Also, thank you for the fruit! I’d never had a kumquat before. They were delicious.
Cassie
My handwriting was nowhere near as nice as Frederick’s, and I didn’t have an envelope to put my note in. But there was nothing to be done for it. I set it down in the center of the kitchen table, figuring that if he still wasn’t awake by the time I had to leave for my shift at Gossamer’s, he’d see it there.
I was exhausted from moving and regretted agreeing to take a shift at the coffee shop that night. All I wanted was to relax in my new bedroom and listen to music. But I needed the money and wasn’t really in a position to say no to shifts, no matter how tired I was.
I still had an hour before I needed to leave for work. Plenty of time to eat something. I’d had the foresight to save some of my nonperishables for the move, which was a very good thing. I’d been so busy with moving I’d forgotten lunch—something I rarely did. The fruit was tasty, but it wasn’t a meal.
And now I was starving.
I went into the kitchen and for the first time noticed just how clean it was. The picture Frederick had sent me hadn’t really captured that. The white tile floor didn’t have a speck of dirt on it. Neither did the old-fashioned stove or the pale pink countertops.
I’d assumed Frederick had people clean for him. But this was more than clean.
This kitchen looked like it had never been used.
Would my dinner be the first meal ever prepared in there? Impossible. And yet somehow, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was true. If so, it was pretty pathetic that my spaghetti noodles with a little salt added for flavor would be the one to break the seal.
I knelt down and opened one of the kitchen cupboards at random, looking for a saucepan. It was completely empty, save for bare shelves, the liner that had been placed on them, and a layer of dust.
Frowning, I opened the cupboard next in line. This one was packed with a bizarre assortment of food I’d have to be on the verge of starving to eat—jars of cocktail onions and gefilte fish, boxes of Hamburger Helper and cans of asparagus—but nothing to cook it in.
“Huh,” I muttered. Where were Frederick’s pots and pans? Did he just get takeout every day?
“Miss Greenberg.”
At the sound of Frederick’s voice, I jumped and smacked the top of my head on the underside of an open drawer.
“Fuck,” I muttered, rubbing my head. It was already throbbing. I was pretty sure I’d have an ugly bump there in the morning.
I stood up and . . . there he was. My new roommate, standing right in front of me. He looked like he’d just stepped out from a magazine photo shoot, his hair artfully tousled and falling perfectly over his forehead. He was standing much closer to me than he had when I’d toured his apartment, and he seemed to notice that, too, his eyes widening and nostrils flaring a little as though he were breathing me in. He was dressed even more formally than he’d been the night I’d met him, adding a red silk ascot and black top hat to the charcoal-gray three-piece suit that fit like the gods had made it specifically for him.
It was an odd look, to be sure. But—god help me—it worked. My mouth watered for reasons having nothing to do with hunger.
If he noticed how overwhelmed I was by his appearance, he showed no sign of it. He simply frowned, brow furrowed in concern. He stepped a little closer. He smelled like fabric softener, the citrus fruit he’d put in my bedroom, and something deep and mysterious I had no name for. “Are you quite all right, Miss Greenberg?”
I nodded, flustered and embarrassed. “Yeah.” I rubbed at the spot where my head had met the drawer. A bump was already starting to form. “Where are your pots and pans, though?”
“Pots and pans?” He stared at me, puzzled. As though the words were in a language he didn’t understand. Eventually, he shook his head. “I’m sorry, but . . . I don’t follow.”
Now it was my turn to be confused. What about my question was hard to understand?
“I was going to cook myself some spaghetti before I went to work,” I explained. “I didn’t get a chance to eat lunch today, and I’m starving. They have sandwiches and things at Gossamer’s, but the food there is pretty gross and super marked up, and we only get a fifty percent employee discount. Which, if you ask me, is basically wage theft. I already bought this spaghetti, so . . .”
Frederick’s eyes went very wide. He smacked his forehead.
“Oh!” he exclaimed. “You want to cook something!”