Page 21 of Bad Seed
He pauses, his arms loaded with goodies, to stare at me. “And how do you feel about vegetables?”
Is that about my weight? I fight off the frown and joyfully cry out, “Love ‘em.”
“Great,” he smiles, the awkward moment gone in an instant. “Because I’ve got a bunch I need to use up and what better time than tonight?” Aubry reaches for one of the knives hanging off the wall.
“Wait!”
The way he freezes, biceps taut and flexing distracts my brain before I reel back in. “I should be the one cooking. You saved my life. It’s the least I can do.”
“Are you certain?” he asks and takes a step back.
I roll up my imaginary sleeves and sidle up, prepared to wow him with my culinary expertise. “What do we have to work with here? Zucchini. Okay. A mess of green beans. Sprouts. Um… Banana sauce? Coconut milk. I know that one. And tamarind. Great in curry. What is that?” I pick up the jar with a shrimp on the label. “Bagoong?”
“Shrimp paste,” Aubry says, a smile rising.
This is not the time to fail so bad I give him food poisoning. Raising my hands, I bow away. “Yeah, okay. I might be out of my depth here. Can I ask about the banana sauce?”
He slides into place and grabs a bulb of garlic, then a cutting board. “Do you want to try it?”
“What is it?”
A sly smile lifts his lips. “I suppose you shall have to wait and see.”
He lifts the knife, then pauses. “I nearly forgot.” The knife drops to the cutting board and he turns to me. “Your allergy. What is it?”
“My…”
Those eyes staring at me, not crinkled in concern as I gasp for air and fumble for the epipen. No…they’re laughing.
“Sadie?” A hand lands on my arm, and I jerk back. Aubry doesn’t move. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. I’m good. I just…” The ghost of trauma past wallops me in the head. Sucking in tears, I stare at the ceiling so he can’t see me fall apart. “I don’t like to tell men…people what I’m allergic to.”
“Why?”
It’s a good question. My one dating rule makes me sound a little insane, but most other men don’t even know I’m deathly allergic to anything. None of them had to save my life.
Rubbing my fingers on my scalp, I aim my gaze to Aubry. He’s not Derek. He won’t act like Derek. I can just tell him.
“It’s eh…” My throat closes up. I start clawing down the skin as if I can open it from the outside. It’s drawn Aubry’s curiosity, his eyes gleaming. I can’t tell him.
“I had this boyfriend and he’d, sometimes, give me things to eat that had…my allergy in them. Little things, and whenever it happened he’d apologize. Say it was a mistake. I just assumed he forgot. I forget all the time.”
Oh, how fucking naive I was.
My heart pounds faster, as if my blood pressure’s spiking from an attack. “It kept happening. Every couple months or so, I’d wind up in the hospital. Always an apology, always a mistake. Then one night…”
The flash of him standing over me, watching with this little grin. Like a cat entertained with a dying bug.
I fight to steady my breathing, my throat cracking into dust as I gasp for air. “It was bad. Really bad. One of the worst attacks of my life. I had my epipen and was about to stab myself when Derek… He knocked it out of my hand.”
Everything was a blur after that. I remember falling, then waking up in the hospital, Derek once again apologizing. As if I couldn’t remember what he did. As if I didn’t know it would happen again.
I cram all that old trauma back into its box and smile at Aubry. He’s unreadable, his face stone, but his eyes burn. Trying to laugh, like it was all some joke, I say, “So that’s why I don’t like to tell people my allergy. In case they forget. It’s on me if I…mess up.”
“I see,” he intones like a funeral bell chiming over a plague town.
Please don’t make me tell you.
