Archive of Our Own

Nico pushed through the door and walked into the classroom he would be teaching in soon enough. He hadn’t been hired yet, hadn’t even interviewed, but he knew he would have the job secured within the hour. He approached the community center board - a couple of members smiling at him as he approached, the rest not even acknowledging his presence - and the woman at the center of the table said, “Hello, are you here to interview for one of the teaching positions?”

“Yes I am,” Nico answered. “The cooking class, specifically.”

“Great! And what are your qualifications?”

“I’m Italian.” Each member of the board frowned up at him. “Let me cook something for you.”

As Nico walked them through his process and presented the board with a surprisingly simple dish, he was hired on the spot. 

Will was lucky to have graduated with job offers already on the table, so the same day that he received his Master’s degree, he hopped on a plane to New York. He had an apartment lined up, though the lease didn’t start for another week, and he only had a single suitcase’s worth of clothes to hold him over until the rest of his belongings shipped. Admittedly, he hadn’t set himself up for a great first week as a real adult, but he knew he would figure something out. Hopefully sooner rather than later, too.

He fired his phone up once he got off the plane, ignoring most of the texts and emails that came through immediately when all he really wanted was to find a hotel somewhere. As he was skimming through his notifications, one text in particular caught his eye.

From: Piper the Great; congrats on graduating!! we have to meet up soon, I feel like I haven’t seen you in FOREVER!! text me when you’re free and we can get dinner or something!!

Rather than responding, Will hit the call button next to Piper’s name, and held the phone up to his ear. “Hey Piper, you’re still living in New York, right? Is there any chance you’ve got a couch I could crash on for a few nights?”

“Oh, sure, you don’t call in months, and now you expect a free place to stay?” she started, sounding so serious that Will winced, though she continued with, “Of course you can. Go get a cab, I’ll text you my address.”

“Thanks, Piper, you’re a lifesaver,” Will told her. 

“No problem, Sunny D,” she replied, and Will had to fight the sudden urge to hang up on her just for bringing up that old nickname. “I’ll see you soon!”

“Right back at you, Lightning McLean,” he shot back in revenge.

“Oh, you watch yourself, Solace, or I won’t let you in once you get here.”

“You wouldn’t do that to me, you love me too much.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Will found his way out of the airport - only adding a few minutes to his stay in the airport when he got turned around - and to the line of taxis that were waiting outside for customers, then read Piper’s address off to the cab driver once he had sat down in the backseat. The cab ride was plenty long enough for Will to call his mom and let her know that his flight landed safely, as well as listen to everything that had happened in Texas since he had last called her right before his flight took off. 

He was still on the phone with her even as he climbed out of the cab and collected his suitcase, repeatedly trying to get her attention to end the call in the nicest way possible even as Piper walked out the door of her apartment building and started making faces at him - it was like they were in undergrad all over again.

“Mama,” Will tried again, trying to avoid looking directly at Piper so that he wouldn’t laugh. “Mama, I gotta go, I’m outside Piper’s apartment--”

“Oh, Piper’s there? I miss Piper! Say hi to her for me, would you?” his mother replied, and Will rolled his eyes.

“She says hi,” Will stated blandly, and Piper darted forward to take the phone from his hand. 

“Hi, Ms. Solace,” Piper said cheerfully, hurrying away from Will before he could snatch his phone back. “Yes, I’ll keep an eye out for him. I’ll keep you updated, of course. No, I won’t let him anywhere near my kitchen, I can promise you that. Of course, I’ll talk to you soon. Love you too!” 

Piper spun back around with a smile, holding Will’s phone out to him. “Your mom says bye.”

“Gee, thanks,” Will replied, and took the phone. He grabbed the handle of his suitcase and tipped it onto its wheels, pushing and pulling it back and forth a short distance in impatience. “Are you ever going to invite me in?”

“What are you, a vampire? Maybe give your best friend a hug, and then we can go inside.”

Will sighed, “Fine,” and stepped toward Piper with his arms outspread as Piper did the same, though at the last second, Will ducked down and wrapped his arms around Piper’s waist, picking her up off the ground and propping her over his shoulder. He grabbed the handle of his suitcase once more and started toward Piper’s apartment building.

“William Andrew Solace, put me down!” Piper shouted, fists pounding on Will’s back and legs kicking wildly, though any intimidation factor she might have had was negated by her raucous laughter.

While he had no intention of putting her down, Will realized that he wouldn’t be able to walk through the door without bashing Piper’s head into it, so he reluctantly set her back on her feet. Though as soon as they both walked through the door, Piper jumped onto Will’s back and insisted on being carried the rest of the way up to her apartment in retaliation. Will did his best to ignore the weird looks the security guard at the front desk gave them.

Will struggled to carry Piper while he pulled his suitcase behind himself, but at least Piper hit the elevator buttons for him, so that was one less thing to worry about. They had made it about halfway up to Piper’s floor before the elevator doors opened and a twenty-something guy walked on, eyes glued to his phone aside from the second it took to hit the button for two floors up. Somehow, he failed to notice Will and Piper and the situation they were in - or maybe he just didn’t care. The doors opened again shortly after and the guy walked out. Just as the doors started to close again, Will and Piper shouted, “Take the stairs, asshole!” Will glanced back at Piper with a grin. Just like old times.

Will dumped Piper unceremoniously on the couch once they finally reached her apartment. “Cool, so, I’d love to catch up, but I haven’t peed since California, so if you could point me toward the nearest bathroom, that would be great.”

Piper, still laying on the couch, pointed across the room and said, “Around the corner.”

Five minutes later, once Will had returned from the bathroom and Piper had made up the couch as Will’s temporary bed, the two flopped down as Will said, “Alright, highlights of the last year, then I say we go to bed, and we can elaborate tomorrow.”

“Deal,” Piper said. “I’ll go first. Let’s see… I got promoted to head of my PR team, which came with a raise so I could afford to move into this apartment, and do you remember that guy, Jason, that I told you about? I’m still with him, and you won’t be able to avoid meeting him this time around.”

“Ugh, fine,” Will replied overdramatically. He was happy for Piper, of course he was, but he had never been one for making friends - he could never stay in one place for too long, and making friends just made it so much harder for him to leave when the time came. Piper had only managed to weasel her way into Will’s life because she was stubborn. “My turn?” he asked, and she nodded. He started counting off on his fingers. “Alright… Well, I moved a couple of times, and I graduated...obviously. I dunno, I’ve been pretty focused on school, so I haven’t had time for much else.”

Piper rolled her eyes, but it wasn’t as subtle as she probably hoped it was. “Two years of grad school, and not a single date? You didn’t even flirt with anybody?”

“I mean, I guess there was one girl that I talked to a few times, but I didn’t do anything about it because I was too busy moving. Again.”

“Was that move by choice or by force?” She raised an eyebrow at him.

Will sighed. “I wouldn’t necessarily say it was by force.”

“Were you asked to leave your apartment by your neighbors, your landlord, or the police?”

“None of those.” He looked away and scratched at the back of his neck as he muttered, “Fire department.”

“Please tell me you didn’t burn down a building.”

“I didn’t! It was just a little smoke! For...the fifth time that month.”

Piper leaned forward, hiding her face in her hands, torn between laughing at her friend and crying over his stupidity. “Why do people keep renting you apartments? Or an even better question might be: why do you keep renting apartments that have kitchens in them?”

“You can’t get an apartment that doesn’t have a kitchen in it,” Will argued.

“Clearly, you need to look harder. This is New York, you can find anything here. You could probably find a whole building that only has communal bathrooms.”

“Oh, gross! I lived in a dorm for three years, I’m not going back to that! Besides, I already have an apartment lined up, I just can’t move in yet.”

Piper nudged him with her foot. “I wasn’t telling you to get the communal bathrooms, stupid. God, you’re like the brother I never wanted.”

Will grinned. “Right back at you.”

Will crashed on Piper’s couch for four nights as he started his new job, and was able to move his single suitcase into his new apartment before the rest of his belongings shipped and finally arrived the day after. Piper came over to help him get everything into his apartment, and forced Will to go grocery shopping while Piper unpacked all of his clothes - she knew he would be living out of his suitcase for months otherwise.

She left for her own apartment shortly after Will returned with his groceries, but not before checking to see whether he had bought any foods that required they be cooked with either an oven or a stove. Thankfully, she saw mostly raw fruits and vegetables - the same foods Will had eaten all throughout undergrad in order to survive - though she watched him stuff a few frozen pizzas into his freezer as well.

Piper forced Will into a hug before she left, and made him promise not to burn the place down. Really, she should have known better than to trust him so much. 

She returned the next night with a fire extinguisher to replace the empty one that now sat beside Will’s trash can. Will was on his knees, cleaning out the charred remains of what once was Will’s dinner from his oven. He glanced up when he heard Piper walking through the door, but returned to his cleaning in a second. 

“Hey, Pippin, can you give me a hand?” Will asked, sounding worn out, almost more annoyed than tired. 

Piper set the fire extinguisher on the counter and crossed her arms over her chest. “You can’t keep doing this, Will.”

“It’s not like I set the thing on fire on purpose,” Will argued, scrubbing at the bottom of the oven with more force.

“You’re an adult--”

“I know that--”

“Not knowing how to cook is a really dumb way to die, Will!”

Will threw his sponge against the back wall of the oven before he twisted around and dropped onto the ground with a huff. “Yeah, well, practice leads to more fire, so I guess I’ll die either way.”

Piper rolled her eyes, feeling anger rising up inside of her as she felt an argument coming on, before a simple solution came to mind. “Or--” she snapped her fingers in front of his face a few times as if to gather his attention - which she already had - as her eyes lit up with excitement, “--you could practice in a controlled environment. You could take cooking classes.”

“I’m not in high school, I can’t just sign up for Home Ec.”

“No, not Home Ec, stupid. There are community centers around here that have cooking classes. I know a guy who teaches one of them, so I can ask him when his next class starts, and maybe you can sign up for it.”

Will sighed. “I don’t need to take cooking classes, Piper. I’ll be fine on my own.”

“Fine, suit yourself,” she replied with a shrug. “Have fun cleaning.”

“Wait, you’re not going to help me?” Will called as Piper headed back toward the door. 

She shot a grin at him over her shoulder. “You said you would be fine on your own. See you later, Sunny D!”

Unfortunately for Will, he was not, in fact, fine on his own. However, he did use his new fire extinguisher within forty-eight hours of Piper dropping it off, but that didn’t stop the smoke alarm from going off and forcing an evacuation of Will’s entire building. He sat on the curb across the street, watching as a few firefighters left the building with the cause for the alarm: Will’s frozen pizza. He sent up a silent prayer to whoever might have been listening that the firefighters not walk over to him and give him a lecture on fire safety - he had heard plenty of those before, and didn’t need his new neighbors figuring out who was going to be lighting accidental fires so often.

Will pulled his phone from his pocket and scrolled through his contacts until he found Piper’s name, and hit call. She answered after three rings.

“What’s up, Willow Tree?” she asked in an overly cheery voice. 

“I may have had to use that fire extinguisher you brought me,” Will told her, trying to keep his voice down so that his neighbors wouldn’t overhear and give him away to the rest of the building . “And, uh, this time the fire department was called.”

“Ah. So, you’re talking so quiet because you’re out on the street with all of your neighbors because they made you all leave the building,” Piper said. 

“Yeah,” Will sighed. “Anyway, do you think you could sign me up for that cooking class you told me about?”

Will could hear the smile she was wearing as soon as she replied. “Oh, I already did.”

Nico’s beginner’s cooking class met every Tuesday and Thursday evening and lasted for three weeks. Usually, his students consisted of college students who never learned how to cook or retirees in the search for new recipes or something to do with their free time. Every so often, there would be someone in their thirties who had never even learned the basics of cooking - they were usually the ones that Nico needed to keep an eye on the most.

It was the start of a new month which meant the beginning of a new set of classes. There were six kitchen stations throughout the room - seven, if Nico’s was included - and each of them was claimed by the time the clock struck six. 

Nico cleared his throat to get his students’ attention before he said, “Hello everyone, and welcome to Cooking for Beginners. My name is Nico, and this is my fifth time teaching this class, yet I still haven’t found a good way to introduce myself. Anyway, since this is a beginner’s class, I’m not expecting culinary excellence from any of you, just, you know, understanding and execution of basic cooking skills. We won’t be cooking anything too complicated in the next few weeks, but the dishes will be increasingly difficult - hopefully nothing you all can’t handle.

“Now, before we get into any actual cooking, I’d like to get a feel for all of your skill levels to know what I should expect from each of you. We’ll start at this table up front and work towards the back. Just tell me your name and your favorite thing to cook.”

With the beginner’s class, Nico always knew that the favorite thing to cook question would be a bit of a dangerous game. Some of his students had learned how to cook a single meal in high school that was a little bit more complicated than anything they would be cooking in class, but he always had at least one student per class who barely knew how to reheat leftovers. And there was usually some dumbass who confused favorite thing to cook with favorite thing to eat, which were on two completely different spectrums. 

He was happy to hear that five out of his six students had greater cooking abilities than just microwaving instant noodles, but it was the sixth that gave him some very mixed emotions. He had taken the furthest kitchen station from Nico’s which must have been how Nico had missed seeing him until now, and the only words Nico could think to use to describe him were tall, blond, and beautiful. 

And then he opened his mouth.

“My name’s Will,” he started - so far so good - but then continued, “and I guess my favorite food to cook would be, um, frozen pizza.”

Was Nico only attracted to idiots?

That didn’t matter, Nico probably wasn’t allowed to date one of his students anyway - was that actually a rule? Maybe he would have to ask his supervisors - so he would just have to keep an eye on Will instead, in more ways than one.

“Alright, we’re going to start off nice and easy today so that I can see you all in action,” Nico told them. “You all have bread, cheese, butter, and a can of tomato soup at your stations, as well as all of the pots, pans, and utensils you’ll need to make two grilled cheese sandwiches with a side of tomato soup. Normally, I would walk you through what we’re making before we start, but I do need to gauge what you’re all capable of on your own.” 

He tried not to eye Will specifically as he said, “Just to make sure, you do all know how to make a grilled cheese, right?” Each of them nodded, though Will’s nod seemed hesitant. Nico raised an eyebrow in his direction to see if Will would speak up, but when he didn’t, Nico said, “Alright, get to work. I’ll be walking around to make sure nobody starts any accidental fires, but other than that, you’re on your own.”

Nico couldn’t decide if he should linger near Will’s station - to watch him cook and for no other reason - or split his time between each of the stations, and after a moment decided on a happy medium. He checked in on the nearest station and worked his way back until he had finally reached Will’s station. Luckily, everyone else was competent enough on their own to make a simple sandwich, though once Nico reached Will’s station, he found him struggling.

“Your soup is boiling over,” Nico said calmly, and watched as Will practically lunged in order to pull the pot off the burner. He stepped into Will’s kitchen and found a plate sitting on a small section of otherwise empty counter, and on the plate appeared to be a square of charcoal. He picked up the plate and held it out. “Uh, Will? Is this your first sandwich?”

Will glanced at it, his face flushing in embarrassment as he turned back to his second sandwich. “Call it a practice round?”

Nico sighed and set the plate aside. “Will, I have a feeling we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other.”

With such a short cooking time for the first class’s recipe, Nico was able to get home almost an hour earlier than he was used to, and found Jason lounging on the couch while eating his dinner and watching TV. Nico marched into the living room and shoved Jason’s feet off the couch so that he could flop down himself, crossing his arms with a huff.

“You’re home early,” Jason said, his eyes not leaving the screen in front of him, before stuffing a spoonful of cereal into his mouth. Nico internally rolled his eyes at Jason’s choice of dinner and considered pointing out the correct time to eat breakfast cereal, but he had already lost this same argument too many times to try again - Nico refused to budge: cereal was a breakfast food only.

