Page 54 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"There's nothing gentle about anything I do in a kitchen. That's not a skill set I was issued." He pokes at the bowl with a spatula like it might explain itself, and between the two of us we manage to turn what was supposed to be a soufflé into something closer to a very sad omelet, and we eat it anyway, sitting on the counter because the table felt too formal for a meal this ridiculous.

"This is terrible," he says, taking another bite.

"It's not terrible. It's rustic."

"It's terrible, Jenna. I've eaten field rations that had better structural integrity."

"Fine. You win. But we made it together, so it counts as a bonding experience regardless of the outcome."

"By that logic we should set the kitchen on fire next. Really bond."

"I would not put it past you to actually try that."

We clean up the wreckage of dinner and end up at the small table with a deck of cards Gunny left behind months ago, and Rafe teaches me a version of gin rummy with rules that seem to change slightly every hand, always in his favor, until I catch him at it on the fourth round.

"You just made that rule up."

"I didn't. That's a standard variant."

"There is no standard variant where you get to discard and draw in the same turn. You're cheating a woman who balances your payroll for a living."

"I'm not cheating. I'm optimizing."

"That's cheating with better branding." I throw a card at him, which he catches without looking, infuriatingly, and something about this whole ridiculous argument over a game neither of us actually cares about winning is the most relaxed I've seen him since I've known him.

"Fine. No more invented rules." He gathers the cards, shuffling them with more precision than a card game strictly requires. "We play it straight."

"Try to contain your disappointment."

"I'm devastated. Truly." He deals a new hand, quick and even, and I watch his hands do it, steady in a way that still catches me off guard sometimes, the same careful precision he brings to inventory sheets and hazard checklists now sorting a deck of cards like the stakes are actually real.

"You take this far more seriously than the game deserves."

"Everything gets the same setting from me. It's not really something I can turn off."

"I've noticed. I mostly find it endearing now instead of alarming."

"Progress." He glances up at me over his cards, something warm sitting behind the usual focus, and the low firelight and the quiet and the fact that neither of us has anywhere else to be shift the whole evening sideways, easy in a way that feels less like a decision and more like gravity finally getting its way.

We don't finish the hand. I don't remember exactly when the cards end up forgotten on the table, or when I end up against his side on the couch instead of across from him, only that at some point his arm settles around me and I settle into it, and the fire's the only light left in the room, throwing gold across everything it touches.

"You're staring," he says, quiet, not moving.

"I'm allowed to stare. You're worth staring at."

"That's a dangerous amount of honesty for this early in the evening."

"I've been saving it up." I tip my head back to look at him properly, and whatever teasing either of us had left dissolves somewhere in the space between us. "I just wanted to say it."

He kisses me slow, patient in a way nothing about our first time together was, nothing but the two of us choosing this on purpose tonight, no crisis forcing our hand, just two people who've earned the right to take exactly as long as they want to get here. His hands find my waist, gentle in a way I've stopped bracing against, the same carefulness that once read like a warning now reading only as tenderness, and when he pulls back enough to look at me there's a question in his eyes he doesn't need to ask out loud.

"Yes," I tell him anyway, because some things deserve saying regardless. "All of it. Slow, though. I don't want to rush a single second of tonight."

"I wasn't planning on rushing anything." His voice has gone low and rough in a way that undoes something low in my stomach. "I've got nowhere else to be for two days. Neither do you. I intend to take advantage of that fact thoroughly."

We move to the rug in front of the fire because the couch suddenly feels too small for what tonight wants to be, and everything unfolds slower than our first time did, more deliberate, both of us further along now in trusting this is real and not something that vanishes if we blink. He undresses me first, unhurried, pressing a kiss to every new inch he uncovers like he's committing it to memory before moving to the next, and by the time he's finished I'm trembling under his hands for reasons that have nothing to do with the fire being too far away.

"You keep doing that," I tell him, breathless, when his mouth finds the curve of my shoulder and lingers there.