"Don't."
"You've been on it since the onions went in."
"I'm letting it breathe."
"It's not wine. It's a seven-letter answer and you already know the fourth letter is a v."
He points the wooden spoon at me without turning around. "If you say it I'm taking the pen."
"You gave me the pen."
"On loan."
I write in anchovy and slide the paper an inch to the left, square to the table edge, where it lives. The pen goes down parallel to the long side. Gaspard is on the chair across from me, front half off the cushion, back half not committed to anything, watching the pen the way he watches every object that moves and stops. Gray going to nothing in the low light. An opinion inevery line of him. He decided two days ago that the crossword pen is prey. He hasn't caught it. He believes it's a matter of time.
"He's stalking your stationery again," Soren says.
"He's allowed."
"He bit the volunteer at the shelter."
"He has a type."
The spoon stops. I hear it stop. He's holding the laugh in the back of his throat again. No sound, but the kitchen goes a half-degree warmer. I keep it. The sound of him not laughing, under the sounds I've started keeping without deciding to.
The apartment smells like a kitchen. It doesn't usually smell like a kitchen, because I don't cook anything that requires more than a pot. He brought the bags up himself, two of them, and set them on the one clear stretch of counter. He reorganized my single shelf of spices in the four minutes it took me to find the colander. He didn't ask where it was. He found it. He finds things in my apartment faster than I do, which would unsettle me if it were anyone else. It doesn't, because it's him, and because he puts everything back square.
"Ropa vieja," he says, setting a bowl in front of me. "Yours."
"Mine."
"No scotch bonnet. Half the cumin. I pulled the peppers before they went in your half." He sets his own bowl down across from the cat and sits. His is darker, redder. A different dish wearing the same name. "You can have a bite of mine if you want to lose the evening."
"I'll pass."
"You always pass."
"I pass because I've seen what it does to your face and I don't want it doing that to mine."
He eats. I eat.
It's good. Built for me, every edge sanded down to the version I can have. I watched him pull the peppers out with his fingersand set them on a paper towel on the far side of the board so a stray seed wouldn't migrate into my half. He didn't narrate it. He just did it, the way he does the pad on my left side before I ask. Same as having the bowl ready before I knew I was hungry.
It lands as warmth. It always lands as warmth. But tonight there's a second reading sitting next to the first one. The two of them look identical from across the room.
The thumb finds the index finger. Index, middle, ring, pinky, back. I do it under the table where the cat can't see it move and decide it's prey too.
My phone lights the table edge. I turn it over. Eleven messages from Matty. A voice note at the end. Matty doesn't leave voice notes. Matty texts in fragments at the speed of someone who learned to type by arguing.
I read the texts first, in order, because there's no other way to read anything.
He says, quote, two more rounds and then I get to dump you on your own home ice. He says it's been seven years since he's checked me into anything and he's owed. He sent a photo of the seating chart with my parents' section circled in red. Etienne says the circle isn't to scale.
The voice note is fourteen seconds. I put one earbud in and press play.
"Jules." A breath. Noise behind him, a bar or a locker room, somewhere with too many voices. "Fais attention, là." Be careful. Then a pause that's too long for Matty, who never pauses. When he comes back the volume is lower, closer to the mic. "Sois prêt." Be ready. The note ends.
Soren's watching me.