“First class,” Nico replied.

“Any master chefs?” 

This time, Nico rolled his eyes for real. “Of course not, it’s the beginner’s class.”

Jason paused. “Any idiots?”

Nico tipped his head back with a groan, grinding the heels of his palms into his eyes. “Yes! He’s so stupid. He’s like, when you google the definition of dumb blond, his picture pops up. He served a lump of coal that was supposed to be a grilled cheese sandwich, but god, he looked so pretty while he was doing it.”

Jason tried to keep himself from laughing by shoving more cereal into his mouth, then slipped his phone out of his pocket to open up his texts to Piper. 

To: Pipes <3; We have liftoff

From: Pipes <3; what the hell does that mean???

To: Pipes <3; Nico’s complaining to me about an attractive dumb blond from tonight’s class. That has to be your friend, right?

From: Pipes <3; hot and stupid? sounds like will to me

To: Pipes <3; Should I be jealous?

From: Pipes <3; gross babe hes like my brother

From: Pipes <3; omg hang on will just showed up at my apartment updates to follow

Piper practically ran out of her apartment and down the hall to the elevator, finding Will on the other side of the security desk in the lobby.

“Hey, Argus, he’s with me,” Piper said, and the security guard nodded, gesturing for Will to pass. As Will and Piper made their way up to her apartment, Piper asked, “What’s up, Willow Tree?”

“I went to that cooking class you signed me up for and I made a complete fool of myself in front of the teacher,” Will told her, his face red and his eyes looking anywhere and everywhere, as long as it wasn’t at Piper. “I can never go back there, I swear.”

“Aw, poor baby,” Piper teased as she let them into her apartment. “Tell me what happened.”

Piper sat down on one end of the couch, expecting Will to sit on the opposite end, though really she should have expected him to collapse across the thing and lay with his head in her lap. She rolled her eyes at his actions but ran her fingers through his hair anyway.

“I made a fool of myself, what else is there to say?” he whined.

“Did you set something on fire?”

“No--”

“Congratulations.”

“Shut up!” Will glared up at her. “I’ve cooked without lighting fires before.”

“I have a hard time believing that, but if not that, then what’s the problem?”

“He’s hot and he probably thinks I’m an idiot!” Will complained, then hid his face in his hands with a groan. “He said he’d never seen someone overcook tomato soup so bad that it turned into a paste. And he said we’d be seeing a lot of each other, like I’m the only incompetent person in the class! And this was the easy day! I can never go back there again, I swear. If I made that much of a fool of myself, just think about how bad it’ll be for the next three weeks! I can’t keep embarrassing myself in front of the most attractive man alive, Piper!” By the time he had finished shouting, he’d waved his hands around with such aggression that he’d almost smacked Piper in the face more than a few times. 

Piper caught one of Will’s hands before it could make contact, and smirked. “The most attractive man alive, huh?” Liftoff, indeed.

“Shut up, that is so not the point!”

The next Tuesday, the class made tacos. Will had successfully managed to survive the second class without burning the place down, though he had started a minor fire that he put out before anyone else noticed - or at least that’s what he hoped. He had less confidence in his abilities this week, however. Mostly because he couldn’t take his eyes off Nico. 

He hadn’t really paid attention to the directions Nico gave at the beginning of class, so Will was certain he had done things out of order. He burned the ground beef because Nico was within ten feet of him, and Will’s eyes were glued to Nico’s legs (read: his ass) in those skinny jeans. Why did he have to torture Will in such a way?

Will ended up forgetting about the taco seasoning altogether because at the same second that Will went to add it, Nico caught him staring, and the seasoning packet slipped from Will’s fingers, now lost to the void (or more likely: half-kicked under the stove). He moved on to chopping up lettuce, tomato and onions, which all came out messy and uneven, and ended up with Will nearly cutting off one of his fingers when he heard Nico’s voice close beside him saying, “How’s it going, Will?”

“Fine!” Will announced far too quickly, and glanced up to see Nico watching him intently, a curious look on his face like he was trying to read Will’s mind. Will really hoped he couldn’t because all he would hear would be, god he’s so pretty, how can one man be so pretty?

They held eye contact long enough that it became awkward - though Will was so frozen that he couldn’t have looked away even if he wanted to - when Nico finally glanced down at Will’s stove and said, “Your meat is smoking.”

Will choked on his next breath. “My what?”

Nico raised an eyebrow. “Your ground beef is about to catch on fire, Will.”

Will started to repeat himself before he finally dragged his gaze away from Nico to see smoke pouring from his pan. “Oh, shit!” Will shut off the burner and pulled the pan away from the heat. By the time he looked up again, Nico had moved on to another table. Will sighed, feeling himself flush with embarrassment, and went back to chopping vegetables. 

Within ten minutes, Nico was making his final rounds to assess everyone’s cooking, and Will felt his anxiety spike as he looked down at the terrible state his kitchen was in. Before he knew it, Nico was standing in front of him, eyeing the food he’d prepared, and Nico said, “No offense, Will, but I think that if I eat that, I might die.”

Will ducked his head and scratched at the back of his neck. “Yeah, I thought you might say something like that.”

Nico started giving Will advice on how to improve - something about slicing the vegetables more evenly and keeping a closer eye on the stove to keep from starting any fires - but Will just nodded along without listening. Somehow, he felt like his cooking abilities were getting even worse the more time he spent looking at Nico. It seemed pretty safe to say that Nico would be the death of him. By association, at least - it would technically be a grease fire that would probably, actually, take him out. 

“His kitchen almost caught on fire while I was standing right there!” Nico announced as he threw himself onto the couch next to his roommate. “I think I’m intimidating him, or something. I came over to ask how things were going and he had this wide-eyed stare like he was afraid of me. He didn’t even realize that his food was smoking!”

“Maybe he’s embarrassed,” Jason suggested with a shrug. “Or maybe he thinks you’re hot.”

Nico rolled his eyes. “Shut up, Jase. I’m not going to get my hopes up when I don’t even know that he’s not straight. I don’t know anything about him, other than that he’s a shit cook.”

“Maybe you should offer him private lessons. Teach him to cook outside of class, spend some time one-on-one. Then you might kill two birds with one stone.”

“I’m not doing that.”

“Or you could skip a few steps and just as him out now.”

“Shut up, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Unfortunately for Nico, he spent the next few days with Jason’s words repeating in his head, telling him over and over again that he should ask Will out - despite the fact that Nico had no idea if Will was even gay. He ended up distracted during one of his more advanced cooking classes, thinking more about Will than he was about not over-whisking his eggs. It was even worse the next night when he saw Will again.

It really wasn’t fair that the pretty ones were always so stupid. Or maybe Nico had been cursed to only be attracted to men who were incapable of using a stove. Or there was the incredibly unlikely chance that Nico was destined to have a trophy husband who was the perfect arm candy but couldn’t hold a conversation to save his life. Dear God, please let there be another option.

They were making chicken alfredo and garlic knots in class that night. Thankfully, none of his students knew just how terribly Nico had messed up his sauce - it was somehow burnt and lumpy at the same time because Nico had glanced up in the middle of sprinkling in parmesan cheese to see Will running a hand through his hair which caused Nico to accidentally pour far too much cheese into his saucepan at once. 

Once he had finished his demonstration, Nico started his usual rounds, working from the kitchen station closest to him back to Will at the opposite end of the room. Everyone in the class could handle themselves perfectly fine for the most part - aside from Will, of course, but that much was obvious - and to be completely honest, none of them drew Nico’s attention as much as Will had, so Nico hadn’t really bothered to learn any of his other students’ names. He slowly made his way back to Will’s kitchen station, both eager and anxious to talk to him again, though once he finally reached Will, he frowned. 

“You don’t have your oven on,” Nico pointed out. 

“Oh, right, it has to preheat,” Will said, and switched his oven on. 

“You were supposed to put the garlic knots in the oven before you started on the alfredo sauce.”

Will glanced up at him, his cheeks growing faintly pink, and Nico thought his heart might have skipped a beat. “Right. Sorry, I guess I just got a little...confused.” He stepped away from the stove and started measuring out ingredients for the garlic knots based on the recipe sheets Nico had left in each of the kitchen stations.

“If you leave your sauce like it is, then it’s going to burn before you even add the cheese,” Nico reminded him.

Will made a noise of complaint, almost like a whine, and slide back over to the stove to keep working on the sauce. 

Nico sighed. He stepped up to Will and placed a hand on his shoulder, pushing him away slightly. “Alright, you make the garlic knots, and I’ll finish this for you. Otherwise, you’ll end up with three different ways to ruin your dinner.”

“Not like that’s any different from usual,” Will muttered, probably not intending for Nico to hear him, then said louder, “Thank you.” Will returned to the bowl of ingredients on the nearby counter, starting to create the dough. 

Nico did his best to really focus this time, wanting to make the sauce correctly - not that Will would know if Nico did something wrong, and would probably think that it had been his own fault if he did find anything off. Once he had finished with the sauce, he looked over to see that Will had made the dough for the garlic knots and was working on shaping them, though he appeared to be struggling somewhat. 

Nico removed the sauce from the heat so that it wouldn’t burn before he moved beside Will and reached out for a small handful of dough. He quickly shaped it in his hands, and got Will’s attention to show him how to tie the knot.

Will looked down at Nico, nodding slightly to show that he understood, and easily twisted the dough into a knot. His smile could have lit up a room, and Nico’s heart stopped at the sight. Oh, he was so screwed. 

Jason and Piper tried to schedule their stay-at-home dates on nights where Nico was teaching his class so that they could have plenty of alone time before Nico returned home. Of course, they could easily just spend their date nights at Piper’s apartment and avoid Nico altogether, but then they would miss out on Nico’s leftovers. 

The couple was cuddling on the couch - Jason watching a movie while Piper occasionally showed him funny pictures on her phone - when Nico returned home. He stormed into the living room with the same disdain as always, and glared down at Piper’s feet where they sat on his usual seat on the couch.

His glare traveled up from Piper’s feet to where she was holding up a peace sign and grinning at him. “Oh. You’re here,” Nico grumbled. 

Piper dropped her peace sign, holding a hand to her chest instead, as though flattered. “Aw, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me!”

“Don’t be an ass, Nico, we all know you like Piper,” Jason commented, keeping his eyes on the TV.

Nico considered his words for a second before slowly stating, “I don’t... hate her.” With that, he turned on his heel and started to leave, though he only managed to round the corner of the couch before Piper stopped him.

“Hey, what did you cook tonight?” 

Nico turned back and cocked an eyebrow. “Alfredo.”

Piper sat up from where she was leaning against Jason’s side, eyes widening in excitement as she exclaimed, “Oh, please tell me you brought leftovers! I love your alfredo.”

Nico rolled his eyes and continued on his way back to the kitchen. Piper relaxed against Jason once again, about to ask Jason what had just happened in the movie when Nico dropped a tupperware dish of alfredo onto her lap.

“Oh, hell yeah!” 

Nico dropped down into the nearest chair, slouching until his heels reached the edge of the coffee table. “I ate all the garlic knots.”

Jason gasped. “You asshole! You know I love garlic knots!”

Piper cracked open the lid of the tupperware, looking like she was about to dig right in, though she hesitated. “You didn’t bring me a fork.”

“Eat it with your hands.”

Piper shrugged and picked up a single fettuccine noodle with her fingers and popped it into her mouth.

“Oh, gross,” Jason said,  plucking the tupperware dish out of Piper’s hands before standing up. “Don’t do that. I’m getting you a fork.”

“Thanks, babe!” Piper called after him as he made his way into the kitchen. “So, Nico, how was class tonight? It was the beginner’s class, right?”

“Yeah,” Nico replied. He slipped his phone out of his pocket and looked like he was scrolling through Twitter or something. “It was fine.”

“Any master chefs?”

Nico lowered his phone just far enough that he count squint at Piper across the living room. “You need to stop hanging out with Jason.”

Piper frowned. “What? Why?”

“That’s the exact same thing that he said after the first class.”

At that moment, Jason came back, returning the tupperware - now warmer than before - and handing a fork to her. He pressed a kiss to the top of her head before he walked around the couch and reclaimed his seat. 

“Aw, babe, we know each other so well,” Piper told him. She leaned back against Jason once again and stuffed a big bite of alfredo into her mouth. “So, Nico, any himbos?”

“Any what?” Nico and Jason asked simultaneously. 

With her mouth full and her words slurred, Piper explained, “You know, himbos. Like bimbos? But they’re guys. Hot guys that are unbelievably stupid. Got any of those?”

“Can you please not talk with your mouth full,” Nico said tiredly, as though this hadn’t been the first - or even hundredth - time he had had to ask that of her. 

Piper rolled her eyes, and made a show of chewing and swallowing the pasta before she repeated herself. 

“Um,” Nico started, “maybe…?” His gaze drifted from Piper to Jason, and his eyes narrowed at the sight of his best friend. “Oh. You told her, didn’t you?”

“Well, I do tell her everything, so. Yeah,” Jason told him. “She is my girlfriend, after all.”

Piper grinned as though she had won some kind of competition. “So, tell me about him. How hot is he? How stupid? On scales of one to ten.”

Nico sighed. “He’s tall, hot, blond. He burns everything he touches.” He shrugged. “Not much else to say.”

Piper nodded solemnly. She twisted her fork in the alfredo and lifted a bite to her mouth, though she paused to say, “You know this means you’re morosexual.” She stuffed the bite into her mouth. 

Nico dropped his phone onto his lap and sighed. “What are you talking about.”

This time, Piper waited until she had swallowed the bite before speaking. “If he’s a himbo, and you’re attracted to him, then clearly, you’re morosexual. Someone attracted to idiots.”

Nico huffed and pushed himself up out of his seat. As he started to leave, he said, “Those aren’t words. Talk to me again when you decide to speak a language I understand.”

For the final class, Nico handed out a recipe for chocolate chip cookies and told his class to get to work without doing a demonstration beforehand. While his students prepared their cookies, Nico brought out the little class completion certificates that he was required to pass out to the people who passed on the last day. Luckily, he had a class list to go off of so that he wouldn’t have to awkwardly ask each of his students for their names before handing them a certificate, though he still hadn’t quite figured out how to distribute the certificates without making it known that he didn’t know anyone’s name.

Once he had finished with the certificates, he left them at his kitchen station before he started making his rounds. As usual, just about everyone was working just fine on their own - most of them had made chocolate chip cookies at some point in their lives, anyway - and even Will seemed to be alright, though Nico wasn’t expecting that to last too much longer. 

As his students finished up, they called Nico over for a final assessment. Some had burnt cookies, others’ weren’t cooked all the way through. Nico handed out certificates and dismissed those who had finished - and only guessed one name incorrectly, which he was pretty proud of. 

After he dismissed the last student - whose name, he just learned, was Nyssa, apparently - he made his way over to Will, who was struggling to scrape burnt cookies off his cookie sheet, and didn’t even notice when Nico first walked up. 

“Did you burn all of your cookies?” Nico asked.

Will’s head snapped up in surprise. “Um. They aren’t all this bad. The rest are over there, if you want to try one.”

Nico walked toward the plate of cookies that Will had set on the counter and picked the least-burnt cookie he could find, breaking it first with his hands before taking a bite. He almost spit it right back out. “Holy shit, how much salt did you put in these?”

Will glanced over his shoulder at him with a frown. “I followed the recipe exactly!” He abandoned his last batch of cookies as he grabbed the recipe sheet, reading it and then holding it out for Nico to see. “A tablespoon of salt, that’s how much a used.”

Nico looked from the recipe to Will and back again a couple of times, making sure that he was in fact looking at salt and tsp. “That says teaspoon, Will.”

