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“You left me in a hotel room with a note that said sorry.”
I stare at him. He looks back calmly. There’s no real anger in his face, but the line hits anyway. Dry. Accurate. Inconvenient.
“Ouch,” I say again, quieter this time.
His expression shifts a little. Not regret exactly, but something close enough to make him step toward me. “I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”
“You were trying to be annoying.”
“Yes.”
“That part worked.”
He takes the textbook from my hands, sets it on the small table, and looks me over properly. His sweater hangs loose on me, and I’m suddenly aware of my bare legs, my messy hair, and the fact that I almost attacked him with a medical book while wearing his clothes.
His eyes linger for half a second too long.
Then he turns back toward the stove. “Sit down.”
I blink. “Excuse me?”
“You were nauseous yesterday. Sit.”
“Don’t use my vomiting against me, sir.”
“I’m using it for you,” he says.
“That’s exactly the kind of sentence that makes people want to hit you with pharmacology.”
He pulls out the chair without looking at me.
I sit down because my stomach chooses that moment to remind me that standing around making speeches is a luxury for non-pregnant women with stable blood sugar.
The kitchen smells like toast, coffee, and mild disaster. There’s a plate on the counter with two slices of bread. One is very dark. The other looks frightened and underdone. A pan sits on the stove with eggs in it. At least, I think they are eggs. They have the emotional texture of eggs that have been cross-examined.
I look at him.
He looks at the pan. “I’m improving,” he says.
“From what?”
“Toast.”
“You improved from toast to this?”
“Yes.”
“The eggs look stressed.”
“They’ll recover.”
“They will not.”
He puts the plate in front of me anyway. Beside it, he sets a glass of water, a banana, crackers, and the leftover soup from last night warmed in a bowl.
I stare at the spread. “This is not breakfast. This is what a very worried man builds when he doesn’t know where the cereal is.”
“I found the cereal.”
