He crosses to me anyway and slides his arm around my waist from behind, his chin coming to rest on my shoulder, and his saffron hits the air warm and close and immediate and my strawberry rises to meet it without asking my permission first.
My omega stirs, just slightly.
Down, I tell her.
She subsides. Satisfied rather than suppressed. There is a difference and I know it now.
"You look so sexy in the morning," Santos says, against my ear.
"I'm cooking eggs," I say.
"I know," he says, and he sounds entirely serious about it.
I giggle. Santos grins against my cheek and squeezes my waist once before he steps back and takes his coffee and his saffron and his absolutely unfair morning energy out of the kitchen.
I stand there for a moment looking at the eggs.
My omega is still not listening.
I smile anyway, think about what herbs I need from the garden, and let the new life I have now settle around me like the morning light, warm and certain and entirely mine.
It's good.
No, it’s fantastic.
31
SANTOS
Jennifer has flour on her jaw again.
She doesn't know it. She pushed her hair back twenty minutes ago without thinking and left a white streak along her cheekbone, and she has been standing at my bench rolling pasta ever since, entirely unbothered, moving the rolling pin away from her in the long even strokes that require her whole body to lean into it. I have been sitting at the island with a glass of wine watching her and telling myself I am giving her space to work.
She came in at six, looked at the bench, said "I'm making pasta," and started making pasta.
She glances at me over her shoulder.
"You're staring," she says.
"I'm appreciating," I say.
"I can't concentrate with you looking at me like that," she says, and turns back to the pasta, and I watch the corner of her mouth do the thing it does when she is trying not to smile and losing.
I get up from the island.
I cross to the bench and stand beside her, close enough that her strawberry wraps around me completely, and she looks up at me with those green eyes and raises one flour-dusted eyebrow.
"I'm working," she says.
"I know," I say. "Let me help."
"You'll ruin it," she says.
I reach past her for the rolling pin. She lets me take it, steps back with her arms folded and flour on her hands and that expression, warm and skeptical and entirely awake.
I roll the dough.
"Wrong," she says, immediately.