“What? No, it doesn’t.” Will ripped the paper out of Nico’s hand and frowned at it, realization slowly blooming on his face before his cheeks grew pink in embarrassment. “God, I’m such an idiot,” Will groaned, dropping the recipe and burying his face in his hands. “I didn’t pass, did I?”

Nico stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and ducked his head, hating the way that Will looked so disappointed in himself. “I mean, It’s not exactly a pass/fail system, since, you know, this isn’t high school. And really, the only way for you to fail is if you burn your station down, but I’m pretty sure that any fires you started got put out while my back was turned.”

“There weren’t any actual fires,” Will muttered, lowering his hands. “Just some smoke.”

Nico sighed. “I’m genuinely concerned for your health, Will.”

“I know,” Will whined. “A lot of people are. That’s why I took this class in the first place.”

“I think that if I left here without you being able to cook any better than you did when you got here, then I might legally have to turn myself over to the police for being an accomplice to the arson you’ll inevitably commit when you actually light a kitchen on fire. Or maybe for assisted suicide, since eating nothing but frozen pizza will definitely kill you sooner rather than later.”

At this point, Will’s entire face was bright red, his eyes trained to the floor as one of his hands rubbed at the back of his neck. Maybe it was Nico’s kind and giving heart, or the heartbreaking look on Will’s face - who was he trying to kid? Obviously it was the latter - but Nico took a breath and tried to rationalize the thoughts flying through his head. Was he really about to say this?

“I have a...proposition for you,” Nico said slowly. “I have some free nights in between teaching classes here, so if you want, I could keep teaching you how to cook.”

Will finally met his gaze - and Nico did not get lost in his eyes, thank you - with confusion evident in his features. “But...what’s in it for you?”

Nico shrugged. “I dunno, I won’t have to live with the guilt that you’re going to die at a young age if you don’t change your eating habits? Can’t I just...do something nice?”

“Oh. That… That would be great, actually. Thank you.”

His smile slowly returned, and Nico knew that his intentions were much more selfish than he let on, even if he wasn’t expecting anything more than to just see Will smile a little more often.

“Piper, I’m in crisis.”

Will could practically hear the eye roll through the phone, and he really didn’t appreciate it. Didn’t she understand what a crisis was? Nico was going to show up at Will’s door any minute now to continue to teach him how to cook, and if that wasn’t the definition of a crisis, then Will didn’t know what was.

“I’m serious, Pippin, I’m freaking out!” Will exclaimed, pacing in the entryway of his apartment. “You know that guy from the cooking class, the teacher?”

“Yes, I am aware of him, I signed you up for his class intentionally,” Piper reminded him in a monotone voice.

“He’s coming over, like, right now,” Will said. “Nobody’s ever been here besides you, and I’ve never been, like, a host before! I’ve never even spent that much time with him! The only communication I’ve had with him outside of class was basically just when he texted me to ask for my address.”

“Calm down, Will, he’s just coming over to cook, right?” Piper asked, sounding just as bored and unaffected as before.

“Well, yeah, but we’re going to be cooking together, and then eating together, and that’s a whole lot of together, and it kind of feels like I’m preparing myself for a date, except--” Will nearly choked on his sharp inhale. “Except nothing. Oh God, Piper, this really feels like a date--”

“Woah, Willow Tree, slow down,” she cut in, finally putting some emotion behind her voice and speaking in the way that always calmed Will down. “It’s not a date. He said it himself, he’s just coming over to help you cook, and you need to learn how to cook. Just think of it as an extension to the class, and that when he says you’re capable of cooking on your own, you can cut ties with him. Or if you realize that you actually like spending time with him, then maybe you can think about opening yourself up to having a second friend.”

“I...have more than one friend,” Will insisted. Piper really had a way of pulling the bad thoughts out of his head and replacing them with better ones - she really was the perfect friend to have at times like these. 

“Yeah? Who?” she pressed, though Will knew she wasn’t teasing. This was just another way to keep his mind off of Nico, to stop the flood of panic.

“My...coworkers?” Will tried, though he wasn’t even sure of himself. “I mean, Kayla and Austin are pretty cool, I guess. And there’s this guy, Magnus, who seems pretty nice. I don’t know, I haven’t really had the chance to get to know them yet, but they could be… friends.... someday.”

“I’m glad to hear it, Will,” Piper told him. “So, now that you’re off making friends, I guess you don’t need me anymore, right?”

“No! I mean, no, I do. Piper, c’mon, don’t do this right now. You know how hard this is for me. I can’t--” There was a knock on Will’s door, and his heart stopped. “Oh no, he’s here.”

“So hang up with me and answer the door.”

“I don’t suppose you want to come over for dinner, say, right this second?”

“Answer the door, Will.”

He tried to argue, but Piper had already hung up on him.

Oh well. Nothing left to do now but open the door. Just reach out and open it. Turn the knob and pull the door open. He was thinking it, so why wasn’t his arm moving?

Nico knocked on Will’s door, which was pretty difficult to do with his arms loaded down with grocery bags, but he managed. Though, after a couple of minutes without an answer, Nico started to worry that he either a.) had knocked on the wrong door, or b.) hadn’t knocked loud enough, so he tried again. 

The second his knuckle made contact, the door was ripped open from the other side. 

“Hi!” Will exclaimed, and in that instant, Nico decided that Will looked like an excited golden retriever puppy. That wasn’t a comparison he should be making. He definitely had more important things to be thinking about. What was he getting himself into? “Come on in!”

Will opened the door wider and gestured for Nico to enter, allowing Nico to walk straight in until he found the kitchen - which was buried under boxes. Most of the apartment was littered with unpacked boxes, actually, which Nico noticed as he took a second to scan the area for a place to set the bags of groceries in his arms. He finally turned toward Will and asked, “How long have you lived here?”

He seemed to have just noticed the state his apartment was in. Will practically leapt for the small table across the kitchen and dumped a few of the boxes there onto the ground nearby, then came to take the groceries from Nico. “Sorry about...all of this. It’s been almost two months, but… You know how it is, I’ve been busy with work, and then I was spending a lot of time in your class, so I haven’t really had the time, you know? Wow, I both started and ended that sentence with you know. Sorry.”

Nico probably would have rolled his eyes and told Will to stop apologizing, had he been listening. Instead, while Will was talking, Nico had started walking through the kitchen, his eyes skimming the boxes he passed - none of which were labeled kitchen. “And have these boxes been on the stove that whole time?”

Will swooped in to take one of the boxes off the stove as he said, “Not the whole time. These have just gotten shifted around, sort of. Like, a bunch of boxes got stacked in front of the fridge for a few hours, but obviously they couldn’t stay there, so they got pushed in front of the oven. Then I tried to use the oven - you can probably already guess that that didn’t go well - and the boxes got moved around again. One ended up in the sink at one point. Still not sure how that happened.”

Nico could only watch as Will continued moving boxes out of the kitchen, absolutely dumbfounded by what he was hearing. How was this man still alive? He spoke like he had food somewhere in this apartment, but Nico half expected that he would open the cabinets just to find more boxes inside of them. Did he even have cooking utensils? If he did, would he even have any idea how to use them?

When Will’s words finally sunk in, Nico said, “Woah, hold on, wait a second. You’ve only used your stove once in two months?”

“Huh? Oh, no,” Will replied, stacking another box against the wall. “I’ve used the oven a few times, but I think I’ve only used the stove once.” He seemed to think for a moment before he said, “Yeah, I just used the stove the once, because when I did, I guess I had one of these boxes a little too close on the counter, so it caught on fire. It was super inconvenient, really, because then I had to actually unpack that box even though I didn’t really have the time to do so.”

Nico pinched the bridge of his nose as he tried to think. “Let me get this straight: You haven’t unpacked after two months, you’ve used your stove just one time, and when you did use the stove, you set one of your many unpacked boxes on fire.”

He looked up at Will who was nodding along, appearing completely unfazed by Nico’s words and tone of voice - and Will’s own past actions. “Yep, that’s what I said.”

“Oh my god,” Nico whispered, burying his face in his hands. What have I gotten myself into? When his eyes found Will again, he at least had the decency to start looking embarrassed. “Do you even have cooking supplies? Like, pots and pans? Utensils? I mean, what do you even eat?”

Will ducked his head, scratching at the back of his neck - they had hardly spent any time together, yet Nico was already able to recognize that movement as something Will did whenever he was too embarrassed to make eye contact. “I mean, I have apples and salad and stuff in the fridge. I don’t have to cook to eat.”

“Do you eat those gross microwave meals?”

He paused. “They’re not that bad--”

“Oh my god, okay, we need to get started right now. First thing’s first: please throw out those microwave meals.”

“What? No, I’m not going to waste perfectly good food.”

“That stuff is not food,” Nico argued, though when Will refused to move, Nico held back a groan before saying, “Alright, fine. Keep your fake food. Just...get out a pot and a pan, and some knives and cutting boards, and I’ll start unpacking these groceries.”

Nico made it across the kitchen to where they had left the groceries before he noticed that Will had yet to move from his spot near the stove. He was still scratching at the back of his neck, though now he was glancing around at closed cabinets with a frown on his face. “Will?” Nico prompted, and Will jumped slightly, dropping his arm.

“Sorry, uh, just trying to remember where everything is,” Will replied. He finally stepped toward the cabinets, opening each of them and leaving them open so that Nico could see inside - one had plates and bowls, another had coffee mugs and travel cups, and one had a jar of peanut butter and a few other food items that were unrecognizable from across the room. The rest of them, about five remaining cabinets, were completely bare. After a few moments, Will spun back around to Nico to say, “So, I may not have unpacked any of my cooking supplies. I know I have some!” he continued before Nico could reply. “I just don’t really know where they are.”

“Will, that’s not any better.”

“No, it’s totally fine! Obviously they’re in the apartment somewhere, because everything I own is in these boxes. We just have to find them.” Will walked over to the nearest box, completely disregarding the label of bedroom in big letters across the side, and pulled it open. “Feel free to crack open a box and start looking.”

“I’m not going to start tearing through your stuff, Will, I barely know you,” Nico told him. “Besides, I haven’t seen a single box labeled kitchen since I got here, so I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

“Oh, they’re not labeled correctly, don’t worry about it,” Will told him, already elbow deep into the box.

Was anything in Will’s life actually in order? “What.”

“Yeah, I’ve moved around so much that I’ve just reused all of the boxes, and the last few times I stopped bothering with correct labeling because it took too long. Seriously, it’s cool if you want to look in another box.”

Nico held back a groan. “I’m going to put these groceries in the fridge so they don’t spoil in the two days it takes to find a single cutting board in this place, and then I’m going to make sure your stove actually functions and won’t set me on fire at any point.”

Will turned away with a sigh and grumbled, “That’s probably not a terrible idea. Kind of you to assume it’s the stove’s fault and not mine, though. Thanks for that.”

As Will began his search through box after box, Nico started unloading groceries into the almost-empty fridge - the only items already inside being a brita filter pitcher, a bag of apples, and a small stack of takeout boxes. Once he had everything inside, Nico closed the fridge and moved toward the stove. While they wouldn’t be using the oven that night, he still checked to see whether it turned on, and even tested the broiler to see if it would cause the entire appliance to explode - thankfully, it didn’t. 

He moved to the gas range next, already afraid for the sake of the apartment as soon as the flames ignited on the burner. He lit each burner one by one just to be safe before shutting each of them off, then did a quick test of the microwave to make sure it functioned. Once Nico was satisfied with the functionality of the appliances, he turned back toward the stack of boxes near the table to see that Will had seemingly vanished. 

He called out, “Will? Where did you go?”

“Living room,” his voice came from somewhere to Nico’s left. “Still looking.”

Nico stepped around the corner to see even more boxes scattered around the living room, with Will lost between a few stacks. “You haven’t found any kitchen supplies yet?”

“Oh!” Will said, popping up from behind one of the stacks. “No, I have! I pushed that box away from the rest of them because it has all my pots and pans in it.” He pointed to a lone box in the center of the floor that was sitting half-open, and as Nico moved closer to it, he could indeed see a small stack of saucepans inside.

Nico picked up the box and took it back to the kitchen, calling over his shoulder, “I’m going to pull out what we’ll need, and then put the rest in one of the cabinets, okay?”

“Thank you!” Will said back, though it was muffled as if he had spoken from inside a box. 

After digging through the box, Nico set aside the largest frying pan he could find, as well as a medium-size saucepan, and then unloaded the rest of the pots and pans into the lower cabinet next to the stove. Luckily, also inside the box, Nico found a few utensils - a wooden spoon and a plastic spatula and a whisk among them. He gave the two pans he’d taken out a quick once-over with a sponge and some dish soap just to make sure that they didn’t have a year-old layer of dust on them. When they were clean and dry and waiting on the stove to be used, Nico saw Will cutting through the kitchen to the opposite end of the apartment.

“Find anything else?” he asked.

Will spun around to face him. “Not yet,” Will answered, and threw a thumb over his shoulder, pointing in the direction he’d been heading. “I’ve still got some more boxes over here, though, so I’m ninety-five percent sure that the knives are in there.”

“And cutting boards,” Nico reminded him.

Will dropped his head - half in a nod, half out of exhaustion - and said, “Shit, right, the cutting boards. Yeah, I’ll find those, too.”

He continued on to the next room while Nico leaned back against the counter with a huff, crossing his arms. He glanced around, looking for something else he could do to kill the time. He couldn’t cut up chicken without knives or cutting boards. He didn’t want to start the rice in case it took Will more than half an hour to find everything they needed. And he was not about to start digging through Will’s belongings to help him.

Instead, Nico went into the fridge and pulled out all of the vegetables he’d brought - onions and bell peppers and all of his favorite stir fry ingredients - and started washing them in the sink. He took his time, figuring that at this point it would be midnight before they actually got around to cooking anything, and still managed to finish washing all of them.

After waiting around for another minute with nothing to do, Nico finally gave up and went off in the direction Will had gone. He stopped in the doorway, mostly because the entrance to the room was blocked by boxes just big enough that Nico wouldn’t be able to step over them if he tried, and spotted Will sitting on the floor of his bedroom. He was surrounded on all sides by boxes and a random assortment of items that he must have pulled out in his search. Nico watched as Will reached into the box in front of him and pulled out a knife block, knives and all, and grinned. “Hey, Nico,” he called out, “I found them!” 

“I see that,” Nico replied.

Will’s head snapped up, clearly surprised at Nico’s presence. “Oh! Sorry, I didn’t know you were there.” He got to his feet and stepped around boxes until he could hand Nico the knife block and said, “Here, take these. I’ve got the cutting boards too, so I’ll bring those out after I shove some of this stuff back into these boxes until I have a path out of here.”

With a nod, Nico took the knife block back to the kitchen, and within a few minutes, Will had joined him with a couple of cutting boards.

On the counter, Nico set out the chicken, the vegetables, and the rice. He stepped back and said, “So, we’re going to make stir fry. There are three separate parts: the chicken, the vegetables, and the rice,” and he pointed to each as he named them. “What gets started first?”

For a second, Will didn’t answer, then jumped when he felt Nico’s eyes on him and realized he was looking for an answer. “Oh, uh, were you asking me? Because I couldn’t tell you.”

Nico sighed. “You start by boiling water for the rice.” He picked up the medium-size saucepan and handed it to Will, saying, “Fill this about halfway and set it to boil. Normally, I would use a rice cooker, but something gives me the idea that you don’t have one of those.” 

Instead of setting the pot under the faucet, Will grabbed the bag of rice and tore it open. 

“Will,” Nico said, and Will froze. “You put the water in first.”

“Right! I knew that,” Will said, and dropped the now-open bag of rice, sending grains flying. “Oh, shit!”

