Why couldn’t he be?
Before my heart could answer the question, my head spoke up.
Because he doesn’t want to be. He said as much.
You have tonight, and that’s it.
Make the most of it.
Thirteen
Theo
* * *
“Got the cinnamon and sugar ready?” I lined up the bag of marshmallows, the bowl of melted butter, and the crescent roll dough, which Claire had placed on a plastic cutting board.
“Yes,” she said, holding a little white bowl with two hands. After we cleaned up, she’d put on pastel pink flannel pajama pants with little gray bunnies on them (I’m not making this up) and traded the white t-shirt for a fitted gray tank top that showed off her breasts. Her hair was back on the top of her head, and every time I looked at it I remembered taking it down and watching it spill down her back like honey. “Where does it go in the assembly line?”
“Right here.” Ignoring the twitch in my pants—take a break, asshole—I made space between the butter and the cutting board, and she set it on the counter. “OK, ready?”
“Ready.”
I pushed my cuffs up a little higher. “So you take a marshmallow, and you give it a bath in the melted butter.” Taking a marshmallow from the bag, I rolled it around in the butter, and the memory of doing this hundreds of times as a kid hit me like a freight train. I could hear my grandmother’s voice, smell her house, see the blue ceramic mixing bowl she always used for the cinnamon and sugar. I’d taken that blue bowl when Josie, Aaron and I cleaned out the house. But I didn’t bake, so it sat unused and gathering dust in my kitchen cupboard. Same with her electric mixer and a set of spatulas that I recalled licking batter off. Those were the good years—the cake batter years.
“And then what?” Claire prompted.
I focused on the present. “Then you cover it with cinnamon and sugar.” Melted butter dripped from the marshmallow as I rolled it around in the little white dish. “Now get one of those little triangles of dough ready.”
Claire laid out one raw crescent roll. “Just flat?”
“Yes.” I placed the sugar-and-cinnamon-coated marshmallow at the wide end of it. “Now you have to wrap it up with the dough and seal the edges.” My fingers were also coated with butter, sugar, and cinnamon, so I watched as Claire folded the pointed end of the triangle over the top of the marshmallow and then pinched all the edges of the dough together.
“Like that?” She looked up at me.
“Yes. Just make sure the seal is really tight, or they explode in the oven and all the magic drips out.”
She laughed. “Got it. So the marshmallow melts, is that it? That’s the magic?”
“Don’t try to look behind the curtain, Claire. Sometimes believing in magic is better than the truth.”
“OK, OK. So now what?” She held up the dough-wrapped confection.
“Now dip the bottom of it in the butter and drop it into one of the holes in the muffin thing.”
She did as instructed and looked at me. “How’s that?”
“Perfect.”
“I really want to lick your fingers right now. Is that one of the steps?”
I grinned. “It wasn’t when I made these with my grandmother, but help yourself.”
With a twinkle in those sage green eyes, she took my right arm by the wrist and held my hand up like a lollipop. She looked at me as she closed her lips over the base of my thumb and slowly pulled it out, her tongue swirling over the tip.
My dick took interest, hopping around in my pants like a little kid in line for the merry-go-round, impatient for his turn. She licked the next two fingers just as slowly, savoring every drop of butter and grain of sugar. And the way she kept her eyes on mine, oh my God, my imagination was out of control. My pants grew uncomfortably tight.
Gently I took my hand from her grasp. “Uh, I could watch you do that all night, but I’m going to lose all interest in baking these things if you keep going, and I really want you to taste them.”
She giggled. “Will you let me lick them again once they’re in the oven?”
“You can lick anything you want to once they’re in the oven.”
“Deal.”
We worked together, and even though there were some spontaneous finger-licking breaks, we managed to get them in the oven in about ten minutes.
She set the timer for ten minutes and I rinsed the bowls in the sink. “Should I put these in the dishwasher?” I asked.
“I’ll do it.” She pushed me gently to the side and took my place in front of the sink. “You tell me about your grandmother.”
Leaning back against the counter, I crossed my arms. I wasn’t in the habit of talking about my family, but I’d opened my big mouth about my grandmother already. And I couldn’t believe I’d missed that damn Barbie doll when I’d cleaned out my car. I was usually so careful. “She was good to me.”
“Were you close?” Claire loaded the bowls into the top rack of the dishwasher, which looked about as old as the house. For that matter, so did the linoleum floor, which was clean but cracked and faded. She had a lot of work ahead of her, fixing this place up.
I could help her.
Immediately, I shoved that notion from my mind. I was out of here tonight and I couldn’t come back. “Yeah. We were, for a while anyway. She basically raised me from eight to eighteen.”
“Really?” She flicked a glance at me. “What happened to your parents?”