the potatoes I’m peeling and listen, with great interest, to the very specific crack of a cork breaking in half, followed by silence.

“How’s it going back there?”

“Fine.”

“Yeah?”

“Fully under control.”

I keep peeling. Behind me, the corkscrew goes back in. There’s a long struggling sound—a soft grunt, the faint squeak of cork giving up its will to live—and then a small, defeated thunk. That’s when I turn around.

Cole is staring at the bottle in his hand.

“Cole.”

“Don’t.”

“Where’s the cork?”

“It’s been…relocated.”

“To where?”

“Inside the bottle.”

“You pushed the cork into the wine?”

“It was easier than pulling it out.”

I have to set down the peeler because I’m about to drop it, and then I lose it. Real, doubled-over, can’t-catch-my-breath laughter. He stands there with the bottle of pinot noir held hostage, his mouth pressed into a thin line as he tries very hard not to smile.

“You can rappel down a mountain face,” I gasp. “You jumped out of a plane at fourteen thousand feet. You’re in tech security. And yet, you have been defeated. By a cork.”

“It was a faulty cork.”

“It was a perfectly average cork.”

He hands me the bottle, and I find a small mesh strainer in a drawer and pour the wine through it into a clean carafe. A handful of sad cork bits fall into the strainer.

“There,” I say, holding up the strainer like a trophy. “Crisis averted.”

“You are extremely smug right now.”

He pours us both a glass while I finish making dinner.

…

“This is incredible,” Cole says as he takes his first bite of steak. The sound he makes is borderline obscene. Like, there should be an age restriction on that noise. “Who knew you’d be such a great cook?”

“Don’t sound so surprised,” I tease, cutting into my own perfectly medium-rare steak. “But thank you. I don’t cook for people very often.”

“Their loss,” he says simply, and the sincerity in his voice makes my heart do an embarrassing little flip. He makes it look so easy to be this genuine. Meanwhile, I’m over here trying to remember how to use a fork like a normal human being.