Page 29 of The Player + The Pact = I Do

He shrugs. “Mac and cheese is the best. How can I turn down an offer like that? You need a hand?”

I don’t need a hand. The last thing I need is a hand. What I need is for him to go away. Far away. And leave me. I don’t want some montage of us in the kitchen being cute together playing in my head all night.

“I’ll grab the flour,” he says and heads to the pantry.

I reach for a couple of pans. We need to get this over and done with, then I can eat and go to bed.

He comes out with some pasta and flour.

“Good start. I need to know how to turn on the stove.”

I start to fill the large saucepan with water and he comes up behind me and turns off the faucet.

“What?” I ask.

“Can I?” he says, taking the pan handle from me and tipping out the inch and a half of water I have in there.Then he does something weird with the tap and refills the pan with boiling-hot water.

“Boiling water. Straight from the tap?”

“You haven’t worked in property development long. No kitchen is without one of these now.”

“Good to know,” I reply. “It might take a decade to reach Jersey.” I watch as he sets the pan on the stove and fiddles with the controls. He might order out a lot but he seems to know his way around this kitchen perfectly well. It’s cute. And I hate that it’s cute.

He pours the pasta into the bubbling water and then turns and scoops some flour into the smaller pan, then grabs some butter and milk from the refrigerator.

“Shall I grate some cheese?” he asks.

“What the actual fuck?” I ask. “This ‘comfortable in the kitchen’ thing,” I say, waving my hand in his direction. “It doesn’t fit your brand.”

“My brand?”

“Exactly.”

“You’re making a bechamel and dried pasta. This isn’t Le Bernardin.”

I grin at him, because I just can’t help it. He’s funny and knows what a bechamel is. I mean, who wouldn’t smile?

“Right,” I say, “but it’s not exactly a skill set I would have thought you were blessed with.”

“Because it’s not on-brand?” he asks, flattening out his accent to mimic mine.

“Exactly,” I say.

“What would be on-brand?” he asks, resuming his position, leaning against the kitchen counter to watch me add butter to the saucepan and pull out a whisk from the drawer beneath the stove.

“You ordering all your food from Le Bernardin. It’s not a bad thing. You can afford it.”

“You’re going to lose your mind when you see my stash of ramen noodles.”

I laugh. “Nothing wrong with ramen. Do you have them in England?”

“Oh god, no. It’s a bloody wasteland over there. We live in caves, don’t have cars, no running water.”

“Okay, okay, so you have ramen.”

He chuckles, and I have to suppress my pleasure at him poking fun at me. Talking to him is so easy. That’s how it was the first night we met, too. I was giddy from talking to him after only a few minutes. I was floating when he asked for my number. Then I came down to earth with a thump when I saw him with that other girl.

I have so many different contrasting snapshots of Leo. It’s confusing.

---