As Will frantically tried to scoop up the rice, Nico struggled to hold in his laughter, slapping a hand over his mouth and nose when a snort slipped out.

“I’m sorry! I promise I’m not that stupid; I’m an engineer! I should know better than this!” Will practically shouted, holding about a cup of rice in his hands while his head darted around for a place to put it so that it wouldn’t go to waste. 

“Don’t worry about it, Will,” Nico told him with a smile, setting a hand on his arm. “It’s not a big deal. Just put the rice in a bowl, and we can measure it out later.”

When Nico set his hand on his arm, Will felt a shock travel through his body - or maybe it was the aftershock of the feeling he’d had after hearing Nico’s adorable little snort of a laugh. It was like the Google Chrome tab that was his brain went Aw, snap! and needed about thirty seconds to reboot before he could start dumping the spilled rice into the spare pan that Nico pulled out of the cabinet. 

Nico nodded his head toward the sink. “Alright, get the water, and I’ll scoop up the rest of this.”

Will moved on autopilot as he filled the pot with water, then stepped behind Nico to set it on the stove, not even thinking when he set a hand on Nico’s lower back as if to silently alert him of where Will was. As soon as he realized, Will snapped his hand back to his side, biting back an apology in the hope that, somehow, Nico wouldn’t have noticed that it had happened. 

He lit the burner under the pot and turned his attention back to Nico.

Nico cleared his throat. “So, while the rice is cooking, we need to prepare the chicken,” he instructed - did his cheeks look a little pink, or was that just Will? - and took a knife from the block to slice open the package of chicken breasts that he’d brought. He took out one piece of chicken and set it on the cutting board in front of Will, then handed him a knife before he set the other piece of chicken in front of himself. Will tried to ignore the way their fingers brushed as he took the knife. “First thing you’re going to want to do is trim off the fat - that’s the white-ish pieces that are mostly along the edge - and set those aside to be thrown out.” As he spoke, Nico showed Will what he meant, then nodded to Will once he had finished as if to say, your turn.

Will set his fingers on the chicken to hold it in place, cringing at the slimy feeling beneath his fingertips, and carefully sliced off the fatty parts. 

“Good,” Nico told him. “Now, cut the chicken into cubes. Try to keep them all around the same size so that they’ll all cook evenly.” Nico expertly ran his knife through the meat, leaving it diced into bite-sized pieces in just a few seconds. Will was much slower, naturally, having never done this before, though he was impressed by how similar his product looked to Nico’s. “Great. Now wash your hands before you touch anything else.”

Next came the actual cooking of the chicken. Rather than using oil to fry the chicken, Nico poured a little bit of teriyaki sauce into the pan without any explanation other than, “It’s better this way.” Will wasn’t about to argue; it’s not like he knew any better.

Will was instructed to cook the chicken while Nico got started on cutting up the vegetables, since he figured that it would be more beneficial for Will to learn how to tell when chicken was cooked. After all, undercooked vegetables couldn’t kill a person.

In between giving instructions, Nico asked, “You said you’re an engineer, right?”

“Yeah, I am,” Will replied, stirring the chicken around just as Nico had shown him.

“So, do you, like, design buildings or something?”

Will chuckled. “No, I’m a biomedical engineer.”

“Oh.” Nico drew out the word, as if that simple clarification made everything obvious to him, though the slight furrow of his brow told Will that he had no idea what that meant.

“I design prosthetic limbs and stuff,” Will explained.

“Oh!” Nico said again, this time his voice filled with recognition and surprise. “That’s really cool, Will.”

Will ducked his head in an attempt to hide the blush that was brought on by Nico’s praise. “Well, I haven’t actually made any prosthetics yet. I just got my master’s degree, so I’m stuck in the research lab for a little while making other peoples’ designs before I can make my own. What do you do?”

He looked up from the chicken to see Nico shooting him a dull look, one eyebrow raised. “You mean, besides teaching you how to cook?”

“Oh, right! I’m sorry, forget I asked,” Will rushed out. “I promise, I was serious about not being as stupid as you probably think I am.”

“Relax, Will, I think you’re just as smart as you make yourself out to be.”

Will let the tension drop from his shoulders as he exhaled. “Thanks.” A moment of silence passed between them before Will exclaimed, “Hey, wait! You just called me stupid!” 

Nico started laughing so hard that he had to set down his knife and step away from the counter. Will hoped that the blush that rose up his neck and burned at his ears would be taken as embarrassment and not any kind of reaction to the sound of Nico’s musical laughter. 

Nico was starving by the time they finally sat down at Will’s tiny kitchen table to eat. He’d been a little hungry when he first arrived, and ended up munching on some pieces of raw pepper that he had chopped up while he waited for the chicken to cook through. He was grateful to sit after a couple of hours standing around and pacing back and forth in Will’s kitchen, and even more excited to finally eat. He was even pretty sure the food was safe for consumption, though the chicken ended up slightly burnt.

They had continued to chat throughout the rest of the cooking process and as they sat down to eat. Nico had to try very hard to keep himself from feeling like he was on a date when he took his seat across from Will. Will had tried to better explain his career, though he eventually waved a hand dismissively and said, “I’ll just have to show you sometime,” and Nico had let slip that he worked at a daycare during the day while the cooking classes were just something he did to earn some extra money on the side. When they had both eaten as much as they possibly could, there was still a small mountain of stir fry in the pan on the stove, which Will had immediately decided that Nico should take with him, since he had brought all the ingredients in the first place.

“I’m not taking your food, Will,” Nico insisted, dropping his bowl in the sink and flipping on the faucet to start washing. “First, because I don’t feel like hanging around until the middle of the night just so you can find some tupperware in one of your five hundred boxes. And second, because I would feel much better knowing that you finally had some vegetables to eat for the next few days at least.”

Will frowned, and moved to try to bump Nico away from the sink with his hip, though Nico didn’t budge. “I eat vegetables.”

Nico finished washing out his bowl. He handed Will the sponge, rinsed the last of the soap from the bowl, and grabbed the dish towel that was hanging over the cabinet door beneath the sink to dry it out. He shot Will a disbelieving look as he said, “If it came from a fast food restaurant or a microwave frozen meal, then it doesn’t count.”

Will released a deep sigh. “Fine. I’ll keep the leftovers.”

Piper let herself into Will’s apartment, holding a finger to her lips as Jason followed her inside. She didn’t announce herself just in case Will was asleep somewhere in the apartment - she was here to bother him, but she wasn’t going to disturb his sleep in order to do so. She moved quietly through the apartment, poking her head into Will’s bedroom first before moving across the place to the living room. 

She found Will sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, in front of the couch where most people would put a coffee table or an ottoman. He was surrounded by a ring of papers and folders and indiscernible pieces of colored plastic. He was wearing his reading glasses, though even from across the room Piper could see him squinting at the pages in his hands. She made a mental note to give him the number for her optometrist.

He didn’t move until she said, “Wow, it’s like we’re in undergrad all over again,” though he barely glanced up at her over the top rim of his glasses. 

Will turned back to his papers, and his glasses slid slightly down the bridge of his nose when he tipped his head down. He pushed them back up with a thumb as he said, “Hey, thanks for knocking, please come in.” Considering his reaction, Piper figured Will hadn’t seen Jason standing behind her - he always tried to be more polite around company, and he’d hardly considered Piper company after the fourth or fifth time he’d found her asleep in his dorm bed.

“Don’t be mean, Sunny D,” Piper said with a teasing smile. “Are you busy right now?”

Will took a deep breath, sounding irritated yet holding himself back from flat-out telling Piper to leave. “Oh, I don’t know, I’m just trying to determine the functionality of this artificial kidney that my supervisor designed. Would you consider that busy?”

Piper rolled her eyes. “Alright, asshole, no need to get pissy. I just stopped by on my way out to lunch to see if you wanted to join me, but suit yourself. Sorry for checking in, I guess. I just want to make sure you’re taking care of yourself.”

“I can take care of myself just fine, thank you,” Will told her. He finally set down his papers and lifted his head, leaning back on his hands as he stretched out his back. “I’m not overworking myself, I got almost eight full hours of sleep last night, and I even had a homemade meal last night.”

“Microwave dinners don’t count as homemade, Will.”

“It wasn’t a microwave dinner, it was a reheated in the microwave dinner. I had leftovers from the night before.”

“Oh, you mean from your cooking class?” Piper asked, shooting a look at Jason over her shoulder. He was standing just out of Will’s line of sight, listening - and in no way spying, despite the fact that Piper had intentionally brought him to spy on Will - and occasionally making faces at Piper. The mention of the cooking class had Jason raising an eyebrow.

“I told you, the class ended already. Nico just offered to keep teaching me because he thought I was a danger to society.”

“You are a danger to society.”

“Shut up. Didn’t you say you were going to lunch?”

“I’ll get there. So if you reheated leftovers on your own free will, does that mean you finally learned how to cook something edible?”

“I mean, I had help.” Will ducked his head and picked up another stack of papers as if he was trying to go back to work, though Piper could see a blush rising on his neck and knew that he was just trying to hide his embarrassment. 

Piper shot Jason a look - which he returned - before Piper said to her boyfriend, in her normal volume, “He’s totally in love.”

“I am not!” Will exclaimed, his head snapping up.

As Jason took a single step closer to Piper and revealed his position, Piper saw as Will’s eyes widened and the blush darkened on his face.

“Uh—“ Will’s eyes darted from Jason to Piper and back again, as if checking to make sure Jason really was there, and he jumped to his feet. He hopped over his ring of papers and rushed toward Jason. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize anyone else was here! I’m Will,” he said, and held out his hand for Jason to shake.

“Jason,” he replied, grasping Will’s hand for a couple of seconds. 

“Oh, Jason?” Will glanced at Piper and asked, “The Jason?” Piper nodded and smiled. “It’s so nice to meet you! I’ve heard so much about you.”

“Likewise,” Jason replied. From anyone else’s perspective, Jason probably seemed cold and uninviting, probably even intentionally intimidating, but Piper could see the softness in his eyes and the tiny upturn of his lips at the corner, showing that Will amused him. 

“Well, we’ll let you get back to work,” Piper said, setting a hand around Jason’s bicep. “We have a lunch reservation that we have to get going to, anyway, and since you’re clearly taking care of yourself just fine, we’ll be on our way. Do me a favor and text me a little more often, would you? Maybe that way I won’t just show up in your living room again anytime soon.”

“You don’t mean that,” Will told her, and pulled her in for a hug. 

She pressed a kiss to his cheek. “You’re right, I don’t.” Piper stepped back and grabbed Jason’s hand, then started back toward the door. “Bye, love you! Have fun with your kidney!”

As soon as the two were back out in the hallway, Piper said, “Oh, he is full on, head over heels in love with Nico.”

“I would have said infatuated,” Jason said with a shrug, “but yours works too, I suppose.”

When Will let Nico into his apartment the next time, Nico released a heavy sigh. It looked as though every box that was in the kitchen was in the same exact place as the last time he was there, meaning that Will still had not unpacked a single thing in the last few days. 

“Something wrong?” Will asked when Nico stopped at the entrance to the kitchen. 

“How do you live like this?” Nico gestured to the stack of boxes against the wall.

Will shrugged and took the grocery bags that Nico brought, taking them to the counter when Nico stayed planted in the entryway. “When I moved into my first apartment, I didn’t unpack for six months, and then moved out a month later. I’ve lived here for two months and never unpacked anything until the last time you were here. Did you really think I was going to unpack more in, what, four days? Clearly we don’t know each other very well yet.”

At last, Nico stepped into the kitchen and watched as Will started unloading the groceries onto the counter. “Please tell me that you at least found the rest of your kitchen stuff so we won’t have to waste another hour and a half digging through boxes.”

“Oh, we?” Will teased, shooting Nico a grin. “We dug through boxes? Tell me, Nico, how many boxes did you go through?”

Nico bumped Will with his shoulder. “Alright, I get it--”

“No, no, hang on,” Will cut him off. “I’m trying to remember just what you were doing while I was looking through those boxes. If I’m remembering right, I think you were just putting vegetables in water.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Nico’s head snapped toward Will. “Do you mean that I was washing them?”

Will rolled his eyes. “Sure, washing them. What’s the point of that, even? Like, did you drop them on the floor when I wasn’t looking? I feel like you’re just making up cooking rules because you know that I don’t know what I’m talking about, and you’re just trying to trick me.”

Nico’s jaw dropped at some point during Will’s tiny monologue, unable to believe what he was hearing. It took almost a full minute before he managed to say, “Vegetables grow in dirt, Will.”

“Bell peppers don’t!” Will argued. 

Nico spluttered. “The pesticides! And-- And you don’t know how many gross peoples’ hands have touched them! You have to wash them! I thought you were a doctor!”

“I’m a biomedical engineer, it’s way different!”

“You’re still a...a medical professional, or whatever! How did you not know that you’re supposed to wash vegetables?”

Will buried his face in his hands. “I have never once said this in my life, but can we please just cook something already?”

Nico narrowed his eyes. “You’re lucky I’m hungry. Get a frying pan and a small saucepan.”

As Will took a step toward the cabinet that contained the pots and pans, Nico went in the opposite direction and opened up the fridge. Will saw Nico pull out the butter, and then picked up the loaf of bread off the counter, which Will used strictly for making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to take to work sometimes. For a second, Will found himself frozen in the thought of how quickly Nico had gotten comfortable in Will’s apartment - despite how much he complained about Will’s aversion to unpacking - and was navigating the kitchen like it was his own. It made Will’s heart swell for a moment before he remembered that Nico was nothing more than his teacher, and that he shouldn’t have let himself get on that train of thought in the first place.

But wouldn’t it be great if it was Nico’s kitchen too?

Will wanted to smack himself in the head with the frying pan just to knock the thoughts out of his head. 

As Will looked down at the ingredients laid out on the counter, he frowned. “Are we making grilled cheese sandwiches? We made those in class, why are we doing that again?”

Nico raised an eyebrow up at him. “Do you not remember how that turned out the last time?”

Will thought back to the lump of charcoal he had tried to pass off as food about a month ago, and winced. “Okay, yeah, I get it.”

“Do you remember what to do?” Nico asked, leaning one hip against the counter and giving Will his full attention. It was starting to make Will a little nervous, so he kept his gaze locked on the counter and scratched at the back of his neck. 

“I know that the bread, cheese, and butter all need to end up in a hot frying pan, but I don’t remember which order to do those in,” Will answered. “And the soup gets heated up in a pot.”

“Start with the soup, then.”

With a nod, Will picked up the can of tomato soup and took it to the stove where he’d left the frying pan and small saucepan. He cracked open the can with the pop top, poured the soup into the pot, and lit the burner. “Keep the heat medium-low,” Nico told him. “You don’t want to turn your soup into paste again. And turn on the burner under the frying pan while you’re there.”

Will did as he asked, then stepped back toward Nico. “What now?”

“Where do you keep your silverware?” Will pointed to the drawer at Nico’s hip, and Nico pulled a butter knife out from within. “Take this, and take two pieces of bread. Butter both sides of both pieces, and put them in the pan.”

Will did so, hoping that his movements were normal and not as shaky as he felt, still so nervous under Nico’s intent gaze. He took the bread to the stove and dropped them into the hot pan, hearing the butter sizzle as soon as the bread touched metal. After a second, Nico appeared at his side with a spatula in one hand and a few slices of cheese in the other. Will almost jumped at his sudden appearance. 

“Cheese first, one slice on each piece,” Nico told him, holding out the cheese for Will to take. Will tried desperately to ignore the way their fingers brushed and the way his heart jumped at the feeling he was ignoring. He set one slice of cheese on each piece of bread, just as Nico had instructed, and a moment later, Nico held out the spatula for him. This time, Will was careful about making sure their hands didn’t touch. 

