Chapter 17
1248 Words
*Elena's POV*
It started with pickles.
Well ... pickles and peanut butter and whatever those little chocolate-covered pretzels were that I had spotted in the pantry three days ago and had been thinking about ever since. Don't judge me. I was growing a human being. My cravings had their own personality at this point.
I waddled down the stairs at half past midnight, one of my hand on the railing, wearing an oversized sleep shirt and the kind of dignity that only a pregnant woman raiding a kitchen at night could possess.
The kitchen light was already on.
I froze in the doorway.
Liam was standing at the counter in shorts and no shirt ... which, fine, was an entirely unnecessary detail that my brain chose to register and file immediately, while he hold a glass of water. Very innocently. Very suspiciously innocently.
We stared at each other.
"What are you doing down here?" I asked.
"Getting water." He lifted the glass. Proof.
"At midnight."
"People drink water at midnight, Elena."
"Uh huh." I walked in slowly, eyeing him. "And the water just happened to give you..." I tilted my head, studying his face .... "chocolate. On your lip."
He blinked. His hand flew up to his mouth. "What? No it didn't."
"Right there." I crossed the kitchen, reached up without thinking, and pressed my thumb against the corner of his lip, brushing away a small smear of dark chocolate.
He went completely still.
I mean completely. Like someone had reached inside him and turned everything off. He stopped moving, stopped talking, and I was almost certain he stopped breathing, his eyes dropping to my face with an expression I didn't quite know what to do with.
I took my hand back.
Cleared my throat.
"Chocolate," I said, showing him my thumb like evidence in a court case.
A beat of silence overwhelmed us.
Then he burst out laughing and I burst out laughing and just like that, the strange charged moment dissolved into the kind of giggling that made absolutely no sense at midnight but felt completely necessary.
"Okay, fine," he said, setting the glass down. "I was stress-eating chocolate. Are you happy?"
"Genuinely." I moved toward the pantry. "What kind?"
"The good kind. The kind you're not getting because you already judged me and you have no leverage."
"I have all the leverage. I'm pregnant. Everything is about me."
"That," he said, pointing, "is not how marriage works."
"It is absolutely how this marriage works."
I pulled open the pantry door and reached for the shelf, the one with the chocolate pretzels and the caramel popcorn and the little bag of sour gummies I had been dreaming about since Tuesday.
"Elena."
"Liam."
"What are you doing?"
"Getting a snack." I grabbed the pretzels. "Obviously."
His hand closed around my wrist before I even turned around.
"You can't eat those," he said.
I looked down at his hand. Looked up at his face. "Excuse me?"
"You're pregnant."
"I am aware, yes, thank you for the update..."
"Those have like four hundred milligrams of sodium per serving and enough sugar to put a horse to sleep, Elena."
I stared at him. "Are you serious right now?"
"Completely."
"It's midnight."
"The sodium doesn't care what time it is."
I opened my mouth, then closed it. "Then what exactly am I supposed to eat? Please, Liam, enlighten me. What is the acceptable midnight snack for a pregnant woman who has been thinking about these pretzels for three days?"
He let go of my wrist, walked to the fridge, opened it, and turned around holding a carton of milk like he was presenting an award.
"Milk," he said.
I looked at the milk.
Looked at him.
"No."
"It has calcium..."
"I know what milk has, Liam. I don't want milk. I want the pretzels."
"You can want the pretzels all you like." He reached past me, plucked the bag right out of my hand, and before I could even process what was happening, he turned and put them on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet. The tall one. The one that required either a stepladder or a husband who was unreasonably, unfairly tall.
I gaped at him.
He turned around and leaned against the counter with his arms folded and the expression of a man who had absolutely won.
"Milk," he said again pleasantly.
"Youuuu...." I pressed my lips together. "You did not just do that."
"I did, though."
"Liam."
"Elena."
I looked at the cabinet. Looked at him. Looked at the cabinet again.
Then I grabbed a chair from the kitchen table, dragged it across the floor with the most deliberate amount of noise I could produce, and climbed up onto it.
Liam's eyes went wide. "What are you — Elena, you're pregnant, get down.."
"Then give me the pretzels."
"Absolutely not."
"Then move." I stood on the chair and reached toward the cabinet. My fingers grazed the shelf. Almost. Almost there.....
He reached up and grabbed the bag. Then, with a grin that I wanted to remove from his face immediately, he lifted it straight up over his head, his arm fully extended, holding it at maximum Liam height.
I made a sound that was not entirely human.
"Give. Me. The pretzels."
"Come get them."
"You are the worst fake husband in the entire history of fake marriages..."
"I'm going to put that on a mug."
I stepped off the chair because I wasn't completely unreasonable, I wasn't actually going to jump for them and marched directly up to him. He was tall. Annoyingly, ridiculously tall. Even standing right in front of him, the bag was comfortably out of reach above his head.
I grabbed his shirt with both hands.
I went up on my toes.
I stretched.
My fingers were an inch from the bag. Maybe less. His arm was still raised, but I was close, I was so close, and I was not going to lose this battle over chocolate pretzels in my own kitchen at midnight...
I don't know exactly when it happened.
One second I was reaching. The next, everything slowed down.
My hands were fisted in the front of his shirt. His arm had lowered slightly. My face was tilted up and his was tilted down and we were very close. Too close. Close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off his skin and his breath. close enough that when he exhaled I felt it.
Our lips were almost touching.
I don't think either of us was breathing.
His eyes dropped to mine and they were very dark and very still, and I forgot completely about the pretzels, I forgot about the kitchen, forgot about everything except the way he was looking at me like I was something he was trying very hard not to want.
Neither of us moved.
Neither of us spoke.
The whole world went quiet.
"What is going on here?"
We jumped apart like two people who had been caught doing something we absolutely were not doing. The bag of pretzels hit the counter. My hands flew off his shirt. We both spun toward the kitchen doorway.
Andrea stood there in silk pajamas, her arms were folded, one perfectly shaped brow raised, her eyes moving slowly between the two of us with an expression that was somehow both cold and deeply amused.
The silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever heard in my life.
- Writer
