Page 121 of Secondhand Smoke
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Maybe it was wishful thinking, but Ron seemed to be taking a liking to her over the last week. Or, at the very least, he didn’t mind her living with them.
She herself had started to get a hang of living like this. For the most part, it was heaven being with Barrett nearly every hour of the day at home or practice.
It was quite easy to ignore everything else when she was here. She’d found ways to almost always be in a good mood.
The hardest part was avoiding any spots in town her parents might run into her and waking up in the morning without the smell of her mom’s breakfast. But she would live.
She’d even gotten good at making breakfast herself.
In fact, she’d become the designated breakfast cook of the house. Experimenting with the million different ways to make eggs was her new hobby.
Poached, she discovered, was turning out to be the most difficult so far.
It’d seemed easy when her mom did it, but every time Nell dropped the egg into the water and tried to pull it out, it ended up in an inedible watered-down soup.
She had managed to get one of the eggs to stay together, but when she’d looked closely at it, she realized she’d broken the yolk. Barrett liked his yolks runny, so now she was on her fourth try.
What she’d managed to scrape together from her previous attempts was on her plate for breakfast.
She watched the boiling pot closely as she dropped the latest victim in. She adjusted the bun she’d pulled her hair into and leaned over, squinting at the water.
“What is it this time?”
Nell jumped as arms wrapped around her waist from behind, and Barrett’s messy bedhead tickled her neck as he rested his chin on her shoulder and looked into the pot.
“You scared me.” Nell lightly tapped his hand crossed over her stomach.
“I said ‘good morning’. You just didn’t hear me.” He turned his head and pecked at the side of her jaw. “What’s with the mess?”
Nell frowned when she realized he was talking about the plate with all the ruined eggs. She spun so she was facing him, but his arms stayed in place around her, allowing her to lean against his chest. “I’m trying to make poached eggs, but they’re impossible. What are you doing up so early anyway?”
Normally, she made breakfast, then woke him up to eat before he went to work. When Ron wasn’t working an early morning shift, she did the same for him.
“The bed was too cold,” he said, his eyes narrowed sleepily as he smiled down at her. “I came to bring you back.”
“If I go back, you’ll show up to work late and hungry.”
He shook his head, unconvinced. “I’m willing to make the sacrifice.” He closed the space between their mouths before Nell could reason with him, which drained any semblance of reason from her. She grinned as he nibbled lazily on her lips and murmured, “How long does that thing need to cook?”
Nell’s eyes widened as she gasped and pulled away, breaking herself out of his hold to spin toward the pot.
She knew before she even caught the slippery egg that it was a dud. She groaned, shooting him a joking glare and biting back a smile. “You’re distracting me. Either go back to bed or make some toast.”
He chuckled, smacked one more kiss on her cheek, and left to find the bread.
47 - Nell
Nell slept later than she’d meant to on Thursday morning, missing her usual time to make breakfast when the alarm clock didn’t go off. Based on the same clock, it was nearly noon.
She sat up, confused, and took in the empty space Barrett had left behind.
Even more surprisingly, the smell of food wafted faintly through the room. Not eggs and bacon, though. It was a lot more than that. Like roast chicken and something sweet, and a bunch of other smells she couldn’t place. It smelled like dinner.
But that wasn’t all.
There were voices. Quite a few of them, all overlapping and chaotic on the other side of Barrett’s door.
