"About all of it." He glances at the stove behind me. "Your stock is catching."
I spin around. It’s absolutely catching. I grab the spoon and rescue it and hear him step closer, and now he’s one foot away and the kitchen is warm and smells of both of us and this is a disaster I walked directly into with my eyes open.
"You could step back," I say, stirring.
I point the spoon at him without turning around. “I’m holding a utensil."
"I noticed." He reaches past me to move the salt to a more useful position, and his arm crosses the air next to mine and the saffron is everywhere and my rose scent does something complicated and I stir the stock with great focus and professional intensity.
"Santos."
"Jennifer."
"Why are you really here?” I ask losing my patience.
A pause. Then, quiet and without any of the charm attached: "I wanted to see if you were real."
I don't have an answer for that. I stare at the stock, and the kitchen holds the two of us in it and his scent sits in the warm air around me like it has always known where it was going.
"The onions need doing," I say finally. "Black-handled knife. Board's on the left."
A longer pause.
"I don't really chop onions," Santos says.
I turn around fully. “What?”
"Men like me don't typically—"
"If the next word is billionaire," I say, "you can leave my kitchen and take your coffee with you."
His mouth closes. Opens. "I was going to say Italian."
"Italians invented half the food I'm cooking." I hand him the knife. "Board's on the left."
He takes it. He goes to the board, and picks up the knife with a grip that is completely and impressively wrong.
"That's going to end badly," I say.
"I know what I'm doing," Santos says.
I cross the kitchen, come around to his side of the board, and reach over to fix his grip. My hands over his for four seconds while I reposition his fingers, and his hands are warm and he goes still in the way he went still in the elevator, and the saffron spikes and my strawberry spikes back before I can stop it and the kitchen is very small all of a sudden.
"Like that," I tell him, stepping back. "Knuckles curled, the blade guides along them. You won't cut yourself if you do it correctly."
"And if I do it wrong?"
"That's what the first aid kit is for."
He tries. The onion goes sideways.
"You laughed," he says.
"The onion was funny," I say, getting the laugh under control.
"You laughed in my kitchen."
"My kitchen," I correct, taking the knife and showing him the motion, the onion coming apart in clean even pieces in about fifteen seconds, and I feel him watching the whole time, and not the onion.