Candra looked back at him with a sigh. “I hope you’re learning to like it crispy and your eggs runny. I can never get them right, even though I’ve totally got the French toast down.”
“That’s fine by me. The toast is my favorite anyway.” He walked up behind her and took a piece of fairly crispy bacon from the pile, crunching it almost into powder as he took a bite. “And the bacon doesn’t bother me either. Have you ever tried to eat a pig that died from electrocution?”
“No…” She said as she looked back over her shoulder at him crunching away. “Are you saying my bacon tastes like zapped pig?”
“No, I’m saying I’ve eaten many a zapped pig in my life, and after a while, you kinda get used to it. Crunchy bacon is excellent by comparison. As for runny eggs, I’ll just mop them up with the toast. Problem solved.”
She turned enough to kiss him on his cheek. “I don’t know if I’m ever going to get this cooking thing down. I never had to do it.”
“You still don’t. I told you I can take care of it if you want me to.”
“I want to learn. I want to know how to do things.” Candra argued adamantly, since her independence was new. She wanted to try and gain as much as she could.
“Alright, alright.” He kissed her on the shoulder and took another piece of bacon. “Look at it this way, you’ll never have to worry about doing steak right. As long as it’s warm and bloody, I’m good with it.”
She smiled and put his share of the food onto a plate and plated her own before she set them both down on their small kitchen table. She sat down next to him instead of across from him and she smiled over at him. “At least we’re doing some things right. We’re eating at a table together. Like a real couple. Or at least the ones I read about.”
“Which ones were those?” He questioned with a smile, since he enjoyed hearing about the fictional people she’d come to know in her years of captivity. Most of them he’d only seen in movies.
“The books described a family as a mother, father and children. But before the children there was a mother and a father who fell in love. The father works, the mother cares for the house and meals and eventually the children. You know what I’m talking about.”
“Well, that’s…yes, that’s one way of all that working out. There’s a few thousand different ways for a family to be a family, but that’s one method people have chosen. There’s not really just one default image a family looks like. They get…complicated. Sometimes in good ways, sometimes not.” He said with a darker expression, finally settling into his French toast.
“What?” She said with an obviously concerned expression. “What’s wrong? What did I say?” His expressions weren’t impossible to read, but she was still learning to read him.
“Nothing, nothing.” He smiled faintly. “I’m just remembering my mom and dad. They tried to keep that kind of life up. It just…didn’t work out real well.”
Candra leaned in and kissed the side of his neck. “Are we going to be like that? Do you think it’s even possible?” It was strange to talk about their relationship in such a serious way, but only a few weeks felt like years. It felt like she would never find anyone like him and so it made no sense to do anything slow.
“I don’t know. I can’t tell the future.” He didn’t say it sadly, but he was still very reserved when talking about their relationship. Not that he was still fighting it, since he knew he really couldn’t, but just because every day he had to walk out their front door and see Aura’s small house set apart from everyone else’s. “But I think the kind of family you’re talking about was the kind where the dad goes to work all day, comes home with a briefcase, the wife is wearing an apron, puts dinner on the table. Dad talks to the kids about how their day was at school, gripes about his job, then goes and watches the news for three hours before going to bed. Sound about right?”
“I guess that’s right, yes.”
He shook his head. “That’ll never be me.” He said it with the same look in his eyes that told her he was thinking about his parents, but then looked at her and pulled her in to kiss her on the cheek. “But I wouldn’t want that to be you either.”
She pressed her forehead to his afterwards for just a moment before she went back to eating. Slowly. “Is it wrong? For us to be happy together?”
“No.” He said without hesitation, though he didn’t return to his food as he looked over at her so that she could see he meant what he said. “It isn’t. And it won’t be. Please don’t think that that’s how I feel about it. It’s just…” Orlando took another bite of French toast and chewed slowly as he thought of a way to finish that phrase. “Not what I expected. But that’s not a bad thing.”
Candra nodded slowly and she ate in silence for a little while longer before she spoke again. “What are we going to do about the Fulness?”
He knew the question was the elephant in the room for a long time, but he hadn’t realized she would actually be the one to bring it up first. Here he was, older than he generally cared to admit, and this twenty-something was being more mature about the situation than he was. “How are they normally for you? Did they let you run free at all during them, or did you have to stay down in your… home the whole time?”
“I don’t…I didn’t run during the Fulness.” There was a lot of changing the way she talked about her life, mentioning things in the
