Immediately after hitting the ground, Mina fell on top of me. In the dim light of the lantern in the cavernous kitchen space, now rolling around somewhere under the island, our eyes locked, and I felt both of us holding our breath. I was keenly aware of her breasts pressing into my chest and how hard my cock got immediately. She had to feel it pressing against her.
“Sorry about that,” she said.
“It’s fine,” I said, my voice coming out in a hoarse whisper.
She reached over and grabbed her flashlight, smacking it against the ground and making it light again.
“Going to get up now,” she said.
“Yup.”
Our eyes hadn’t left each other’s yet. Neither of us had moved. Suddenly, it was like her body caught up with what her mouth had been saying, and she hopped up, getting to her feet and gathering the things she had dropped. By the time I was getting to my feet, she was already halfway up the steps and heading toward the light of the lobby floor.
I reached under the island and grabbed the lantern before looking to see if there was anything else that I dropped or that she had missed picking up and followed after her.
I ran up the stairs behind her into the lobby and crossed to the door leading to the hallway, where she was waiting for me to join her. As soon as I was near, she opened the door and walked briskly to Dr. Sutton’s office without a word. But I could see the red in her cheeks, even still. She was embarrassed, sure, but maybe there was something else. Something she wasn’t quite ready to admit to herself yet.
As I followed her into the office, I sat down the stuff I carried on the counter by the little oven and stove and looked around for a cutting board. I was going to be very upset if I had to go back down into the darkness of that kitchen to find one. After banging around a few drawers and cabinets, Mina, who was busy putting a pot on the stove and filling it with water, looked over at me.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Looking for a cutting board,” I grumbled. “I forgot to grab one when I was downstairs. Going to make it really hard to chop anything if I don’t have a board.”
“It’s right here,” she said, tapping the drawer below the oven with her toe. “I saw it when I pulled out the pans.”
“Oh.” I reached in and grabbed the cutting board. “Perfect. So, what’s first?”
“Mise en place.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s French,” she said.
“I got that,” I said. “What does it mean.”
“It means everything in its place. Or something like that. Essentially, do the prep work, sous chef.”
“Oh, I’m the sous chef now?”
“You want to do all the cooking?”
“I think the better question is whether or not you would eat all the things I would cook,” I said.
“What do you mean by th—”
“Bacon,” I said, holding up the package and grinning. “Everything cooked in bacon fat. Everything.”
She laughed, and I thought it sounded like the cutest thing in the world. It was a giggling laugh, one more appropriate for small woodland animals in animated movies than a person. It was unlike the rest of the façade that she seemed to put up, at least with me, of a no-nonsense workaholic. There was a silliness about her, and I could feel it through that laugh.
It was intoxicating. I wanted to hear it again.
***“Okay, so we have pasta salad, we have pasta and meat sauce, we have baked chicken, and we have steaks with mashed potatoes and corn. I think we did pretty damn good,” she said.
“Not bad, not bad,” I said. “Just wait until you get a load of this garlic butter with the steak though.”
“That good?” she asked, a smile that I interpreted as flirty and then immediately shelved the possibility of crossing her face.
“Damn right. You know the secret?”
“Bacon grease?”
“What? No,” I said. “The secret is whipping the butter first.”
She laughed, and I felt a tightening in my stomach. She seemed so much more at ease when her hair was down, and she wasn’t wearing her lab coat.
Since I had flipped the breaker, the heat had come back to these rooms, though I wasn’t sure if it would last. With everyone outside doing what they could to rescue us, I figured we should be as warm and comfortable as possible, though. Having these two rooms warm meant we were basically living in an apartment that was still bigger than my first one in college. It wasn’t bad.
As we ate, I watched the way her lips moved. We didn’t speak much, but I chalked that up to both of us being hungry and the steak being spectacularly good. I really outdid myself that time, but if I was honest, it was probably the cut of beef that was doing all the heavy lifting.