Page 21 of Omega's Forbidden Heat
Jack lounges to his feet, stretching and yawning as he does. “What you got in the fridge?” He opens the silver door and leans in, the yellow light from within bathing him in its glow. He slides forward the vegetable tray and picks his way through. “Have you got any noodles or rice? There’s enough in here to make a stir-fry.”
“Yeah, we have noodles,” Amy says.
Finn’s phone starts to buzz and flash on the table and he picks it up in his right hand and gazes down at the screen. The forefinger of his left hand hovers over it, twitching backward and forward as if he’s deciding whether to answer, and then with a huff of irritation, he does, jumping up at the same time and striding from the room. “Hi,” they hear him say as he disappears out the front door.
She looks back at Jack.
“You want me to cook?” he asks softly.
It shouldn’t, it’s nothing, but it makes her stomach flutter.
“Yes, please,” she says, then she forces a grin. “So you learnt how to cook too?” She says it teasingly, but he responds flatly.
“I’ve always been able to cook. My mum worked shifts, remember? I used to cook for us both.”
“Oh.”
He pulls vegetables from the fridge and dumps them on the countertop. Broccoli, onions, carrots, mushrooms. Finn has been doing the shopping since their parents have been away, and she is sort of amazed to find green things regularly in their fridge. But then he’s been all about the healthy body for the last few years. She rarely catches him eating biscuits from the tin in the cupboard, whereas she’d live on the things if she could. “Can I help?” she asks him.
He shifts on his feet for the briefest of seconds as if he’s unsure it’s a good idea, and she leans against the counter and juts out a hip, drawing his eye there. He lines the vegetables in a row across the counter. “Can you find us some chopping boards and knives?”
She spins on her toes and fetches these items.
“And where are your herbs?” he asks. She points to the rack on the wall. “Start chopping the carrots,” he tells her as he goes to investigate.
After he’s found the ones he needs, he comes to stand a few paces away from her and chops the broccoli, their knives working almost in synchrony, the thud of the blade sounding awkwardly like the rhythmic thud of headboards against walls, of hearts against ribs.
“Have you been at uni?” he asks, after several long moments of silence.
“Yes, over in Guildford.”
“Finn said. Social work, right?”
She nods.
“Sounds …” he searches for the word, “tough.”
“Sometimes it is,” she admits, “I’ve done quite a bit of on-the-job training already and, yeah, sometimes it’s heartbreaking and,” she pauses her knife for a moment, “Frustrating.”
“Frustrating? How?” His eyes hover over her face and she’s reminded again how intense it feels to capture the attention of Jack Johnson, those blue eyes infinite like the sky.
“You can’t always fix people’s problems, because they don’t want you to, or there isn’t the funding, or red tape and fucking bureaucracy get in the way.”
He smiles wearily, like he knows all about that.
She lifts her hand and pushes away hair that’s fallen into her face with the back of her wrist.
“Don’t wave your knife around,” he says, and she peeks up to her hand and realises she’s gripping the knife.
“Whoops,” she says. She rests down the knife and twists around, picking up a carrot and crunching it into her mouth. “It’s worth the frustration and the heartbreak, though,” she continues, “because when you do fix something or help someone, it feels really good. Like I’m doing good in the world.” She grins and bites again.
He’s moved on to the onion and the pungent aroma stings her eyes. She blinks and wipes away moisture from her eyelashes with her sleeve. He appears unaffected. “Onions don’t make you cry?”
“Nothing makes me cry,” he says, his focus on the globes as the blade slices through their translucent skin. She wonders if that is true. Surely, he cried when his mum died.
“How did Finn convince you to help with the books?”
“I like helping.”