Nico wasn’t quite tall enough to peer down at the pan from over Will’s shoulder, so instead he stood close to Will’s side, so close that Will could have leaned against him, though Nico seemed to maintain a centimeter of space between them at all times. He walked Will through stacking the pieces of bread, then through flipping them, determining that they were fully cooked but not overdone, and then held out a plate for Will to deposit the sandwich onto - when had Nico stepped away to get a plate?

“Looks great,” Nico told him. “Now make another one.”

Silently, Will prepared two more pieces of bread, set them in the pan, and waited for Nico to hand him two more slices of cheese. When he didn’t, Will looked over his shoulder to see Nico leaning against the counter across the kitchen, scrolling through his phone. He looked up when he noticed Will’s eyes on him, and said, “What?”

“Aren’t you going to help?” Will asked.

“I helped with the first one,” Nico told him. “You know what to do. Go ahead.”

Will’s nerves shot through the roof. “Oh, okay.” He got the cheese himself and set them on the bread, then spun in a circle when he couldn’t find the spatula. For a second, he thought he saw Nico watching him, though when he glanced back, Nico was smiling down at his phone. He found the spatula after a moment or two, combined the two halves of the sandwich, and saw right away that the bread had already burned. It was nothing like the lump of charcoal he’d made in Nico’s class, but it still wouldn’t taste all that great.

Will plated the second sandwich, and suddenly Nico was there next to him once again. How did a person move so quietly? Or could Will simply not hear him over the pounding of his own heart in his ears?

“Not bad,” Nico told him. “A little crispy, but still safe to eat.” He looked up, meeting Will’s eyes, and smiled proudly. Will’s heart skipped a beat, but he couldn’t help the matching smile and grew on his lips. “Now let’s make sure you didn’t boil the soup down to nothing.”

“Oh, shit,” Will said. “I completely forgot about the soup!”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Nico told him, moving away for a second to grab a spoon and returned to stir the soup - it was just as much of a paste as it had been the last time. “Did you even put any water in this?”

“What? No, was I supposed to?” 

Nico picked up the can, which Will had left on the counter. He skimmed the label for directions, and when he found what he was looking for, he held the can out for Will to see. “Combine one can of soup with one can of water,” Nico said.

Will huffed. “Well, you didn’t say that.”

Nico rolled his eyes. “Alright, next time we’ll work on reading and following directions.” He handed Will the can. “Fill that with water and pour it in the soup. Let’s see if it’s salvageable.”

Will poured the water over the tomato paste while Nico stirred it in with the spoon. He watched as Nico mixed it furiously, his brow furrowing as he frowned down at the pot, as if he could intimidate the soup into submission. Will wanted to smooth out the wrinkle between his brows with his thumb, wanted to kiss him until his smile reappeared, wanted to forget about learning to cook so that he could learn about Nico instead. 

He found himself lost in a daydream as he leaned against the counter and watched Nico standing over the stove, imagining him cooking dinner for the two of them after a long day with soft music playing in the background. Will would pull Nico away from the stove, wrapping his arms around him and swaying back and forth to the music. Nico would complain at first that the food would burn, but then he would get even more fed up by Will’s horrible dancing and take the lead instead. Maybe Nico would return to the stove before things burned beyond repair, or maybe they would scrap it all and order takeout instead. Either way, they would wash that night’s dishes together, standing side by side at the sink, and Nico would get suds in Will’s hair when he pulled him down for a kiss with his soapy hands—

Will was pulled out of his thoughts when Nico held the spoon up to his own lips and tasted the soup, then nodded. “Alright, I think I got it.”

“Huh?” Will said, still blinking the daydream from his eyes and halfway wishing that he was that spoon held at Nico’s lips, then went, “Oh! Good!”

Nico had to knock by kicking Will’s door with his foot since his hands were so full. Will seemed surprised when he opened the door, as if he hadn’t been expecting Nico, which didn’t make sense since Nico had just texted him that morning. 

“You’re early,” Will said, moving back after a second to get out of Nico’s way. 

“Well, I don’t want to eat dinner in the middle of the night,” Nico replied, walking inside and heading straight to the kitchen as always. He set down the pot he was carrying - he had used it both to carry the groceries he’d brought, and figured that Will didn’t have a pot big enough considering he hadn’t seen one the last couple of times he was there. He took a second to look around, spotting the stack of boxes against the wall where they had been the last time, and peered into the living room to see it just as cluttered with boxes as well. “Oh, good. You haven’t unpacked anything else yet.”

Will, who had been following Nico back to the kitchen, stopped in his tracks. “Is that…some kind of joke?”

“No, not really,” Nico told him. “I mean, it’s less of a joke and more of a roast on you. But I am genuinely glad that you haven’t unpacked, because I planned dinner tonight around that.”

“Around…what?” Will’s head tilted in confusion, and Nico felt a lightening in his chest at the sight, like he was being filled with helium. “Um. What are we making?”

“Chicken noodle soup. It’s easy, but it takes a long time to cook, so while it’s cooking, I’m going to help you unpack.”

“Do I have a say in this?” 

Nico stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Well, yeah, it’s your apartment. But it’s gonna be pretty awkward if we’re just standing around for an hour while we’re waiting for chicken to boil. So, I’m going to be unpacking. You can do whatever you want, I guess.”

“I thought you said it was weird to unpack my stuff,” Will reminded him.

Nico shrugged. “I got over it.”

“You said we didn’t know each other well enough yet for that.”

“I know that you don’t wash your vegetables. I’d say we know each other well enough by now.”

Will pouted, and Nico grinned in response, knowing he had won.

“Fine. We’ll make your dumb soup.”

“Great!” Nico took the pot from Will’s hands and set it on the counter. As he started emptying it of all the soup ingredients Nico had brought with him, he said, “Get out the knives and cutting boards. We have to boil the chicken first, which will take about half an hour on its own. I think we could easily get a few boxes unpacked in that time.”

Will did as he was told, pulling the knife block from the far counter and taking two cutting boards out from a cabinet. By that point, Nico had set all of the ingredients out on the counter, and was putting the pot in the sink to fill with water. “Remind me why it’s such a big deal for me to unpack,” Will requested.

“You can’t live your life like you’re going to pack up - you know, figuratively, in your case - and leave at any second,” Nico replied, then glanced at Will over his shoulder with a frown. “Unless...that is what you’re planning on doing.”

Will shrugged, crossing his arms over his chest and dropping his gaze to the clutter on his counter, looking suddenly uncomfortable. “I don’t know. I mean, I’m not planning on it, but I’m not exactly tied down here, or anything.”

Something about the way that Will said that... hurt, but Nico couldn’t pinpoint why. Will was in the prime of his life, fresh out of graduate school - he shouldn’t be tied down. Regardless, Nico kind of wanted him to be. Was that selfish of him? Sure, he still didn’t know Will very well, but they had a good thing going here, right? Something that might turn into more if Nico wasn’t such a coward - and as long as Will wasn’t straight - so it was perfectly reasonable for Nico to want Will to stick around. 

But something gave him the feeling that Will didn’t feel the same.

“Open that package of chicken,” Nico said instead of spilling his heart all over the kitchen floor. He tried desperately to ignore the sudden emptiness he felt inside himself at the thought of Will leaving his life so soon after entering it as he carried the pot to the stove and lit the burner. “And don’t you think it would be so much easier to find all your stuff if you unpacked? Like, we-- you,” he corrected himself before Will could call him out again, “spent almost an hour looking for cutting boards. What if there’s some kind of emergency--”

“I know where, like, important stuff is,” Will cut in. “And didn’t I tell you? I never unpacked at the last place I was at, except for the essentials, just like now. I don’t even use a bunch of the stuff I have.”

“So unpack your shit, figure out what you don’t need or want or use, and get rid of it. Make it easier for the next guy who comes to teach you to cook.”

“Aw, come on, Nico, you know you’re the only one for me,” Will said, shooting Nico a grin that was probably meant to lighten the mood, but it just put Nico more on edge. 

“Don’t change the subject. You can’t live with half your stuff packed up for the rest of your life.”

“God, I hope I’m not in this shitty apartment for the rest of my life.”

Nico had to agree. He couldn’t ever picture himself living there - with or without Will’s clutter of boxes - especially not with a kitchen so small. No, Nico would never live there, so Will would probably move in with him--

He had to hold himself back from dunking his head into the pot of slowly heating water. Will basically just said that he wouldn’t be sticking around, so Nico could not be having thoughts like that.

“Just…” Nico sighed. “Put that chicken in the pot so we can go unpack something.”

Nico stepped back from the stove to give Will the space to drop the raw chicken into the water. Luckily, the water wasn’t incredibly hot yet, so the splashes caused when Will put the chicken in didn’t result in any burns - just small puddles of water on the stove, counter, and floor. Nico rolled his eyes and stepped away, completely ignoring the mess Will was making and trying to pretend that he wouldn’t cause any more mess that night. 

As Nico approached the stack of boxes in the kitchen, he asked, “Where do you want to start?”

“Wait, you were serious?” 

Nico rolled his eyes. “Yes, I was serious. Now tell me where to start before I pick a box at random and dump it out on the floor.”

“Okay, okay! Don’t do that. I guess you can just grab a box and crack it open,” Will told him as he came up behind Nico. 

“Cool. Let’s start with just one box at a time and see how well that works out.” Nico picked up one of the boxes and set it on Will’s small dining table before he cracked it open. It was in that moment that Nico remembered Will telling him that he had thrown random items into each of the boxes in a rush to move out. As Nico stared into the box - containing, at first glance, dish towels and picture frames and books - he felt a stress headache starting to develop. “Okay,” Nico said with a deep, already tired sigh, “I can take stuff out of the box while you find somewhere to put it. Sound good?”

Will nodded. “Yeah, that’ll work.”

At first, Nico was handing things to Will straight out of the box. After a few moments, Nico was piling things on the table on all sides of the box, and Will was practically running back and forth across his apartment in search for places to put things. At one point, he had shouted at Nico from his bedroom to put any of the books he’d unpacked on the bookshelf in the living room, just to give him something to do that wasn’t standing back and watching Will run around - not that he minded doing that, but he wasn’t about to say that to Will. 

Nico checked on the chicken when he came back from the living room. Since Will either didn’t have a meat thermometer or it was packed up somewhere, Nico pulled open drawer after drawer in Will’s kitchen until he could find a fork and knife. He pulled one of the larger pieces from the water and sliced into it to see that it was not yet cooked all the way through. 

Will returned to the kitchen to collect another armful of stuff, but before he could leave again, Nico stopped him with a, “Hey, come over here for a second.” When Will came to stand beside him at the sink, much closer than necessary but Nico wasn’t going to comment on that, Nico said, “How can you tell whether or not the chicken is done?” 

“If it’s not pink anymore?” Will guessed.

“Right. So, does this look done to you?” 

Will shrugged one shoulder. “I mean, it doesn’t look pink to me.”

Nico pulled the chicken apart with the knife and fork, showing the still-pink inside. “What about now?”

“Still pink.”

“It’s not too far from done, though,” Nico told him, “and since the chicken has to cook in the soup, too, we’re only going to boil these on their own for a few more minutes. So, you should go find someplace to put that stuff--” he looked pointedly at the items Will held in his hands, “--and then come back so we can start on the rest of this.”

“Got it,” Will replied, and left the room once again.

While Nico waited for him to return, he poured chicken broth and vegetable stock into the pot he’d brought. He set it on the stove next to the smaller pot where the chicken was still boiling, and lit the burner underneath, leaving it at low heat. Another moment later, Will returned with empty hands.

“What do you want me to do?” Will asked, rubbing his hands together as if eager to get to work. 

“We’ve got onions, carrots, and celery to cut up, so grab a knife and cutting board,” Nico told him. 

“Don’t they need to be washed first?” Will teased, leaning toward Nico and looking like he wanted to start an argument.

Nico shot him a grin. “I already did. Now get chopping.”

As Will did as he was told, Nico did the same, collecting a knife, cutting board, and an onion, which he peeled before placing it on the cutting board.

Nico moved away for a moment to take the chicken out of the boiling water, listening to the uneven sound of the carrots Will was cutting. He removed the pot from the still-warm burner as he said, “Hey, where are your plates?” 

The sound of Will’s clumsy chopping ceased as he reached up to open the cabinet in front of him, and he pulled out a plate which he handed to Nico.

“Do you only have two plates?” Nico asked, frowning as he looked inside Will’s cabinet.

“Yeah?” Will said. “I live alone and I don’t cook, why would I need more than two plates?”

“Okay, I guess that’s fair.” Nico took the plate from him, removed the chicken from the pot, and poured the water out into the sink, then leaving the pot there. Nico set the plate beside Will on the counter and took a second to peek around him at his cutting board. The carrots he’d cut were about half the size of the baby carrots one would buy at the grocery store, and were nowhere near the size they should’ve been. Nico realized in that moment that he’d never actually specified how Will was supposed to cut them, but it was better late than never, he supposed.

“Will,” he said, just to get his attention, and practically felt Will tense with how close they were to each other. 

“Am I not doing this right?” he asked innocently, worriedly, glancing at Nico over his shoulder. 

“I mean, it’s not horrible,” Nico replied, and reached around Will to point at one of the carrot chunks, “but these are, like, five times bigger than they should be. You’re cutting them into pretty equal-sized pieces, so that’s a good thing, but I think you could go a little faster, too. Here, watch me.”

Nico grabbed a piece of celery and stepped back to his own cutting board, expertly slicing it into thin pieces. He pointed out the size of the pieces before nodding toward Will’s hands, as though telling him that it was his turn now. He watched as Will chopped with the knife like he was using a meat cleaver, still creating rather large pieces, so Nico stepped behind him once more.

Nico brought his other arm around until he could set his hands over Will’s. He had to rise up onto his tip-toes in order to hook his chin over Will’s shoulder and look down at the cutting board as he guided Will’s hands to the knife and a new carrot. Nico pushed and pulled at Will’s hands carefully, and spoke in a much softer voice than before when he said, “Keep the tip of the knife down on the cutting board, and keep it in place. Just move the carrot, and try not to get your fingertips too close when you get to the end.”

After Nico guided him through thinly slicing about half of the carrot, he relaxed his hold on Will’s hands and let him reclaim control while Nico moved his hands to rest on Will’s wrists. When Will had successfully chopped up the rest of the carrot, Nico smiled and said, “Good, you’ve got it.” He turned his head slightly to point his smile straight at its target, and seemed to realize just how close he was to Will when his nose brushed against the tiny amount stubble on Will’s cheek. Nico jumped back before Will could recognize the feeling of Nico’s heart pounding against Will’s shoulder blade. 

Nico cleared his throat as he moved back to his cutting board, hoping that his voice came out normal when he said, “Think you can handle the rest?”

He risked a glance up when he heard Will’s quiet, “Uh-huh,” and saw him nodding slowly, his neck and ears glowing red like he’d been sunburned. He kept his eyes on Will just long enough that he saw Will looking at him out of the corner of his eye, and Nico’s gaze snapped back down to the counter. He forced himself to look only at the onions and celery as he chopped away quickly, and flinched when his hand brushed against Will’s when they reached for the same piece of celery at the same time. 

Nico felt like he was going to pass out from the emotional rollercoaster that night had put him through already, and they had barely even started. Or he might spontaneously combust if his flaming cheeks were anything to go by. 

Once he had finished with the onions and celery, he collected them all and slowly scraped them off the cutting board and into the pot. Nico raised the heat slightly and explained to Will that the celery and onions needed to cook for a few minutes before the carrots and chicken could go in. In the meantime, while Will finished with the carrots, Nico quickly washed out the pot in which they had boiled the chicken, and refilled it with water to cook the egg noodles. 

