But Mina was different. Coffee had woken up her face, and curiosity brightened her eyes now. Her eyebrows were slightly lifted, as was her chin, and she looked like she genuinely expected to hear positive memories of Kimmie. Levi never wanted to disappoint Mina.
He cracked an egg into the mixing bowl. “Kimmie had the best laugh when she laughed at her own jokes. Stupid puns were the only jokes she ever made, but then she would laugh, and her whole body shook. Everyone always laughed with her, because her joy was contagious.”
He paused to crack the rest of the eggs into the bowl and waited for Mina to say something. But when he looked over his shoulder, she was eyeing him, her brows still raised, chin still up, waiting. Waiting for him to talk about himself and his life and his beloved wife.
“She would spend hours thinking of the perfect gift to get a person. When I was mining, she would drag me all over the state, shopping and driving for hours. She’d look in every store and pick up everything that caught her eye.” He shook his head as he picked up the whisk and mixed the eggs together. “And if the gifts she got me were anything to go by, she’d spend all that time picking out almost the absolute worst perfect gift. Like all that time she spent in the stores when we thought she was looking for the perfect thing, she was really looking for the perfectly awful thing.”
Levi shoved the bowl of beaten eggs aside. Bacon sizzled on the stove. He grabbed an onion to cut. Kimmie had preferred pancakes for breakfast. He hadn’t started making scrambled eggs until six months after her death when, one Sunday morning, he’d wanted a leisurely breakfast, and the thought of pancakes had made him want to vomit.
“You really loved her,” Mina said from behind him. “Like, a lot.”
“I did.” He slid the chopped onion to the other side of the cutting board and picked up a pepper. “I do.”
“Oh.” Her voice was so small and barely audible that he couldn’t read anything into her tone.
“Is that a problem?”
“No.” Another tiny word said in a tiny voice. “No,” she said louder. “No, it’s great, really. I mean, I hope that you being able to love someone so much means that you can love someone else that much.”
With the pepper cut, Levi added butter to the pan and turned the heat on low. He didn’t say anything for several seconds while the idea of love sizzled in his head along with the butter in the pan. When the butter had fully melted, he finally said, “I think it does. If I didn’t think I could, I wouldn’t be here, with you.”
“So I’m not only a passing fancy?” she responded.
He was dumping vegetables into the hot pan and had to give them a quick stir, before he could turn around and check if the amusement in her voice was real. Much to his surprise, her eyes were sparkling with humor, and a hidden smile flickered on her lips. “No, not just a passing fancy,” he repeated with a smile.
Passing fancy. He turned back to the eggs, half in love with her for the way that she talked.
“I didn’t think so. You didn’t seem the type.”
“What does that type look like?” he asked as he poured the eggs into the pan.
“Well, they don’t ask to wait for the perfect moment for sex.”
He gave the eggs a stir, still a little embarrassed by his original insistence—made worse by the fact that he still couldn’t really explain why he had to wait for the perfect moment. It wasn’t that he hadn’t had sex since Kimmie, but he had known that this would be different. He’d known from the moment he had set eyes on Mina in her short shorts.
“It was a stupid idea,” he said.
“You said that last night. I thought it was cute.” Which he knew hadn’t been exactly true. She’d also been frustrated with him. That much had been clear. But putting a positive spin on the episode was nice.
He concentrated on the way the consistency of the eggs changed as they cooked.
If he couldn’t put his finger on why he wanted to wait until some mysterious perfect moment, neither could he put his finger on what about last night had been different than he’d expected. She’d been naked. He’d been naked. That much was par for the course.