A Good Meal

A Good Meal

POV: Rhys

"Sit down before you wear a hole in the floorboards."

I didn't look up from the cutting board when I said it, the heavy chef's knife coming down against the wood in rhythmic, clean thuds. Bash was still standing by the hallway threshold, his jacket half-unzipped, looking like someone had just pulled the rug out from under him.

"I'm fine," he said, which was a lie, the kind he told out of habit more than conviction.

"Jacket off, Bash. You're home now."

He didn't move at first. I kept working — onions, then peppers, the knife finding its rhythm against the board while the pan on the stove behind me started to warm. I'd started cooking the second I heard the front door not open, the second his footsteps hadn't carried him out into whatever night he'd planned for himself.

"You didn't even ask what happened," he said, sitting anyway, some reflex older than his own resistance.

"You'll tell me if you want to." I scraped the peppers into the pan, and they hissed against the oil. I meant it, too — I wasn't fishing. I already knew. There was a difference between knowing and needing him to say it out loud, and I genuinely believed I was leaving him the second one.

"The diner's short-staffed," he said eventually, quiet. "They put him on a mandatory double. He said he's sorry. He said he couldn't make it."

"That happens at a place like that." I said it plainly because it did happen because I believed every word of it even as I said it — that was the part I never let myself examine too closely. "Short-staffed places run on whoever's willing to stay late. It's not personal. It's just how those jobs work."

I plated the food while it finished — something simple, something warm, the kind of meal that didn't ask anything of him except to sit still and let himself be taken care of. I set it down in front of him without a word, watched him stare at it like he wasn't sure what to do with someone doing something kind for him after someone else had failed to.

"You didn't have to do this," he said.

"I wanted to." I leaned against the counter across from him, arms crossed, watching him lift the fork like his hand had forgotten the motion. "Eat."

He did, slowly at first, and I watched the tension bleed out of him one bite at a time.

"People at a place like that have their own lives, Bash," I said, easy, unhurried, believing it the way I believed most things I told him — because it was true, in its way, just not the whole truth. "They pick up extra shifts when the schedule demands it. You can't expect a job to bend around your plans."

"He said it was an emergency."

"I'm sure it was, from where he's standing." I meant that too. It cost me nothing to be generous about Julian's intentions because the outcome was the same either way.

"You always do this," he said, not angry, just tired. "Find some reasonable way to make it sound like I was silly for hoping."

"I'm not saying that." And I wasn't, not in my own head — I genuinely thought I was just describing the world as it was, a world that would keep disappointing him in small, unremarkable ways forever unless someone stood between him and it. "I'm saying jobs like that eat people's plans whole. It's not a reflection on you."

"And you think that's different. You and me."

"I know it is." I refilled his glass without being asked, set it back down. "I've never once cancelled on you, Bash. Twenty years. Not once."

He didn't have an answer for that. I hadn't expected one, and I didn't feel like I'd scored a point saying it — it was just true, and it seemed important that he remembered it.

He ate the rest in silence, and when he finished I took his plate before he could reach for it, my fingers brushing his on the handoff, lingering there half a second longer than the task required.

"You don't have to clean up," he said. "I can do it."

"I know you can." I carried the plate to the sink anyway, ran the water, and felt him watching my back the whole time. "Sit still. Let someone take care of something for once."

I dried my hands on the towel by the sink and turned back to find him still sitting there, elbows on the counter, staring at nothing, the disappointment still sitting behind his eyes even if his body had gone soft with the meal and the quiet.

I crossed the kitchen and stood in front of him.

He looked up at me the way he always did when I got this close — some mixture of wariness and something else, something he'd never once said out loud.

"You're doing the thing," he said, barely above a whisper. "Where you get quiet like this."

"Do you want me to stop?"

He didn't answer. That was the answer.

I didn't ask permission. I just reached out and slid my thumb along the line of his jaw, resting my palm flat against the warm skin of his throat, feeling the sudden, rapid flutter of his pulse against my fingers.

He didn't flinch. He didn't pull back. He just stared up at me, his breath hitching in the quiet kitchen.

"See?" I whispered, my thumb pressing just hard enough to anchor him right where I wanted him. "I'm still here."