After about five minutes, the water for the noodles was boiling, and the soup was ready for carrots and chicken. Nico poured the dried pasta into the water while he walked Will through the easiest way to scrape the carrots off the cutting board and into the pot before they added the chicken to the soup. 

They both stepped back from stove and stood in silence for a moment before Nico said, “So, the egg noodles will take about twenty minutes to cook, and then they get transferred into the soup and sit for another ten minutes or so, so that gives us another half an hour to unpack.”

Will nodded his head once, then shot Nico a grin. “You want to keep unpacking the boxes while I find places to put shit?”

“You know, if we were both putting stuff away, it would probably go a lot faster,” Nico pointed out.

“Yeah, you’re probably right. Okay, if you come across any books or picture frames, you can put those on the shelves in the living room, and if you find any towels or sheets or whatever, you can put those in the closet next to the bathroom. Anything else, you can just throw on that table over there, and I’ll find some place to put it.”

“I’m going to turn that empty box into donations, too,” Nico said, already moving toward the box they had left on the table, “and the only stuff you can put back into a box is something you’re getting rid of.”

Will rolled his eyes, though he was still smiling at Nico, his gaze softening once his eyes landed on Nico once more. “Alright, fine. Just open up another box already.”

Nico crossed the kitchen knowing that Will was following close behind, and pulled another box away from the wall. He knelt on the ground as he opened it up, seeing mostly books inside, and so he started pulling them out. Nico took a second to glance at one of the titles, and immediately fell back on his ass with the force of his laughter.

Cooking for Dummies was the first one, then Nico took out Cooking Basics for Dummies. Then The Beginner’s Cookbook. One after another, Nico brought out untouched, still packaged, condescending cookbooks, until he was laughing so hard that he could barely breathe. 

“Those were gifts,” Will said, standing over Nico and scratching at the back of his head self-consciously. At least the bright red blush growing on his cheeks would definitely be taken as embarrassment rather than as his flustered reaction to the sight of Nico laying back on his kitchen floor, laughing so hard that he was holding his stomach as tears rolled from his eyes. 

What Will wouldn’t do to see that every day.

Piper tried the door to Will’s apartment rather than knocking, and let herself in without announcement as usual. She had been ready to search the apartment for Will and scold him for leaving the door unlocked so that just anybody - besides her, she meant - could walk right in but she stopped in her tracks before she could leave the kitchen. 

The stack of boxes that had been against the wall the last time she was there was gone, and in its place sat a single open, overflowing box. The old label of “closet” had been crossed off, with the word “donations” now written underneath in black sharpie in handwriting that didn’t match the original label. 

Piper completely forgot everything she had been planning to say to Will, and instead burst into the living room with an almost accusatory, “Did you unpack?”

She saw Will’s shoulders tense as he was startled, then rise and fall from behind as he heaved a sigh, and he pushed his glasses up into his hair as he leaned back against the front of the couch. Piper had never known him to leave his work at the office, so to speak, so she wasn’t surprised to find him sitting on the floor surrounded by his work once more. He spoke with a monotonous voice when he said, “Hi, Piper, thanks for knocking, please--”

“Don’t give me that shit, Will,” she cut in as her eyes scanned the room. The bookshelf - which had been devoid of anything, books or otherwise, the last time she was here - now had full shelves, covered in books and a few picture frames and assorted knick knacks that Piper didn’t even know Will owned. There were still a few boxes scattered throughout the room, though nowhere near as many as there had been before. The place looked clean and lived in, and it was so unlike Will that Piper pinched herself to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. “You...actually unpacked,” she muttered in an awe-filled voice.

“Yeah, so?” Will rubbed at his eyes, like he was tired of working and already tired of this conversation. 

“You never unpack. Not once in five years have I seen you live in an apartment that wasn’t full of boxes.” Why didn’t Will seem to understand that this was such a big deal?

“Nico made me do it.”

“What?”

Will shrugged, and slowly started piling together the papers that sat on the ground in front of him as if he were cleaning up - another thing that Piper had never seen him do before. “He said he was sick of looking at all the boxes and that it wasn’t, like, healthy for me to live like I was, so he planned dinner yesterday around helping me unpack.”

There were so many things that Will said that Piper wanted to address - Will and Nico having dinner together being the main thing, though she was almost certain that Will would brush it off as just more “cooking classes” - but she chose to stay on subject to keep Will from growing suspicious of her true intentions.

“I was sick of looking at all that mess, too, but you didn’t unpack for me, you know, your best friend.”

Finally, Will looked up at her as he stretched his arms over his head, and shot her a grin. “Make me dinner and come over twice a week, and maybe I will.”

“You’re such an asshole,” Piper complained, and flopped down onto the couch behind him. She slipped her phone out of her back pocket with one hand and with the other, she pushed and poked at the back of Will’s head before she wrapped one of his curls around her finger and tugged. 

“Ow! Hey!” Will exclaimed, leaning out of her reach. “What the hell, Piper? Leave me alone.”

“What are you working on?” she asked, mostly just to draw Will’s attention back to his work so that she could sneakily send a text to Jason behind his back; call me asap.

Will huffed in frustration. “This stupid kidney. The 3D printer doesn’t make perfectly solid materials due to the weave of the plastic it uses, and the material we used on this one is too stiff and immovable to function very well, plus there’s the--”

“Oh, hang on, Jason’s calling me,” Piper cut in, jumping back up from the couch. “B-R-B, Willow Tree.”

She left the room, checking over her shoulder to see that Will had replaced his glasses on his nose and had returned to his work already. Piper crossed the apartment and ducked into Will’s room, closing the door softly behind herself as she answered the call.

“Will unpacked for him,” she hissed into the receiver in lieu of a hello.

“Uh, okay?” Jason replied, clearly not understanding the gravity of the situation.

“Will. Unpacked. For. Nico. Will has never unpacked this much of his stuff before, not even when we were in college! He’s always just dragged box after box of stuff from one place to another, and every time I’ve tried to get him to unpack, he tells me that he’s just going to move again in a few months, so it isn’t worth it,” Piper explained, feeling her words grow frantic and knowing that she wasn’t so much explaining things for Jason’s sake, but trying to make sense of them herself. “Does that mean he’s actually going to stay here? He’s been like this for as long as I’ve known him - it’s like some kind of coping mechanism for him to just leave everybody behind and start over someplace new. He doesn’t make connections with people, Jase, you have no idea how hard it was to get him to trust me as much as he does. The fact that he’s hardly known Nico for two months and he’s unpacking? Do you know what this means?”

It took a moment for Jason to respond, probably assuming that Piper’s question had been rhetorical, before he said, “Um. Should I?”

“He likes him, Jason! Like, really, really likes him, I’m sure of it!”

From his own apartment across the city, Jason had to agree. From where he sat on the couch, he was able to look over his shoulder and into the kitchen where he could see Nico moving swiftly throughout the space, bouncing slightly with each step as he danced to the music he was playing while he cooked. Jason hadn’t seen him dance or heard him sing along to his cooking music in months, but in these last few weeks, Jason had observed the old familiar sight from afar like a nature documenter that was afraid to spook the animals if he got too close. He didn’t remember seeing Nico so consistently happy since they first moved into that apartment almost two years ago, and he knew that the cause for Nico’s now-frequent smiles was the time he had spent cooking with Will.

“You’re absolutely certain?” Jason asked.

“I’ve never been more sure about something in my life,” Piper replied.

Jason sighed. “Then those two better get their heads out of their asses before one of them does something stupid and screws it all up.”

“We could always do a little more to help them along,” Piper suggested, and Jason could practically hear the eyebrow wiggle in her voice. “Want to come over on Friday so we can brainstorm?”

“Sure,” Jason replied, and stood up from the couch. He made his way into the kitchen as he said to Piper, “Hang on a second,” and turned down the dial on Nico’s sound system before he said to his roommate, “Hey, I’m spending the night at Piper’s on Friday, so feel free to throw a wild party or whatever while I’m gone.”

Nico raised an eyebrow at him. “Uh, yeah, okay, sure. Turn my music back up, would you? Dinner is almost ready, I’m making shepherd’s pie.”

Jason turned the music down further as he left the kitchen, just to mess with Nico, who shouted some very unfriendly things at Jason as he fled back to the living room. He waited for Nico to raise his music up to an ear-aching level - which he did intentionally to try to piss Jason off in return - before Jason held his phone back up to his ear and said, “Alright, we’re all set, I don’t he’s suspicious at all.”

“Great,” Piper replied, reaching for the doorknob to leave Will’s room. “I’ll see you Friday, then. Now I’ve gotta get back to Will before he gets suspicious. Love you, babe,” she said, and ended the call without waiting for her boyfriend’s reply. She knew that he loved her back; she didn’t need to hear it to know the truth. 

She made her way back to the living room and reclaimed her place across Will’s entire couch, and immediately poked him in the back of the head once more.

“Is everything alright?” he asked, his voice showing the appropriate amount of concern while keeping his eyes glued on the 3D printed kidney model he held in his hands. 

“Yep, it’s all good. He just wanted to plan our next date, and he had a lot of ideas,” Piper lied easily. “You been on any dates recently?”

She could practically see his eyes rolling through his skull. “When would I have had time to date?”

“You spend an awful lot of time learning to cook, I don’t see why you couldn’t use some of that time to put those new skills to work and make dinner for a special someone.” She poked at Will’s shoulder to emphasize her words, but Will just shook her off. 

“You’re forgetting about the part where I have to go out and meet someone that I’m interested in and who is also interested in me,” he pointed out. “Not everyone finds their Prince Charming the day they move to one of the most heavily populated cities in America.”

Piper smiled to herself. “Yeah, I got pretty lucky with Jason, huh?” She sighed happily, running her fingers through Will’s hair in silence for a moment before she said, “You know, your hair’s getting pretty long. Do you want me to cut it for you again? It might be just the thing that draws somebody’s attention.”

“Yeah, in the wrong way,” Will told her, leaning forward so that he - and more importantly, his hair - was out of her reach. “You’re never allowed to cut my hair again, not after last time!”

“It wasn’t that bad--”

“You shaved my head!”

“Not bald! You looked hot with short hair!”

“It’s so not happening, Pippin.”

Piper rolled her eyes. “Alright, fine.” She flopped onto her back with a sigh, and felt more than saw when Will returned upright, leaning his weight against the couch once more. She watched him work for a moment - turning the kidney model in his hands, shuffling through papers, making different notes here and there - and eventually asked, “Do you want to get dinner? Like, order takeout or something?”

“I’ve got food here,” Will suggested.

“What, more microwave dinners?”

“No, like, leftovers. Nico and I made soup yesterday, I can go reheat it.”

“What kind of soup?” Piper asked skeptically, curious to finally see how Will’s cooking classes were progressing. After knowing Will for about six years, she knew that he could easily still be learning how to make canned soups even after so long, so she was eager to find out just what he could actually make.

“Homemade chicken noodle. I cut up the vegetables myself and everything,” Will answered, and Piper thought she could detect a bit of pride in his voice.

“Soup from scratch and not from a can?” she asked teasingly, though if asked she would admit that she was proud of him, too. Piper leaned over the edge of the couch and wrapped her arms around Will’s shoulders, using him to hold up about half of her weight as she pressed a noisy kiss to his cheek. “William Solace, did you know that I’m in love with you?”

Will tried to hold back a laugh. “Ew, get off of me.” He tried to shove Piper away, but couldn’t manage to get her to release her hold on his neck, and instead dragged her down onto the floor beside him. “Never mind, go heat up the soup yourself.”

“Is that any way to treat a guest in your home?” Piper still had yet to let go of him. 

“A guest would have knocked and waited for me to answer the door,” Will shot back. 

“Will you please go warm up the soup for me?” Piper asked, tightening her arms around him and batting her eyelashes.

“Ugh, fine, if it means you’ll let go of me,” Will replied, though he couldn’t hide the smile that was slowly blooming on his face. “I guess I could use a break too, anyway.”

He pried Piper’s hands off of him and stood, then meandered into the kitchen to reheat the soup. 

Piper really was proud of him, not just for learning how to cook, but for taking so many steps to stay put for once. For as long as she’d known Will, he had kept mostly to himself, distancing himself from others as soon as they started making a personal connection - Piper knew she was only the exception because she was stubborn. She didn’t know the whole story, just some bits and pieces that included Will’s absent father and a mother who couldn’t keep a job which resulted in an inconsistent childhood, but she knew that his constant moving around and isolating himself was a defense mechanism. That was how it had been his whole life, therefore he would continue on that path until it killed him - whether it be the isolation or his cooking that eventually took him out. Piper was relieved to see that he was finally breaking the cycle, even if it was just a little bit at a time.

Just as Piper heard him lighting the stove, Will’s phone buzzed on the ground next to where he had been sitting. 

Piper called out to him, “Hey, you just got a text or something, do you want me to check it for you?”

“Yeah, sure,” Will replied, and so Piper scooped up his phone, unlocking it with the same passcode he’d had for as long as she had known him and rising from the ground. She brought the phone into the kitchen as she read the message to herself.

Piper grinned. “You have a text from Nico Who Cooks, and it says he wants you to come over on Friday for a romantic evening.”

She watched as the back of his neck grew red and he dropped the ladle in his hand against the side of the pot. “Bullshit,” he said immediately. “What does it really say?”

“He wants you to come over on Friday because, and I quote, my kitchen isn’t a shithole like yours.”

For a second, he didn’t move. Then, he was spinning around to snatch the phone from her hands with a, “Give me that,” before he turned his back to her once more. However, he wasn’t quick enough to keep Piper from seeing the bright smile on his face.

It was starting to look like she and Jason might not need to interfere after all. Oh, but they were still going to try.

Nico had texted his address to Will, as well as a time to come over, though Will was so anxious about making sure he had the right apartment that he left for Nico’s right after he got out of work. He ended up outside of Nico’s door about twenty minutes earlier than he was supposed to be there, and had a mini panic attack when he realized that Nico had always shown up to his apartment with bags full of groceries - was Will supposed to buy the food in return for using Nico’s kitchen? No, that couldn’t be right, because Nico would have told him to pick something up on his way, right?

Before he knew it, fifteen minutes had passed as Will contemplated texting Nico for a grocery list, and soon decided that it was too late; whatever they needed, Nico had to have had already. Will knocked on the door.

He heard a muffled, “Come in!” from inside, in between drum beats and guitar riffs, which increased in volume once Will pushed the door open. 

Immediately, Will could tell that Nico’s apartment was enormous in comparison to his - first of all, it had an entryway rather than opening directly into the kitchen. He was hesitant about continuing farther into the apartment, still nervous that he might have somehow ended up inside the wrong place, so he called out, “Nico?”

“Just follow the music,” Nico’s voice came back.

Will did as he was told, walking down the short hallway off the entryway until he reached the open concept kitchen and living room, which was larger than Will’s entire apartment on its own. He stopped in his tracks as he took in the kitchen in all its glory, from the double ovens to the giant island, and the dishwasher. Will would kill for a dishwasher, regardless of how few dishes he had and used. He never thought that he would grow to appreciate a nice kitchen like this, though he supposed there wasn’t any use for a nice kitchen to someone who didn’t know how to use it.

The best part of it by far, though, was the sight of Nico almost dancing as he moved through the space. In no way did he follow the beat of the music surrounding them, aside from the constant slight bob of his head to the beat, but he moved so fluidly, so gracefully, that Will couldn’t think of it as anything other than a dance. His hair was loose around his shoulders, swaying back and forth with his every step, and Will wanted to run his fingers through it, brush it aside to press a kiss to the back of Nico’s neck.

