Page 11 of Damnation
“My mother always liked to cook for the whole family,” Thomas tells me, the spontaneity of this disclosure taking me by surprise. “My house always smelled like fresh-baked sweets, especially on Sunday mornings.”
I stop to listen to him with interest, delighted that he is confiding something to me of his own free will for once. He stretches his arms out over the marble counter, his eyes fixed on some point in the middle distance. There is such intense nostalgia in his face that it makes my throat feel tight.
“My sister would get excited every time. She’d start jumping on the bed and singing to herself until she woke everyone up.” He chuckles softly. “She was an insufferable little snot when she was a kid. She’s calmed down a bit over the years.”
I fold my arms over my chest and smile sweetly, perfectly able to imagine this scene in my head. I feel like I can even smell the odor of sweet treats spreading throughout the house. I picture his mother at the stove, cheerful and radiant, intent on preparing breakfast for her family while her mischievous children clamor around her, chasing each other and getting into tiffs. I inch closer to him to reduce the distance between us, though I’d like to do so much more. I’d like to kiss him, to sit on his lap, hold him, and listen to him talk for hours and hours. I want to hear as many stories as I can about his life, about his family. Until I understand him completely. But I promised him that we would move on his timeline, and I intend to keep that promise. “That sounds lovely.”
The expression on his face turns hard, as though my comment has upset him somehow. He focuses his eyes on me and shakes his head slowly. “Nothing that happened in that house was lovely, actually.”
Coldness spreads through my chest, and my words die on my tongue. I stiffen and frown at him, confused. “What do you mean?”
Thomas shrugs and, clearly trying to end the conversation, jerks his chin toward the stove and scolds me: “Careful you don’t burn it.”
I can tell from the detached sound of his voice that he’s put up his usual walls once again. “I’m going out for a smoke,” he says, getting up from the stool to leave.
Time’s up.
He gave me a little piece of his past, but whatever impulse led him to do it has gone now, and he has withdrawn into himself. I take a deep breath and close my eyes.
That’s okay too, I tell myself.
Baby steps.
***
Five minutes later, he’s back. I am relieved to see that some of his tension seems to have been released. I arranged the crisp bacon on the toasted bread along with the tomato slices and some fresh lettuce, trying to assemble everything in the most inviting way. I’ve cooked for other people over the years, for my father or for Alex when he’d come by, but I’m surprised by how much I like doing it for Thomas. I can feel his gaze on me the whole time, so I raise my face to smile shyly at him. He has a strange way of always managing to make me feel awkward and nervous in his presence. He knows this. He embraces it.
“What is it?” I ask, licking a bit of bacon grease off my fingertip.
He moves closer, positions himself behind me, and, looming over me with his broad frame, he buries his face in the crook of my neck. Right where the skin is still purple, marked by last night’s kiss. He rubs his closed lips over it, producing an animal noise of satisfaction. He dips his cold fingers under the hem of my shirt, lifting it slowly to reveal a strip of my torso, which he caresses.
“I could get used to this, you know?”
I swallow as his vetiver smell, mixed with the odor of tobacco, goes straight to my head. “To what?”
“To you cooking for me,” he murmurs. “Although, if we’re being honest, I’d like it even better if you were wearing just a pair of lacy black panties.” I feel his mouth curl into a smirk. “And some high heels in the same color.” His hands tighten on my hips, pressing me into his pelvis. I feel a heat blooming in the low part of my abdomen. “Then, I could satisfy your appetite too.”
I hold my breath, unmoving. I am silent, unable to formulate anything like a meaningful sentence.
Thomas rests his forehead on my shoulder and starts laughing. It’s a deep, mesmerizing sort of laugh. “It takes so little to make you freeze up,” he notes, shaking his head. He turns me to face him before liftingmy chin and planting a chaste kiss on my lips. Then he snags a piece of toast and sits back down with a smug look on his face, probably well aware of all the silent insults I’m directing his way as I try to regulate my heartbeat and regain some small measure of control over the situation. Damn him.
We sit down to eat and clean our plates. I ask for help washing the dishes and tidying the kitchen; then we go upstairs to my room. After putting some clothes into an old moving box, I move on to selecting today’s outfit. I quickly pick out a pair of white jeans and drape them over one shoulder as I continue hunting for a shirt. Thomas is lying on my bed, propped up against the headboard with his ankles crossed in front of him. Bored, he flips through one of my philosophy textbooks on deductive reasoning.
“Do you really study this stuff?”
“Yeah, it’s interesting. And in theory, you should be studying it too.” I take two sweaters out of the closet and lay them on the foot of the bed; one is gray, the other baby pink.
“‘The mental process by which new information is evaluated subject to generally known concepts is called the deductive method.’” He lifts his gaze from the page and, with a snap, closes the book. “What the fuck does that mean?”
I throw a look right back at him. “In other words, deductive reasoning means starting from a general premise and proceeding toward a specific practical conclusion.” Thomas looks even more confused, and so I keep talking, hoping to clarify the concept for him. “It means that, for example, if you were about to give me a book and realized you didn’t have it with you, you coulddeducethat you had left it at home.”
He stares at me perplexed for a few moments. “That’s it?”
“Yeah.” I smile, amused. “That’s it.”
He sits up and pulls on the sneakers he’d taken off previously. “This is why I hate philosophy. It makes something complicated out of something extremely simple.”
My phone display lights up with a message from Tiffany. She also wants to know what happened last night. I respond quickly, telling herto meet me on campus, and while I’m at it, I ask if she can give me a ride to the Marsy. Then I put the phone away and decide to wear the baby-pink sweater.
