Chapter 32: Chapter 32: Just Us
"Give me two minutes," Garrett said, already backing toward the bedroom. "I look like I’m about to ask your father for a loan in this thing."
"You look fine."
"I look like someone else’s idea of me."
He shut the door and got out of the suit fast, hanging it up properly for once instead of dropping it on the chair like everything else he owned. He caught himself in the mirror on the way out and decided this was closer to the truth.
Emiliana looked up when he came back out, and something in her expression shifted, small but real.
"There he is," she said.
"Sorry?"
"Nothing...Go cook."
He didn’t push it. He went to the kitchen instead, rolled his sleeves up, and got the pan going.
The chicken first, sliced thin, seasoned, and laid out in a pan that hissed the second it hit the heat. He kept half an eye on it while he filled the pot for the pasta, salted the water more than he probably needed to, and set it to boil.
"You actually know what you’re doing," Emiliana said, drifting closer and leaning against the counter with her arms crossed.
"Don’t sound so surprised."
"I’m not surprised. I’m assessing."
"Terrifying."
He flipped the chicken, checked the color, and moved it around so it cooked evenly. The pasta water started to bubble behind him, and he dropped the pasta in without looking, muscle memory doing the work his brain wasn’t currently available for.
"What’s in the sauce?" she asked.
"Cream, garlic, parmesan. Butter if I’m feeling generous."
"Are you feeling generous?"
"Ask me again in five minutes."
He pulled the chicken out once it was done, set it aside, and started the sauce in the same pan, garlic first, the smell hitting the room almost immediately. Emiliana leaned in slightly toward the stove.
"That smells good."
"Don’t jinx it."
He stirred, added the cream, and watched it come together slower than he wanted it to. The garlic bread went in the oven a minute later, and he checked the timer twice in the space of thirty seconds like that would make it cook faster.
"You’re stressed," Emiliana said, clearly enjoying it.
"I’m focused."
"You checked that timer twice."
"That’s called being thorough."
She smiled and didn’t argue further. She just watched him work, and somewhere in the middle of stirring sauce, checking pasta, and pulling the bread out at exactly the right moment, Garrett stopped thinking about whether the evening was going well.
He was just cooking.
"Let me do something," Emiliana said after a few minutes of standing there and clearly deciding that watching him wasn’t enough.
"You’re my guest."
"I’m bored."
"You’re supervising."
"I’m bored of supervising."
He gave her a look, weighing it, then handed her the parmesan and a grater. "Fine. This. Don’t overdo it."
"How much is overdoing it?"
"You’ll know when I take it away from you."
She got to work, grating with more focus than the task strictly required, and Garrett went back to the sauce, stirring, tasting, adjusting. He glanced over a minute later and frowned.
"That’s too much."
"It’s parmesan. There’s no such thing as too much."
"There absolutely is. You’re going to turn it into a brick."
"It’s cheese, Garrett, not concrete."
He reached over anyway and pulled the bowl slightly out of her reach, which earned him a flat look and her reaching straight back for it.
"I had it handled."
"You had it aggressively handled."
She huffed, but let him take a portion of it out, muttering something about him being dramatic. He added what was left to the sauce, stirred, and it came together exactly the way it was supposed to.
"See," he said. "Balanced."
"You’re welcome."
"I just took cheese away from you."
"And I’m the reason you knew when to stop."
He didn’t have a comeback for that one, and the look on his face must have shown it, because she smiled like she’d won something.
The garlic bread came out a shade darker than he meant it to on one side. When he set it down, Emiliana picked up the browner half without hesitation.
"You don’t have to eat the burnt piece."
"I like it burnt."
"Nobody likes it burnt."
"I like it burnt," she said again, already taking a bite.
Garrett watched her for a moment.
She was standing in his kitchen, eating garlic bread while he finished preparing a meal for the two of them, completely at ease in a place she’d only just entered.
He glanced back at the sauce.
For once, he wasn’t checking the time.
He wasn’t wondering whether he was doing enough.
He just finished cooking.
The pasta needed stirring, which gave Garrett something to do with his hands.
"So..." she said, looking around the apartment again. "...you surprised I picked your flat?."
"A little."