Nico turned to face him, frowning like he was wondering what was taking Will so long to walk ten feet, though when his eyes landed on Will, his smile could’ve lit up the room. He turned away from Will for just a second to lower the volume on his music until it was nothing more than soft background noise. Nico brushed his hair behind his ear - god, Will wanted to do that too - and raised an eyebrow as he leaned his elbows against the island. “What? Have you never seen a real kitchen before?”

At the sound of his teasing voice, Will’s feet came unstuck from the ground and automatically moved him closer until he was standing opposite Nico at the island, leaning down to meet him at eye-level. “Just because your kitchen could eat my kitchen in one bite doesn’t mean that yours is any more real than mine.”

Nico laughed and pushed himself back from the island. Will felt himself moving closer without meaning to, and when he finally realized that he’d moved, he was standing right beside Nico at the fridge. 

Nico started stacking ingredients in Will’s hands - they were of such a wide variety that Will had no guess as to what they might be cooking, not that he was paying any attention to the food when Nico was standing so close to him - and told him, “Put those on the island for me.”

Once he couldn’t possibly carry anything else, Will went back to the island and dumped his armfull out, spotting amongst the pile green peppers and mozzarella cheese. Nico came up from behind him with a covered mixing bowl and a bag of flour. 

“What are we making?” Will asked, leaning toward Nico in an attempt to see what was inside the bowl. 

“Pizza,” Nico replied. “I was going to teach you how to make the dough from scratch, but it was going to take way too long for the dough to rise, and I figured you didn’t want to hang around here all night, so I made the dough ahead of time.”

“I wouldn’t have minded,” Will said, maybe a little too softly as he leaned his hip against the island, turned so that Nico had his full attention. He cleared his throat and scratched at the back of his head as he dropped his gaze to the island. “I mean… I’m here to learn, aren’t I?”

He was probably imagining the light dusting of pink that grew on the high points of Nico’s cheekbones. “We can still make the tomato sauce from scratch.”

Will grinned. “Great! I’ll try not to ruin it.”

Nico ducked his head to hide his smile, and Will’s heart skipped a beat. “Okay, so, I got a bunch of pizza toppings because I didn’t know what you like on your pizza, but I got all of those ready beforehand so that we could focus on other things today. Mainly, you’re going to learn how to use actual kitchen appliances since you don’t have any of your own.”

“And I’m sure it’s a whole lot easier to invite me over for that rather than lugging everything over to my place,” Will joked, and his eyes swept across the room once more. “Not that I think I have the counter space for any of this stuff. How can you afford a place this big?”

“Well, first of all, I have a roommate who pays his share of the rent, and second, I don’t have graduate school levels of debt to pay off.” As he spoke, Nico pulled his hair away from his face and tied it up into a bun on the top of his head, held in place with the hair tie from his wrist. “Any more questions, or are we going to get cooking?”

“Actually, yeah,” Will replied. “We’re not going to be in your roommate’s way out here, are we?”

“Nah, he’s spending the weekend at his girlfriend’s place. Grab a knife from the block over there. You’re going to cut up the tomatoes while I get everything set up.”

While Will turned his back to pull a knife from the block on the counter, Nico set a cutting board on the island with a couple of tomatoes. 

“They don’t need to be perfect since they’re going in the food processor anyway, but dicing them makes it easier later on,” Nico explained as he pulled a blender out of one of the lower cabinets. How many more appliances did he have hidden away in this place?

Will dropped his attention to the tomatoes in front of him and tried to copy the chopping technique Nico had taught him earlier that week. The tomato didn’t cut as cleanly or as easily as the carrots and celery had, and the end product of the first tomato was messy, more like he had crushed it with his fist then the clean cut lines he’d expected. 

“How’s it going?” Nico asked, appearing at Will’s side and peering around his arm at the cutting board. 

“Um, a little sloppier than expected,” Will answered. 

“That’s fine. Like I said, it doesn’t need to be pretty,” Nico reminded him, and started talking with his hands to explain himself. “Don’t chop at them so much, like you did for the soup. Put the tomato on its side, go from bottom to top, and try cutting even slices with more of a sawing motion then just chopping. It’ll be easier to dice them from there.”

Will followed his instructions, laying the tomato on its side and moving the knife back and forth as he cut through the fruit. He cut a couple more slices while Nico watched - they all came out uneven, each a different thickness than the last and with crooked slopes, though still in better shape than the last tomato had been - before Will asked, “Like that?”

“Perfect,” Nico told him with a smile. He reached toward the cutting board and pulled the tiny end piece of the tomato out from under the small stack of slices, and popped it in his mouth. 

“Did you just eat that?” Will asked. “How can you eat a plain tomato? That’s gross!”

“Are you kidding? I could eat a tomato like an apple,” Nico replied, and laughed at the face Will made. “Hurry up with those tomatoes. I’ve got everything else ready to go.”

Will diced the tomatoes as quickly as he could without accidentally slicing one of his fingers, and when he had finished, he brought the cutting board across the kitchen to where Nico had set up a cylindrical appliance which Will guessed to be the food processor. Nico pulled the lid off the device and said, “Tomatoes first.” After Will had scraped the tomatoes off the cutting board and into the food processor, Nico added water and olive oil before replacing the lid. 

“I want you to hold down the pulse button until you think it’s blended, and then we’ll check it. Think you can handle it?”

Will nodded and took Nico’s place next to the food processor while Nico walked across the kitchen. As Will turned on the food processor, Nico cranked up the music he had turned down earlier until Will was certain that Nico’s neighbors could hear it clearly. Nico began to move through the room with a bounce in his step, bobbing his head to the beat of the song as he mouthed along to the words. Or maybe he was singing - Will couldn’t hear over the loud music and the whirring of the food processor, but he could’ve stood there and watched as Nico slowly grew more comfortable in dancing to the music for the rest of the night. And he probably would have stood there and watched, at least until Nico caught him, had his finger not slipped off the pulse button.

“Oh shit,” Will said when his hand hit the countertop and the whirring ceased, making the room seem deafeningly quiet despite the blaring music.

“Think it’s done?” Nico called over, raising his voice to be heard above the music. He half-walked, half-danced his way back to the sound system to lower the volume once more, though it was loud enough that Will could still hear it clearly, before he returned to Will’s side and popped the lid off the food processor. Nico pulled a spoon from a nearby drawer to test the consistency of the sauce, and grinned up at Will. “You’re getting pretty good at this whole cooking thing, you know?”

Will felt his heart flutter in his chest. “I have a great teacher.”

Nico continued to rock out as they made their pizzas, and Will continued to watch him with hearts in his eyes. Will had a horrible time rolling out his dough, resulting in a somewhat lumpy, vaguely rectangular-shaped pizza crust, while Nico had produced a perfectly round crust of even thickness, obviously through the use of magic or some kind of pizza witchcraft. He claimed that it just came with being Italian, though Will was pretty sure that was just another cooking lie that Nico made up to trick him - like washing vegetables. He still wasn’t too sure about that one.

They argued about pizza toppings despite the fact that they were making two separate pizzas. Eventually, Will agreed to try a piece of Nico’s pineapple pizza once it was finished baking, though Nico adamantly refused to eat any part of Will’s pizza that had green peppers on it. By the time they had put their pizzas in the oven and Nico had set a timer to check on them in about twenty minutes, the two had decided that they would find a movie to watch while they cooked and eventually ate their pizzas. 

They sat on the couch and Nico opened up Hulu on his TV. As soon as he pulled up the movie page, Will said, “Ooh! A Quiet Place, I’ve been wanting to see that!”

Nico hesitated with the remote held aloft and pointed at the TV, raising an eyebrow at Will. “You know that’s a psychological thriller, right?”

“Oh, I know. I love horror movies!” Will told him with a bright smile, which only made Nico even more doubtful. 

“You’re, like, a ball of sunshine. There’s no way you’ll make it all the way through that movie.”

Will leaned toward him challengingly. “You just don’t want to watch it because you’re afraid.”

“I am not!”

“Then put on the movie.”

Nico huffed, hitting play as he said, “Fine, but we’re not turning it off when you get scared.”

“You mean when you get scared,” Will shot back.

Nico elbowed him in the side. “Shut up, it’s starting.”

Will was still smiling as he turned his attention to the TV and the room around them dissolved into silence. For the first few moments, as Will was absorbed by the movie, Nico’s eyes drifted toward Will, watching him as he watched the movie. The soft orange light from the screen made Will’s hair shine like gold and accentuated the blue of his eyes. Nico wanted to reach out and run his fingers through Will’s hair, his fingers twitching at the thought, though he froze, his breath catching in his throat when Will’s soft smile twisted into a frown. 

Nico noticed Will’s eyes narrowing at the screen, so he let his own gaze flicker back to the TV for a second to see subtitles now lining the bottom of the scene. Nico released his breath. Will was just focused on reading the subtitles - he hadn’t caught Nico staring.

Realizing that he, too, should probably pay attention to the movie, Nico turned his focus fully to the screen just as the title card slowly appeared.

“Holy shit,” Will whispered as though to avoid disturbing the quiet of the room with his voice, his eyes widening in surprise. “That kid just got snatched by the thing from Alien.”

After a second, Nico replied, “You mean the alien from Alien ?”

Will bumped him with his arm. “Shut up, you know what I mean.”

Nico smiled and relaxed into his seat as silence filled the room once more. He realized too late that he should have been paying more attention to how much time had passed since he’d put their pizzas in the oven, and jumped when the alarm when off on his phone. He managed to keep his composure for the most part, unlike Will, who cursed and narrowly avoided falling off the couch. Nico had to look away to hide his laughter.

Will shot him a look of absolute betrayal as Nico shut the alarm off and paused the TV. “You did that on purpose!”

“No, I didn’t,” Nico argued, and pushed himself up off the couch.

“You tried to scare me!”

“I’m trying not to burn our pizzas. Come on, it’s probably done.”

As Nico made his way back to the kitchen, he heard Will following after him.

“Oh my god,” Will practically moaned, and Nico stopped in his tracks. “That smells so good. Please tell me they’re done, I’m starving.”

“Even if they are done, they’ll still need to cool.” Nico managed to put himself back into motion, grabbing a butter knife from the silverware drawer before pulled open the oven door. “Come look at this and tell me if you think they’re done yet.”

Will stepped up directly behind him, his chin hovering over Nico’s shoulder and one of his hands falling on Nico’s waist.

Nico almost jumped out of his skin.

“Looks done,” Will replied, his lips millimeters from Nico’s ear, his breath puffing on Nico’s cheek, “but this is usually when you tell me that there’s some secret way to determine whether something’s done or not, right?”

“Yep!” Nico said, his voice about three steps higher than usual and a few notches louder as he forced himself away from Will. He didn’t give himself the time to steady his breathing or calm his racing heart before he reached into the oven with the butter knife and pried the end between the crust and the pan to show Will the pale shade of the crust underneath. “So, uh, to me, that still looks a little bit undercooked, but we’re still going to take them out right now.”

Will frowned in confusion as Nico reached to shut off the oven. “But if it’s still undercooked, then shouldn’t it, you know, cook longer?”

“It’ll still cook a little more on the pan while it’s cooling off, and keeps it from burning on the top while still cooking the bottom,” Nico explained while he pulled the first pizza from the oven and set it on the stove. When he brought out the second, he was stopped from setting it down by the sight of Will leaning over the first pizza - his own - with his eyes closed, breathing in the scent.

Nico stood, watching the peaceful expression on Will’s face until the heat of the pizza pan started to melt through Nico’s oven mitt and his fingers started to burn. “Watch out,” Nico told him, and hurried to set the pan on the stove before his hand took any serious damage. 

“This is the best smelling pizza I’ve ever smelled,” Will told him, leaning toward the pizza once again as soon as there was room for him to.

“As opposed to the best smelling pizza you’ve ever heard?” Nico teased.

Will grinned. “Shut up, you know what I mean.”

Nico shook his head, smiling fondly at Will before he turned away to grab a pizza cutter. 

Once the pizza was cool enough to handle, they each took a few slices of their own pizzas as well as one slice of the other’s. They waited to eat until they were both seated on the couch once more - and Nico couldn’t help but notice how much closer Will was to him than before. Nico raised the remote to start the movie up again when suddenly Will moaned beside him, and the remote slipped from his fingers. 

“This is heaven,” Will told him around a mouthful of pizza, and slumped against Nico’s side, causing Nico to tense up even more. “Seriously, this is… Oh my god, this is so good.”

“Glad you like it,” Nico replied, his voice strangled. Clumsily, he picked up the remote, pretended that his fingers hadn’t just grazed Will’s thigh as he did so, and played the movie, trying desperately to relax as Will straightened up beside him and turned his attention to the screen. 

They spent much of the rest of the film in silence, aside from the occasional exclamation from Will and his eventual admitting that, yes, pineapple on pizza was okay, but it was probably just because the rest of the pizza was so good that it blocked out the fruit taste. Nico argued that tomatoes were fruits, too, though Will refused to accept the truth. However, seeing as Will had held up his end of the deal, Nico agreed to try a bite of Will’s green pepper pizza monstrosity and hated every second of it until he could get the taste out of his mouth. No one would ever change his mind; green peppers did not belong on pizza.

By the time the end of the movie came around, Nico was impressed at how calmly Will was reacting to everything that happened on screen, and even told him once the movie had ended, “Alright, so you weren’t lying about loving horror movies.”

“Of course I wasn’t!” Will said. “Holy shit, that was so good! And so intense! Oh man, now I’m gonna be wired for the rest of the night just thinking about it.”

Nico set his empty plate on the coffee table. “Do you want to...hang out a little longer? I mean, I’m sure we can find some other movie to watch until you’re more relaxed.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want to overstay my welcome.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Nico said with a shrug. “I’m glad to have the company. Pick something out, whatever you want.” He handed the remote to Will and took his empty plate from him. “I’m going to go put the leftovers away; I’ll be right back.”

Nico took their dishes back to the kitchen and set them in the sink before he started on putting the leftover pizza away. Normally, he would put everything together and force Will to take home all of the leftovers when he left, but Nico wasn’t about to give up his own pizza, so he separated the two into different tupperware dishes. 

Before heading back to the couch, Nico grabbed a pint of ice cream from the freezer and two spoons from the drawer, one of which he handed to Will after he sat down beside him - closer than necessary, but if Will could do it, then so could Nico. Will pressed play, and the movie began.

“What are we watching?” Nico asked, then stuffed a spoonful of ice cream in his mouth.

“The Babadook,” Will replied. 

Nico had to wait until he managed to swallow the ice cream before he said, “Another horror movie? Didn’t you just say that the last one freaked you out?”

“No, I said that I loved it. Besides, this one isn’t even that scary, and I’ve seen it before, so I’ll be fine.”

“If you say so.”

It was past midnight when the movie ended, and when Will dropped his head onto Nico’s shoulder with a groan.

“I’ve made a horrible mistake,” Will muttered.

“What do you mean?” Nico asked, suddenly wide awake despite having started to drift off toward the end of the movie. “What’s wrong?”

Will lifted his head and ground the heels of his palms into his eyes. “I have to work in the morning.”

“But tomorrow’s Saturday. And don’t you work from home?”

“Not when I have a meeting with my supervisor in about nine hours to walk her through all the progress I’ve made on the project she assigned to me.” Will stood up and stretched his arms over his head, sighing when his spine popped in a satisfying way. “Let me help you clean up, and then I’ll get out of your hair.”

When Will moved toward the kitchen, Nico jumped up on the couch to follow, saying, “No, you don’t have to do that. If you need to get home, then you should go. I can deal with cleaning up on my own.” Nico moved to stand in front of him, stopping Will from walking any farther into the kitchen.

“But you don’t have to do it on your own,” Will said, sidestepping in an attempt to go around him, though Nico copied his movement. “I’m saying I want to help.”

“And I’m saying that you should go home and get some rest before you have to go to work tomorrow,” Nico argued, crossing his arms and holding his ground. 

