Page 13 of The Meeting
“Hi.” She looked at him strangely and then glanced inside. “You doing okay in here? We heard the smoke alarm.”
He scrubbed his hands over his face, and a laugh escaped him. “I was attempting to make us dinner.”
“Would you like some help?”
He pulled the door open wider and gestured inside. “If you don’t mind.”
She immediately whipped out her phone. “I’ll call for Chinese.” After dialing, she lifted the phone to her ear. “I don’t like cooking.”
He laughed loudly and then went back to his kitchen to clean up the burnt food while she placed an order for delivery.
When she hung up the phone, she leaned a hip against the counter while he loaded the dishes into the dishwasher.
“Food will be here in thirty minutes.”
“Thanks for doing that. Normally I don’t burn food.”
She shrugged. “It’s a little hard to burn a pizza pocket.”
He looked at her strangely. Did she look in his freezer while he was cleaning up or was it a generalization?
She smirked. “I’m just teasing you. The first day we met, I saw you hop in your car with a pizza pocket.”
He laughed. “Well, aside from pizza pockets, I do know how to actually cook. I just don’t do it often.”
Normally, he would have laughed and brushed her comment off. He knew she was teasing him, but it felt important for him to tell her he knew how to cook.
“Sure you do.” She winked.
“I do!” He walked past her and picked up the board game, tearing off the plastic wrapping. “I’ll have to prove it sometime.”
Don’t cross any lines, he warned himself.
But cooking for a friend was innocent, and banter with a friend was harmless. He shrugged. They were only teasing.
They pulled the pieces of the game out of the box, and she explained the rules to him while they waited for the others to show up.
Abi and Logan showed up just as the food arrived. They spread it across the kitchen counters and everyone dished up.
“So, how did you all meet?” Chase asked.
“Abi and I were best friends growing up until senior year of high school. Then we lost touch, but reconnected again at our ten-year reunion,” Kailynn said.
Abi nodded along. “Logan went to high school with us, but we didn’t meet up until the reunion. Then, as they say, the rest is history.”
Logan leaned over to Abi and pressed a kiss to her lips. When he pulled away, he redirected his attention to Chase.
“Where did you grow up?”
Chase finished a bite he was eating. “In Big Sandy, Montana.”
“What brought you here?”
“A divorce, actually. I married my college sweetheart. We tried to make it work, but just couldn’t. No matter what we tried, nothing worked. We stuck it out for ten years before finally calling it off. I wish I could say it was amicable, but it ended rather poorly.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Kailynn said.
He shrugged. “I’m a firm believer that everything happens for a reason. In my case, I don’t know what exactly that reason is, but it brought me here.”
