When He Saw Me by Amelia Wilde

Author:Amelia Wilde [Wilde, Amelia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

I sit her at the counter and put her laptop in front of her.

“Here’s the deal.”

“Oh?” She gives me a coy smile. “Are we dealing again? Is this another contest?”

“No, it’s actually a deal.” I pull out a frying pan from the cupboards beneath the kitchen island, where she sits on a high-backed stool. “You write, I cook.”

Eva screws up her lips. “This sounds like I won’t get to eat if I don’t write.”

I brandish a spatula in her general direction. “You’re absolutely right.”

She puts her hands dutifully on the keyboard, but I feel her eyes on my back the moment I turn around and start going through the fridge. I had the owners stock it before we came, so there’s plenty here to make meals. I have a feeling we’ll be cooking everything in here, after the near miss with the semi yesterday.

I get three bell peppers out of the crisper, locate a cutting board, and prepare them for slaughter. Eva watches me cut through them. I add a little oil to the frying pan and toss in the peppers. An onion is next.

“I don’t hear typing,” I tell her.

“Where did you learn to cook?” Eva’s big green eyes follow me as I pull out a second pan, melt some butter into it, and produce a package of chicken breasts from the fridge, plus another cutting board.

“We didn’t have a ton of money growing up.” I slice the chicken into strips, cutting away all the weird pieces. Maybe Eva doesn’t mind the weird bits in chicken, but I sure as hell do. “So my dad taught me to cook.”

“Your dad?” She’s tentative, which is cute.

“Yeah, my mom wasn’t around.”

I see Eva’s frown out of the corner of my eye. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be.” I flash her a quick grin, and she smiles back. “She took off when I was three. It was a middle-of-the-night escape. For years, my dad told me that she’d left to find a better job and send money back to the two of us. It was bullshit.”

“Where’d she go then?”

“Who knows?” Somewhere, distantly, it still hurts, like an old stab wound that’s never healed. But I’m not going to let myself get sucked in to that pain. It would be pointless, and it would be poison. “She never sent any money back. My dad was too proud to take her to court over it, so….” I dump the chicken into the frying pan. I’ll brown it on both sides then add it to the veggies. “Eventually, some stuff with bank accounts made it necessary to have her declared dead. She might be dead. I don’t know. I don’t really care at this point.” I wash my hands in the sink and glance back to Eva.

“You seriously don’t care? You’re not curious about it?” she asks. “That seems unlike you.”

“There are other things I’m more curious about. Things that meant more to me over the course of my life than that woman ever did.”

“Like

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