I step back to let him in. The apartment smells like sugar, butter, and shame. The shame is from the slightly burnt batch that happened when I got distracted thinking about Saul’s mouth and how it would taste with brown sugar on it.
Saul stops when he sees the counter. Three containers, neatly stacked.
“You made a lot of cookies.”
I shrug like it’s no big deal and not a whole-ass breakdown in Tupperware. “I had a lot of feelings and nowhere to put them except into baked goods and barely repressed horniness.”
That half-smile again. The corners of his eyes crinkle but his mouth is still holding secrets. I want to see the full smile. I wantto earn it. I want it directed at me while he’s shirtless and saying something like “you really made these for me?”
Stop it, Stevie. Jesus.
I pick up the container with the walnut cookies. Hold it out.
“These are yours,” I say. “These have nuts.”
He opens the container. Looks at the cookies, then at me. Like I’m soft. Stable. The kind of woman you could trust with your secrets and your nuts.
Which is basically emotional second base.
“Walnuts,” I say too fast, too bright, like I’m trying to upsell a Girl Scout badge in unspoken intimacy. “You said you liked them. Yesterday. When we were putting stuff away. I just… logged it.”
Something changes in his expression. I watch it happen, catalog every micro-movement because I can’t help myself.
The slight widening of his eyes. The way his jaw loosens, just barely. The flicker of something that might be surprise or might be something else.
“My brain’s like a weird little squirrel,” I add. “It hoards things. Weird data and emotional landmines. Enjoy your nuts.”
Fuck, now I’m obsessed with his nuts.
He picks up a cookie. Bites into it.
I stop breathing.
His eyes close. Just for a second. When they open, he looks at me like I just touched something inside him, and not in a metaphorical way, in a ‘where’s the lube’ way.
Rude. Extremely rude. We’re strangers and I’m barely holding it together.
“These are incredible,” he says, and his voice is different. Softer. Like I’ve done something that matters.
“They’re just cookies.”
“They’re not just cookies,” he says, chewing like I’ve just activated some dormant food kink. He’s got this thoughtfulexpression like he’s trying to memorize what they taste like. Or what I’d taste like. I need to sit down.
“You remembered. About the walnuts.”
Of course I remembered. My brain is a high-functioning surveillance drone. I remember Dario’s eyes. I remember Enzo’s accent around my name. And now I will remember Saul’s after-cookie exhale until the day I die.
“I notice things,” I say. “It’s a curse, mostly.”
“Doesn’t feel like a curse from where I’m standing.”
Okay. Sir. If you’re going to flirt at me using emotional insight and walnut appreciation, we’re going to have a problem.
He finishes the cookie. Takes another one. I watch him eat my cookie and feel something bloom in my chest that’s probably not a heart attack but could definitely kill me. It’s warm and reckless and wants to believe in things like comfort and foreplay and men who stay.
I made walnut cookies for a U.S. Marshal I barely know and now my frontal lobe thinks we’re emotionally married.
So yeah.
