Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 131459 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131459 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
“Mini cheese and herb quiches in hashbrown cups. Blintzes with blackberry compote. Fresh fruit. And bacon. Because Mom and I have a rule of never eating anything breakfast-like without having bacon.”
Definitely a grander affair.
“That’s the best rule I’ve ever heard,” he told her.
She shot him a wide grin.
Mika stormed in, announcing, “Your Uncle Teddy is fired.”
Cadence tossed him an eye roll before looking back to the bowl.
“Yeah, right,” she said, then shared, “It’s time to make the crêpes. Do you want to do it?”
“Don’t I always make the crêpes?” Mika asked.
Cadence looked to Tom. “She does. I like eating them, but I split them on the dismount.”
“You have to have patience, kid,” Mika said, moving in and taking over at the bowl.
Breaking off in a practiced dance, Cadence pulled open a drawer, and out of it she unearthed a crêpe pan she put directly on a burner.
Because even if the kitchen wasn’t all that big, it was bursting at the seams due to all the stuff they had.
Including a crêpe pan.
“Spreader and spatula,” Mika called out, like she was a surgeon demanding an instrument.
“Gotcha,” Cadence said, opening another drawer.
And now here it was.
A demonstration of the reasoning behind the Arizona house.
These two were so embedded in each other’s lives, the loss of one would feel like the loss of the whole.
Tom had a wife and three kids when they started leaving the nest.
It sucked so exorbitantly, he could barely cope with it.
Peace and a new perspective, if you had the means to find either, was the only way to roll.
“Can I do something?” Tom asked.
“You can mise en place the filling for Cadence as we get these rolling. I’ll call out the ingredients. The mise en place bowls are in that drawer over there.” Mika pointed to a drawer with her foot. “Let me know when you’re ready.”
Tom opened the drawer and found it was not chaotic, like he was expecting.
It was almost pathologically organized, the space maximized to its fullest.
It was also the explanation as to how they had mise en place bowls and a crêpe pan in a narrow New York brownstone’s kitchen that shared a floor with a dining room, a family room and a small room that was used as Cadence’s study.
He grabbed the bowls.
Mika and Cadence both took turns calling the ingredients to him.
He helped stuff when it was time.
Cadence couldn’t make the crêpes, but she fried the blintzes.
They all carried to the dining room table, and the room was less crowded than at dinner, but it wasn’t less electric with the company he was keeping as he ate brunch.
They had a ton left over, even if they were leaving in the morning, but Mika said blithely, “Don’t worry. Teddy will be pissed at me for at least a week. But he’ll still come over and get the food. Faun is six four, plays flag football on the weekend, though the flags are for show, and they tackle without pads, so I’m not really sure why they don’t call it rugby, but whatever, and he loves our leftovers, mostly because neither he nor Teddy cook.”
“At least, not very well,” Cadence put in before she told them she was taking off to get ready to go to the museum.
Then she took off.
Tom and Mika sat back with another cup of coffee.
“It’s going to be okay with Teddy?” Tom asked.
Mika stretched her head to the side and explained, “He doesn’t communicate well. His family is very religious, and very old-fashioned, and they chose not to accept him and his supposed ‘lifestyle.’ He hasn’t spoken to his mother or father in at least fifteen years. He loves them. It’s a daily hurt, the kind you get used to the pain, but it’s still there. We’re his family now. This means I get why he’s concerned we’re breaking up, when we’re not. There was dysfunction with his family before he came out, and that shows in how he communicates, or doesn’t, and instead lashes out. Faun will have a few words with him, and Teddy will pretend it didn’t happen.”
“That’s what Cadence said.”
Mika confirmed this with a nod.
Carefully, Tom asked, “Does he usually go that far?”
She took a sip of her coffee and shook her head. “No, but then he’s not usually worried he’s going to lose the two most important women in his life either.” She studied him closely. “I’m sorry he was an ass to you.”
“He guessed what he guessed, and I would assume that would make him even more concerned about us being together.”
“It’s not his place.”
“It still an explanation.”
“Agreed. But it’s not his place.”
Tom sat back and took a sip of his own coffee.
“Are you okay with what he said?” she asked.
“Not particularly,” he answered.
“You looked like you’d been sucker punched.”
“I had.”
Her lips thinned.
“Mika, I can take it.”