Pretend You're Mine

his head and I saw one of his genuine smiles in the slight upturn of his mouth. “No, but thanks. I’ve been cooking for myself since I was eighteen. When I wasn’t working, I used a lot of my free time to learn and experiment.” He moved to start mincing some garlic but paused and looked more thoughtful. “Something about, following a recipe but having some freedom to change it if you want. It’s a balance.” He didn’t keep explaining but I got the sense that he was saying it gave him balance. I could see it in the way he moved around the kitchen, moving and measuring and sometimes putting things in without checking first. He was totally different than how he was at work. It was a Taylor that looked like he was enjoying what he was doing. It also looked like he was doing a little extra since I was watching him. He didn’t have to flick ingredients off his knife or make his gas stove flare a bit. He was enjoying sharing this with me. I was glad I said yes.

The meal was of course delicious. I ate it too quickly to really enjoy it since I had been so hungry from not eating all day.

“I make dinner’s most nights,” He said, and I self-consciously wiped at my mouth worried I’d gotten a lot of it all over me with how quickly I scarfed it down.

“You do?” I really hadn’t been paying very close attention to Taylor and I’d lived with him for almost three months if I hadn’t noticed that.

“It’s easier to cook for two than one. More recipes are formatted that way.”

“You can just ask me,” I said gently.

“Would you like to eat dinner with me, when you are available?” He asked.

“I would enjoy that. At least then you can be confident I’ve eaten at least once per day.”

“You need to eat more.” He obviously didn’t find my joke funny.

“I will.”

And that’s how our nightly ritual began. We would come home from work at slightly different times and he would work out and take a shower and I would get a little more work done or find some way to relax if nothing was pressing. Then I would smell something delicious and I would make my way down to the kitchen to watch him cook. I asked him about certain ingredients I didn’t recognize and techniques he used, and he answered me with an enthusiasm I couldn’t get out of him anywhere else. Then, after an amazing dinner, we would go our separate ways. Except for the nights where we both ended up watching a movie together. Ever since the dinners started, he began speaking to me more and more during these movies.

I had always been the annoying one in the movie theater, always wanting to talk about what was going on. When Taylor started to criticize characters’ decisions out loud, I felt comfortable to speak up too. As it grew colder, as Chicago always did, we began sitting closer to share blankets. I had insisted.

The dinners and the movies felt suspiciously like dates. The moment I had that thought, I was about to fall asleep after one of these nights. I sat up in bed at the realization. They were a lot like dates. At some point Taylor and I had become friends. I think it started right after we were sick, and it clicked during the gala. But I was friends with both Virgo and Michael, and I didn’t feel the urge to walk up to them and kiss them whenever they chopped vegetables.

“Do I like Taylor Hirano?” I said out loud to my dark empty room. I knew I wasn’t going to be getting much sleep with how fast my heart was beating. After some more thought I decided that yes, I did like Taylor Hirano. I liked him a lot. I wanted a soft guy with killer looks, how was I supposed to know from one meeting that Taylor was going to be exactly what I wanted?

I took a deep breath. Even knowing this, I still didn’t think I could act on these feelings. I still didn’t know a whole lot about him. I had gotten him to talk about college and his work, but anything before that he was quick to change the subject or outright ignore my questions. And Taylor had been more open with me of course, but just because we were friends now didn’t mean he suddenly saw our relationship as more than just business. If I made a move and he wasn’t comfortable with it, what would that do to our arrangement?

I briefly considered ignoring the way I felt. I could swallow my feelings down and forget about them. But I knew that the next time I saw him, thoughts of our gala kiss and that feeling of hot warmth sliding through me would bring them all back to the forefront.

My only option then was to keep my feelings a secret and suffer silently.

If I thought things were changing back then, I would have been blown away by what the next weekend had in store for me.

It all started Friday night. He had made some burgers, but not just any kind. It had something he called onion jam on it and the buns he got were way nicer than anything I’d had before.

We had been chatting about our weekend, when he asked, out of nowhere, “Do you want to do something with me tomorrow morning?”

I blinked. Usually he spent a while circling around what he wanted to ask me. “What were you thinking?”

“The leaves have been changing, and soon all the trees will be bare. I wanted to go see some before that happened.”

“You want to go to a park tomorrow?” He went on runs sometimes, so maybe he was inviting me on one?

“Not quite.” He worried his lower lip nervously. “I was thinking of going to the Chicago Botanical Garden.”

My heart flip-flopped. I tried