He pulls his hand back.
Looks at the pale streak across his thumb.
And puts it in his mouth.
His eyes close. Not performatively. Not the way food influencers close their eyes and moan for the camera. This is private. Involuntary. The blue light from the icebox cuts across the hard planes of his face and catches the slight furrow between his brows, the way his jaw works once, slow, as if he's deconstructing the flavor on his palate the way I would. The way any serious chef would.
"Cashew base," he says.
"Yes."
"Refined coconut oil for the fat structure."
"Yes."
"Vanilla bean. Not extract. The real pod, scraped."
"Tahitian. Yes."
His eyes open. Gold in the blue dark. The distance between us has become a suggestion rather than a measurement.
"There's something else."
My heart hammers against me. "Yuzu zest. Microplaned. Fourteen passes, no more, or you hit the pit and it goes bitter."
"Fourteen. You counted."
"I always count."
"I know you do."
The cellar shrinks. Or he grows. One of the two. The blue glow from the icebox pulses once, gentle, casting our shadows long and tangled across the stone wall behind us. His knee presses against mine. Solid. Heavy. The canvas sacks crinkle beneath us as his weight shifts closer, and the sound is grotesquely loud in the silence, and who cares.
"That buttercream has no business being that good," he says.
"Everything I make is that good."
"Yeah." His gaze drops to my mouth. Stays there. "I'm starting to get that."
The air between us is a held breath. A drawn bowstring. A pot of water at 211 degrees, that trembling meniscus one degreeshort of a full rolling boil, and every atom vibrating with the need to tip over.
I fist the front of his shirt.
The flannel is still damp from the storm. My fingers bunch the heavy fabric and my knuckles press against the barrel wall of him and his heat pours through the wet cotton like sunlight through glass. I pull. Not hard. I couldn't move him if I wanted to. A large orc moves only where he wants. But the pull is the statement. The declaration. The formal written notice, filed in triplicate, notarized and stamped.
He comes to me like gravity.
His mouth finds mine and the world detonates.
Not soft. Not gentle. Not the tentative first kiss of two people still pretending they have options. His lips are rough and warm and taste like smoked salt and the faintest ghost of my own buttercream, and when I gasp he swallows the sound whole. One massive hand cups the back of my skull. His fingers thread through my ruined French twist and the last three pins surrender and clatter onto stone, and my hair falls and his fist closes in it. Not pulling. Anchoring.
I bite his lower lip.
He growls.
The sound rolls through him into my fist, up my arm, and detonates somewhere behind my navel. Primal. Absolutely uncivilized. The opposite of everything my kitchen stands for, every precise measurement, every exacting temperature, every painstaking microplane stroke counted to fourteen.
I bite harder.