Page 51 of The Gods Forbid

I stepped back, pushing myself up onto the counter top next to the stove. Sebastian snapped straight, his eyes widening, but he didn’t move. In fact, he looked like he might lunge at me.

Oh, maybe that was a bad idea.

We didn’t know each other before this. He didn’t know that I had grown up doing this to keep my parents company in the kitchen and had never stopped.

“I sit like this in a lot of kitchens,” I said quickly. “Especially when I need to talk to whoever is cooking and I need to talk to you.” It was a clunky explanation, though true. If it was anyone else, I might have been concerned about it being perceived as odd, but I’d already abandoned any self-preservation around Sebastian.

Sebastian’s eyes surveyed my body, going from the steady hold of my shoulders to the hinge of my hips to where my knees hooked over the counter. Reflexively, I crossed them, if not to give into the urge to squirm.

The motion kept his eyes on my legs for another beat longer, and then another. Finally, he said, “I can imagine no one has a problem with that. I certainly do not.”

I felt my cheeks warm considerably, the heat of the stove finally catching up with me. Though it felt nice next to my legs, and this heat was rather internal.

“I wanted to talk about your session with Calpurnia and see how your day was,” I said, needing to talk about something other than sitting on counter tops. That conversation felt borderline lewd.

I was also under orders from my lovely brother to try to pry some of Sebastian’s backstory from him, but I was reluctant to do it in any way that felt dishonest. Eventually, if the conversation didn’t occur naturally, I’d have to figure out a way, but that was a far off occurrence.

Sebastian eyed me skeptically, then turned his attention back to the pot in front of him. Something was bubbling aggressively and he moved to snatch up the stirring spoon like that rapid rumble of liquid wasn’t supposed to happen.

After a quick stir, he lifted a bit of the sauce up to his lips to taste it. I heard, rather than saw, his contentment, communicated by a quiet hum, because my eyes were on my knees.

“My day was fine,” he finally responded. “Calpurnia was actually one of the better parts.”

I smiled, even though his voice got pretty thin at the end, clasping my hands together under my chin. “I knew you’d like her.”

Sebastian’s grin bordered on a wince. “Like is a strong word. I’d say at this point I respect her, with a small note of fear underneath it.”

I small laugh trickled from my chest. “I felt the same at first. She has a rather disturbing way of cutting to the core of things.”

“Is that what you intend to do to me? Flay me open for inspection?” Sebastian’s eyes shifted away from the contents of the pot and to me. I did the opposite, tearing my eyes away from where they had been pinned on the side of his face and down. I watched him methodically move the spoon around the pot twice before I chose the lesser evil and looked back up to his eyes.

“If that was my plan,” I said, pausing to try to refresh my sore, dry throat. “I would have used that knife on you earlier.” Not that I would tell him, but we’d almost encountered an issue, and I likely would have risked losing a finger had he not interfered. I could handle a knife just fine, it was just that walking while trying to wrestle with a fruit as hard as most people’s heads was a different story.

I didn’t even want to think about the force that it required to wedge that knife through that fruit’s thick skin as easily as Sebastian had.

“That was a sharp little thing,” Sebastian said, as those he could read my thoughts. A sharp little thing that he’d taken with him when I’d gone to lunch with Nikolas.

Oh, that was my mother’s. If she found out I lost it, she was going to— “Wait, where is it?”

Sebastian nodded towards the sink on the far end of the counter. I sighed a breath of relief, the weight off my chest dismantling completely.

I bet it wasn’t even in there. I would probably find it gleaming and resting in it’s original place, but I figured telling Sebastian that I noticed he’d been cleaning the dishes to an almost surgical level wasn’t that smart. “I never thanked you for the pomegranate earlier.”

“Unnecessary.” He said it with such force that I was tempted to apologize for even attempting to thank him. It was the type of force that came from trying to rip away your most beloved possession. “Then I went to the market.” There was a heavy beat where Sebastian breathed in, then muttered something under his breath that I couldn’t quite make out. “I met Penn.”

For a moment, I thought he was referring to Penelope Artemis. That was the only Penn that I knew was important to him. Then I realized he’d likely not be bringing her up, and the name clicked. “Penn!” I said, possibly a little too enthusiastically, shifting my legs an inch closer to the stove and a touch too close to the flame.

Sebastian looked down at my leg like it was his own arm that had almost been burned. I changed the cross of my legs to move my thigh away from the burner, but that didn’t seem to be good enough. He switched to stirring with this left hand, using his elbow to bump me slightly out of the way.

I scooted over a little farther, rather than tell him that the point of his elbow pressing into my thigh burned hotter than the flame had.

Or that now every time he moved that wooden spoon around the pot, the loose fabric of his shirt brushed my leg.

It wasn’t his arm, not really. He was wearing a white, linen button-up that was rolled slightly at the wrist. Just enough to expose the ghost of one thin, black line circling his forearm.

But also enough to give the material slack to hang down from his arm and torture me. The fabric was still warm from his skin and with every rotation of that spoon, it brushed up against my leg and set my nerves on fire.

It was like an animal letting a known predator lick their coat over and over, hoping that it didn’t decide to take a chomping bite out of their neck at the next moment.