"You thought I’d choose some expensive restaurant."
"I thought you’d choose literally anywhere except here."
She smiled to herself.
"I told you why."
"Privacy?"
"Privacy." She nodded. "If we’d gone anywhere public, somebody would’ve recognised me. We’d spend half the evening pretending not to notice people staring or taking pictures."
She rested an elbow lightly against the counter.
"Here, it’s just us."
Garrett looked at her for a second before turning back to the pasta.
"Fair enough."
"And..." she added, quieter this time, "I wanted to see your world."
That caught him more than the first answer had.
He stirred the pasta once before replying.
"My world comes with slightly crooked picture frames and neighbours who argue through walls."
"I noticed the picture frame."
"You noticed it?"
"It bothered me immediately."
"That’s somehow worse."
She laughed.
"My dad wasn’t really around. My mum did most of the work raising me on not much. I got used to figuring things out on my own pretty early." He shrugged, testing the sauce, adding a pinch more salt. "It’s fine. It made me annoyingly self-sufficient, if nothing else."
Emiliana didn’t push past that, and he noticed she didn’t. She just nodded, filing it away the way she seemed to file everything, and let the moment settle instead of picking it apart.
"Your turn," he said, glancing over. "What’s actually true about you, versus what people assume because of your last name?"
She thought about that longer than he expected.
"People assume I have everything figured out because I grew up with money," she said eventually. "Nobody assumes I got lonely in a house with twelve rooms and usually only one person in it who wasn’t staff."
He looked at her properly then, sauce forgotten for a second.
She had pulled her hair back loosely on the way over, a few strands slipping free near her face, catching the low kitchen light in a way that made him lose his train of thought for exactly one second too long. She caught him looking and raised an eyebrow, and he turned back to the stove before he could get caught doing it a second time.
"That sounds lonely," he said, aiming for normal.
"It was. Is, sometimes." She shrugged it off the way he’d shrugged off his own answer a minute earlier, like they’d both silently agreed not to make either thing bigger than it needed to be. "Anyway. Your garlic bread’s about to burn again."
"It’s not..." He checked. "It’s fine. It’s character."
She laughed at that, and he decided he liked being the reason for it more than he probably should.
By the time everything was ready, the light outside had gone properly dark, just the streetlamp catching the edge of the new curtains. The flat had warmed up from the oven, the smell of garlic and butter sitting thick in the air, and the flowers he’d bought her earlier sat in the middle of the little coffee table he’d moved to double as a dinner table, the closest thing to a centerpiece the place had ever had.
Garrett plated the food and set hers down first.
"It’s not fancy," he said, sitting across from her.
"You’ve said that already. Twice."
"I’m managing expectations."
She picked up her fork without ceremony, twirled a bit of pasta, and ate it before he’d even sat all the way down.
He watched her chew, trying not to look like he was watching her chew, failing slightly.
"Well?"
She took another bite before answering, taking just long enough for him to start wondering.
"It’s good."
"Good like you’re being polite, or good like you mean it?"
"I don’t do polite," she said, reaching for another forkful. "This is actually good, Garrett."
Something in his chest loosened at that in a way he hadn’t fully expected. Not because it meant he’d done something impressive. Not because any system anywhere was keeping score. Just because he’d made this, for her, hoping she’d like it, and she did.
He caught himself watching her again a second later. The way she sat, comfortable, one leg tucked under her on his secondhand chair like she’d sat there a hundred times before. The dress she’d worn for tonight wasn’t trying hard, but it didn’t need to. Her hair had slipped loose again despite whatever she’d done to keep it back, and every time she laughed or reached for the bread, another strand escaped.
Focus.
It didn’t entirely work.
"You’re staring," she said, without looking up.
"Errm...I’m admiring my own cooking."
"Sure you are."
He picked up his fork and focused very deliberately on his food. When his eyes drifted back up half a second later anyway, she caught him again.
This time she didn’t say anything.
She just smiled into her glass, and somehow that was even worse.
Garrett looked back at his plate, hiding a smile of his own.
Somewhere between cooking dinner and getting caught staring twice, the apartment had stopped feeling like a place he was nervous to show her.
It had started feeling like somewhere they were simply spending the evening together.
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