Page 92 of All at Once

Impressed at how quickly he recognizes the song, I raise my shoulders playfully. “What? It’s a really good song.”

“Oh I’m not denying that,” he says. “I just think it’s funny how that was your first choice when you’re in, I don’t know?Spain.”

“It’s on my cooking playlist,” I say.

“You cook?” he asks, so surprised that it almost makes me laugh.

“Well not really,” I reply.

He tilts his head down. “But you have a cooking playlist?”

“For when I decide to cook.”

“Right.” He snorts. “Another thing about you that makesperfectsense.”

“I like playing songs that remind me of traveling to places I always wished to go to,” I explain. “Almost like I’m actually there while I’m doing some other mundane task.”

Luca would usually respond to a similar comment I’d make previously. But right now, I don’t know how to describe the look on his face other than one of longing. To go back to how things were before. Yet the frustration and hurt are still evident in his eyes before he glances away.

Shifting my focus back to preparing the cakes, my heart jumps when I hear his voice. “I like that reason.”

I almost drop the bowl of baking powder I’m holding. It’s a good thing I immediately set it down onto the counter before I notice how he’s now mixing the dark chocolate pieces and raspberry puree together. When he places his long index finger into the bowl of gooey chocolate mousse, my temperature rises more than the oven, I’m sure. But as he subtly licks the chocolate from his finger, I place my weight onto the counter, feeling a bit dizzy.

Trying to distract myself, I take a taste of the filling as well. “It tastesa lotbetter than it looks,” I say, surprised.Well that was certainly one way to describe the mousse.

Luca bites down a smirk. “Remember how you asked me for advice before? I’m no expert but maybe try and not say that to the guy you like.”

I feel warm. A bit shy. And my skin is tingling. Yet oddly enough, I don’t feelembarrassed.

Besides, it’s hard to be too in your head when you’re covered in all the ingredients you’ve been baking with for the past severalhours. After placing the fifth cake into the oven, we both exhaustingly slump onto the kitchen floor.

Luca looks at the bowl of mousse that also somehow ended up next to us and offers, “I have some vegetables that we can grill and have with mushrooms and potatoes if you want?”

“Honestly that sounds like it’ll be the best meal of my life,” I say. “I’m drooling right now.”

He turns toward me carefully. “You have a little something there.”

“Where?”

He leans in, pointing with his left hand. “Right. Over. Here,” he says, before he quickly places some of the chocolate raspberry frosting onto my nose with his right hand.

I gasp and then take some of the frosting and swipe it over his cheeks now. “So do you,” I say as warmth rushes to my stomach when my fingers feel the heat of his skin from underneath the barrier of chocolate.

As he scrunches his nose, I lean in to sprinkle some flour on him, when my elbow falls right into the bowl of frosting. This position is pretty questionable, considering how I’m almost leaning over his lap before he holds my hand to help me regain my balance.

I’m reminded of when he first held my hand when we were surfing. And how he didn’t let me fall. I barely knew him then. I probably still barely do. But right now it feels like I somehow knoweverythingabout him.

“Make that 28,” Luca says, making me laugh through my flushed cheeks at his tab on my clumsiness. And then my heart flickers when he lets go, not sure why I expected him to keep holding onto my hand.

_________

Thirty minutes later, we’re taking a short dinner break on his couch, and I’m trying not to get too distracted by that brief moment on the floor. “Why do these bell peppers taste so good?” I say.

He raises his brows. “It’s crazy what a little bit of cayenne pepper and paprika can do.”

“I know the first thing that I’m making when I get home.”

“It looks like now you have your first actual recipe for your cooking playlist,” he says with a warm grin.

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