It’s the same feeling of pride I get when I can make this beautiful yet closed-off woman smile. She’s got some pretty sturdy walls built up around her. I don’t know enough about her to make any assumptions. But I plan to change that starting now.
“All right, everybody, we’ve got about an hour break. Get yourself some dinner; you know the drill,” Martin calls out, and I see Carlos put down his camera for the first time in hours.
Normally, everyone would immediately head for the front door, going out to the vans and cars for lunchboxes and smoke breaks. And everyone else sticks to the routine. But I stay behind, wanting to finally spend a moment alone with Erin to see if she may open up a little more without a camera and crew watching her every move.
She slumps onto a stool next to the island, sprawling her arms across the marble countertop as she puts her cheek to the cold surface. “I’m staaarviiing. I was just running to the freakin’ store to grab a heat-up meal that would’ve taken three minutes and thirty seconds in the microwaaave,” she whines, making me chuckle.
“Good Lord, woman, the least you could do is heat up a frozen pizza in the oven instead of the microwave,” I say, moving toward the refrigerator. “Is there nothing you can snack on while we wait for it to cook?”
“The oven takes too long. Preheating sucks the life out of me,” she replies before adding, “and all I have is random crap and condiments that don’t go together.”
“We’ll see about that,” I tell her, biting my lip as I take in all the “random crap” she has in her fridge and cabinets and spotting the perfect combination. She sits up at my “Ah-ha!”
“What did you find? Be careful not to poison me with rotten food. It’s been a decade since I cleaned those condiments out. Does mustard even expire?” she asks, making me laugh.
“You have cream cheese… that’s still good until the thirtieth,” I say setting that on the counter. “Raspberry pepper jelly that hasn’t even been opened yet…”
“Blech. That was in a gift basket I got from a patient. Who the hell eats a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with peppers? I just didn’t have the heart to throw it out,” she grumbles, and I chuckle once again. Has a woman ever made me laugh as much as she does?
“And a box of Wheat Thins that are, in fact, expired but—” I toss one into my mouth, testing the crunch. “—are still good. Not even stale yet.”
She looks at me blankly. “Congratulations, Curtis. You’ve now discovered how a single woman lives in her bachelorette pad.”
I purse my lips and hold her stare as I take out a Pyrex container I found in one of the cabinets, unwrap the cream cheese from its silver foil paper, place it into the container, and then heat it up in the microwave for just a few seconds, enough to soften the brick but not enough to melt it. I then pour the pepper jelly on top of it, sliding the combination and the box of crackers across the island to Erin and her scrunched face with its adorable wrinkled up nose.
“Dafuck is this?” she asks, and my nostrils flare with my effort to keep a straight face.
“Trust me” is all I say, and she narrows her eyes.
After a stare-down that lasts a full minute and eventually makes my dick hard once again—randy fucker—she finally gives in, pulling a single Wheat Thin out of the box.
“Do I fold in the cheese?” she asks, lifting a brow, and my whole face spasms trying not to laugh at her Schitt’s Creek reference. She dips out a tiny bit of the jelly and cream cheese, using the corner of the cracker.
“Here goes nothin’,” she says, acting more like she’s on an episode of Fear Factor than in her kitchen tasting something made with simple ingredients. She squeezes her eyes closed and tosses the cracker in her mouth, chewing with a scared look on her face. Which quickly dissolves as she opens her eyes, a look of pure bliss coming over her every feature. “Holy shit!” She takes out another Wheat Thin and dips it into the mix, this time scooping a lot more onto the cracker before placing it in her mouth, her moans of pleasure making my balls draw up as she reaches for yet another cracker. “This is amazing!” she breathes, and I shake my head at myself, feeling overwhelming pride fill my soul at her reaction to something I made for her.
It’s more than the regular feeling of achievement I get when someone praises the meal I’ve made. It’s almost primal. My woman was hungry. I made her something to eat. She ate it, and not only is she getting the sustenance she needed to end her discomfort, but she thinks what I provided is “amazing.”