Page 66 of The Storm

I fight back a smile. “It was good.”

He rolls his eyes in return. “Fucking whatever. You and I both know it was the best you’ve ever had.”

“I read somewhere that an excessive need for external validation is a sign of a fragile ego. Do you want to talk about it? Because I’m here if you do.”

He flips me off.

I laugh.

And he looks startled that I laughed.

“It really was good.” I tilt my head to the side. “Where did you learn to cook?” I hesitate. “Your mom?”

His shoulders tense for a moment. He barely ever talks about her, and I fully expect the squirrel story to remain a onetime exception, but then he sends me a long look.

“She liked to experiment a lot. She was very young when she had me.” His eyes flash to me. Is he trying to gauge whether I’m judging his mother for it?

I’m not, but there’s no way to tell whether I’ve passed his test or not.

He starts to speak again, so maybe I didn’t fail.

“She was kicked out by her parents and all that cliché shit. Her parents are well off.” He thinks about it for a moment. “Well, no. That’s underselling it. They’re fucking rich as hell.” He looks around the, admittedly, very nice kitchen we’re currently sitting in. “My point is, she didn’t know how to be all independent and do stuff normal people can because obviously she was never going to need to know how, because they had, like, servants and stuff, so nobody taught her those things. Like laundry and cooking and budgeting and all that. She learned from all those how-to guides online. And then she made sure to teach me everything she knew. Cooking was a tough one, though.”

“How come?”

He slides his thumb over the plate, gathering up the crumbs. “She got bored following a recipe. And then she’d add things based on some kind of hunch that they’d go together.”

“Like what?”

The usual harshness isn’t there in his face. In its place is the softness of remembering.

“Scrambled eggs with orange zest and soy sauce.”

I make a face, and he smirks.

“Yeah,” he says. “She always figured that if something tasted good on its own, it had to also taste good when combined with some other good thing. It’s not like she experimented all the time, but even if she didn’t, it was still a disaster more often than not. She’d boil things for too long and bake with the temperature too high. She’d fry everything on high heat, flip things too early, or too late. She would eyeball most measurements. A lot of stuff was burned on the outside and raw on the inside.” He looksdeeply lost in memories before he shakes his head and blinks out of it. “I had to take over.”

“She sounds like a great Mom.”

His jaw tightens, but then he simply nods.

“What about your dad?” I wouldn’t have had the nerve to ask before, but we’ve already established that I can see through his walls by now.

“I don’t remember anything about him. He left when I was barely three.”

“His loss,” I say.

He raises his brow at me. I look at him, not turning away. For a change,he’sthe one who looks puzzled.

“Why are you up?” he asks.

There’s a sarcastic answer to that and a normal answer, which would imply considerably less hostility. For some reason, tonight, I go with the latter.

I shrug. “Couldn’t fall asleep. You?”

“Too busy hiding in my room during the party, so I was hungry.”

This feels normal. And weird. But mostly normal. We’re having a normal conversation. No hidden meaning. No jabs.