“Fine,” Will huffed, crossing his arms right back, “but you won’t be able to stop me next time, and I don’t care how late it is. I will help you clean up.”

“I’m counting on it,” Nico replied, and reached out for Will’s arm. He tugged him toward the door, only releasing him after he’d opened the door with his other hand and said, “I’ll, uh, see you around.”

“Yeah.” Will smiled down at him. “I’ll text you sometime tomorrow to let you know when I’m free next.”

Nico raised an eyebrow challengingly. “Text me when you get home tonight, and tomorrow after your meeting.”

Will’s smile brightened. “Will do. See you, Nico.”

After Nico shut the door behind him, he returned to the kitchen to start cleaning up. He did the dishes first, then found a few small bowls of pizza toppings that had been cut up before Will had arrived but went unused which he put in the fridge. As he did so, he noticed the two tupperware dishes of pizza where there should only have been one. He brought out his phone and opened up his texts to Will.

To: Will; your leftovers are in my fridge

His phone buzzed in his pocket about five minutes later, as Nico was shutting off the TV.

From: Will; noooo damn I was gonna have that for lunch tomorrow

From: Will; I’m half tempted to come back for it

As much as Nico wouldn’t have minded having Will back in his apartment so soon, he knew that Will really should get home and head straight to bed. He bit his lip as he typed out his reply.

To: Will; i could bring it to you at work tomorrow?

His reply was instantaneous. 

From: Will; you are a godsend

From: Will; oh and by the way I’m home :)

Nico thought it was stupid that a tiny smiley face like that could make his heart skip a beat.

So he sent one back. Then he shut his phone off and hid it under his pillow until morning.

Nico woke up to a few texts from Will - the first being an address for the hospital he worked at, the next containing the time that Will expected he would be out of his meeting, and the third a simple thank you with another one of those smiley faces that made Nico feel warm all the way down to his toes. He checked the time after he read the texts and decided that he had enough time to cook something up for breakfast before he headed out. 

For some reason, when he went to get dressed after breakfast, he couldn’t decide what to wear, as if he needed to dress to impress for some reason. Will already knew what he looked like, and he would probably look even more unusual if he actually tried. He had never worried this much when he went over to Will’s apartment, or when Will came to his, so what was so different about this time? Because they would be in public for once? What did that matter? He forced himself to throw on his usual black jeans and a t-shirt, though he threw on his leather jacket without giving himself time to think about it before he left with Will’s leftovers.

He arrived at the hospital without a problem, though he quickly found himself turned around once he was inside the building, unsure of what floor he was even on by the time he pulled out his phone to text Will. He continued wandering around as he waited for a response, though after about twenty minutes without receiving any texts, Nico found the nearest information desk and asked for directions. 

When Nico did eventually locate the research lab that Will was supposed to be in, he found himself stuck in the doorway by the sight of Will in scrubs and a white lab coat with the biggest, most adorable thick-framed black glasses Nico had ever seen. He didn’t know how long he stood there before Will finally noticed him, smiling brightly at him before - unfortunately - pulling off his glasses like he was embarrassed to be seen with them. 

“Oh, hey Nico!” he said, crossing the room and pulling Nico into a hug. “How long have you been standing there?”

“Uh, not long,” Nico replied, attempting to subtly drag his eyes over Will’s form, though due to their proximity, his attempt probably failed miserably. “I thought you said you weren’t a doctor.”

Will glanced down at himself as if he had forgotten what he was wearing. “Oh, no, I’m not. This is just protocol. And I know I’ve said it a bunch already, but thank you so much for coming by. I’ve been craving this pizza all day.”

Nico felt like his heart was going to pound out of his chest. “Then maybe you should’ve answered your texts so I could’ve gotten here sooner.”

Will frowned and patted the pockets of his lab coat, then stuffed his hands into the pockets of his scrub pants, all the while glancing around the room. “Um. I don’t know where my phone is.”

Nico set the tupperware dish of pizza on one of the lab tables as he brought out his phone with his other hand. “Do you want me to call you?”

“Yeah, please.” Will was already digging around under stacks of paper and around plastic organ models before Nico had managed to find Will’s contact. As his phone started ringing from somewhere in the room, Nico joined in on the search, moving toward the sound as Will continued looking around the room’s perimeter. 

Nico located the sound of Will’s generic ringtone underneath a clipboard. He unsurfaced the phone and was about to tell Will that he’d found it when he looked at the screen and saw Nico Who Cooks in place of his actual name. 

“That’s my name in your phone?” Nico demanded, holding out the phone for Will to see when he spun around. 

“Oh, good, you found it!” Will said. He held out his hand to take the device from Nico, though Nico moved it out of reach before Will could. Will frowned. “Uh, is the name thing a problem?”

Nico furrowed his brow. “I have a name, Will.”

“Yeah, and what’s my name in your phone?” he asked innocently, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his lab coat. 

“It’s your name!” Nico exclaimed, waving his arms around in frustration. How could this possibly be such a difficult concept to grasp?

Will rolled his eyes and cracked a smile. “But that’s so boring.”

Nico’s frown deepened. He tossed the phone to Will before picking up his own, already typing by the time he said, “Fine, then I’ll change it.”

“To what?” Will leaned closer, attempting to see what Nico was typing, though Nico pulled the phone against his chest to prevent prying eyes. 

“Why should I tell you?”

“Because it’s my name,” Will said, wrapping a hand around Nico’s wrist. “C’mon, just tell me what you changed it to.”

Nico tried to step back out of Will’s grasp, but found himself leaning back against one of the lab tables with Will boxing him in. “It’s going to be Will who doesn’t wash vegetables.”

Will gasped. “No! You can’t do that!” He made another grab for Nico’s phone, but Nico held it over his head and away from Will. “You can’t shame me for my ignorance!”

“Watch me!” Nico shot back with a laugh, slowly bending backwards as Will continued to grab at his phone. In seconds, Nico was practically laying back on the table as Will hovered over him, one hand pinning Nico’s wrist to the table as the other stretched toward Nico’s phone. 

It was when Nico felt the scratch of Will’s stubble on his cheek that his breath caught in his throat and he choked on his laughter. Will lifted his head to look at him, as if to make sure he wasn’t about to suffocate, and Nico watched his cheeks redden as their noses brushed. 

Time seemed to freeze around them, or maybe it was them that were frozen while time zipped by. Either way, Nico didn’t know how he survived so long without a beating heart or breath in his lungs. His extended arm dropped onto the table behind - above? - him, and the sound of his knuckles hitting the table finally drew Will’s eyes away from his. Then, suddenly, Will was shouting, “Watch out for my kidney!”

“Your-- What?”

Somehow, Will managed to drape himself over Nico even more, though he drew himself back after a second with a hunk of plastic in his hands. He moved back, but not before taking one of Nico’s hands and pulling him upright. Once he was righted, Will presented the plastic proudly and said, “My artificial kidney!”

Nico felt dizzy from the rollercoaster ride he had just gotten off of. Something about all of this wasn’t adding up to him - wasn’t Will just about to kiss him? Where did that kidney come from? What incredibly bizarre chain of events led Nico to this exact moment where the prettiest guy he’d ever seen was rambling to him about a colorful piece of plastic?

“It’s still not perfect,” Will was saying when Nico started paying attention, “but my supervisor said that I’m on the right track. Of course, she doesn’t know exactly what the right artificial kidney looks like either, but we’re figuring it out together! It’s cool, right? I just have to find the right material to use that’ll make it a little more pliable, and then it’ll be ready for trials!”

Nico watched him with wide, surprised eyes as the blond smiled down at the plastic kidney in his hands, turning it slowly as he spoke. As much as he tried to listen to what Will was saying, Nico was absolutely floored by Will’s level of intelligence, and could only think one thing in that moment. 

“You can build an artificial kidney, but you still burn pasta?”

Nico seemed jittery when he let Will into his apartment, like he’d had too much coffee right before Will showed up. He tripped over his words here and there as he was explaining things to Will when they got to the kitchen, which was unusual for him. He seemed a bit scatterbrained, too, and kept interrupting himself to pull out an ingredient he’d forgotten to set out, or grab the measuring spoons since he had accidentally brought out the measuring cups instead.

When Nico set a cookie sheet on the island with a little too much force, causing the rattling sound to surround them for a moment, he winced and said, “Sorry!”

“Don’t worry about it,” Will told him, stepping closer to Nico to get a better look at him - unfortunately, Nico was refusing to make direct eye contact with him. “Hey, are you alright? You seem a little shaky.”

“No, no, I’m fine,” Nico insisted, reaching for the ring on his finger and twisting it almost nervously. “Um. So, I’m actually not going to walk you through this recipe, but I printed out directions for you - did I already tell you that? I don’t remember. Anyway, um. While you do that, I’m going to make dinner for us.”

“Wait,” Will said, frowning in confusion and picking up the recipe Nico left for him, “if you’re making dinner, then what am I making?” Without his reading glasses, Will had to squint slightly to read the title printed at the top of the page, which read, chocolate chip cookies. “Oh, cookies! Just like that one day in class! Don’t worry, Neeks, there is no way that I’ll mess this one up again.” The nickname was what finally got Nico to look at him, but of course Will had to ruin the moment with a wink, which caused Nico to avert his eyes as the back of his neck grew red. 

Will brought the recipe back into his line of sight, squinting at it once again as he said, “So, what are you making?”

Nico turned his back to Will. He pointed at a crock pot sitting on the counter next to the stove and said, “Pot roast. And I’m going to make potatoes to go with it.”

“That must be what smells so good.” When Nico didn’t respond, Will frowned. Had Will done something to upset him? No, Nico had been acting off since Will walked through the door; there was no way that Will was at fault. But what could he do to cheer Nico up?

Before Nico could start peeling potatoes, Will asked, “Hey, could you put on some music?”

“Sure,” Nico replied, and moved toward the sound system. After a few seconds, music surrounded them from the speakers that Will was sure were hidden all throughout the room. When Will looked back to Nico as he started peeling potatoes, he looked more relaxed than he’d been since Will arrived. 

Will smiled to himself as he measured out the flour. 

Nico was indescribably relieved that Will had suggested putting on music. He didn’t want to have to deal with the uncomfortable silences that would no doubtedly follow any smalltalk Will tried to make. Nico had enough on his mind that evening without trying to effectively communicate with somebody who didn’t yet know how to read him without him having to say a word. 

He was able to focus solely on peeling and then chopping potatoes, letting the music wash over him without paying attention to anything other than the beat. It didn’t even register to him that someone was singing until a second voice joined into the mix - softer, closer, less produced. Nico’s body electrified the moment he recognized the voice as Will’s - his spine straightened, his muscles tensed, his hand slammed the knife onto the cutting board. He felt another sharp shock up his arm and glanced down to find a pool of red spreading toward the potatoes. 

“Oh, shit,” Nico muttered, and lifted his hand to get a closer look at the gushing slice in his finger. 

“Oh my god!” Will exclaimed, suddenly appearing at Nico’s side and grabbing Nico’s hand. He tugged him toward the sink and forced Nico’s hand under the running water to wash away the blood. “Nico, are you okay? Nico?”

Will tapped on Nico’s cheek with his free hand, and Nico was finally able to pull his eyes away from his own hand. “Huh?”

“Are you okay? What happened?”

“I, uh. I think my hand slipped.”

Will frowned, like he didn’t believe him, and shut off the water. “Do you have a first aid kit?”

“Yeah, down here,” Nico kicked at the cabinet underneath the sink.

Will released Nico’s hand and crouched down. He opened the cabinet and, after a few seconds of digging around, resurfaced with a hand towel and the first aid kit. He wrapped the towel around Nico’s finger and told him to keep pressure on it before cracking open the first aid kit. It wasn’t the best kit in the world, and Nico might admit that he hadn’t restocked it like he should have after the last kitchen mishap, but Will seemed to find everything he was looking for regardless.

Once he had everything set out, Will took Nico’s injured hand in his once more and carefully unwrapped the towel. The bleeding appeared to have stopped, which was good, so Will ripped open an alcohol wipe with a warning of, “This is probably going to sting.”

Nico tried not to flinch as Will cleaned the wound, and allowed himself to untense once the cleaning was done. “I thought you said you weren’t a doctor,” Nico commented, hoping to lighten the mood a little bit.

“I’m both first aid certified and working in the medical sciences field,” Will replied, shooting Nico a grin. “I think I know how to bandage a cut.”

Nico’s eyes flickered away from Will’s smile. “Maybe so.”

Will wrapped Nico’s finger in a bandage, though before he released him, Will asked, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Nico nodded. “Yeah, I think so. I just zoned out a little bit, but I’ll be fine. I’m done cutting everything up now, anyway.”

“Do you want a hand with anything?” Will offered.

“Oh, no, you’ve got cookies to make,” Nico reminded him. “I’ve got this handled.”

Will turned back to where he’d left his dough half-mixed and joked, “Fine, see if I offer to help you again.”

Nico tried not to think about how, if things went a certain way that evening, then Will wouldn’t have the opportunity to offer his help again. 

Nico rinsed the potatoes - and tossed the few chunks that had unfortunately been stained pink by Nico’s blood - before throwing them into a pot, which he filled with water and set on a burner to boil. He leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest, watching Will for a few moments as he went between mixing ingredients and checking his recipe. 

“Do you need a hand?” Nico asked after a short while. 

“No, I’ve got it,” Will told him, and nearly dropped his whisk onto the floor.

“That’s good,” Nico replied, cracking a smile, “because I wasn’t actually going to help anyway.”

Will flicked dough at him off the edge of the bowl. 

Nico finished mashing the potatoes just in time for Will to put the first batch of cookies into the oven. He had forgotten to preheat the oven, which left him lingering over Nico’s shoulder as he made the mashed potatoes, while Will obnoxiously ate a spoonful of cookie dough right next to Nico’s ear. Considering just how obnoxious he was being, Nico really shouldn’t have wanted to kiss him even more than usual. But he did. And he really needed Will to get away from him before he did something stupid, which was why the sound of the oven heating up came at the perfect time.

Nico and Will sat down at the breakfast nook to eat their dinner so that Will could be close enough to check on his cookies every time his alarm went off. Thankfully, Will’s frequent hopping out of his chair prevented very much talking between them, so Nico didn’t feel as bad about not being fully able to hold a conversation as he had before. 

After Will put the second batch in the oven and returned to the table, he was proud to announce that the first batch didn’t seem burnt at all. Nico had to stuff a bite of pot roast into his mouth to keep himself from jumping across the table and kissing that pride-filled smile off of Will’s face. 

When they’d finished eating, Will tried to insist on washing the dishes - citing Nico’s bandage-wrapped finger as reason why he wasn’t allowed, even telling him, “Doctor’s orders,” which just made Nico roll his eyes - though Will seemed to have forgotten that some people (including Nico, and probably a million other people in the city) owned dishwashers. 

They put the leftovers away together, and, once the kitchen was mostly cleaned up, Nico decided that the cookies were probably cool enough to eat. They each grabbed one off the cooling rack, though Nico noticed that Will hesitated to take a bite until Nico did first. 

“It’s good,” Nico told him, his smile slowly growing as Will grinned at him and then took a bite out of his own cookie.

“Oh, man! You’re right, this is great!” He took another bite, so his mouth was full when he continued: “I can still hardly believe that I can actually cook, you know? And I know, I know, this was technically baking, but close enough. I mean, look at these! I made cookies, and they’re edible!”

Nico popped the rest of his cookie in his mouth and brushed crumbs off his hands and onto the thighs of his jeans. Once he’d finished chewing and swallowed the cookie - because he wasn’t a heathen who talked with his mouth full - he smiled at Will and said, “You know, um, I think this means you passed.”

Will took a bite out of a second cookie and said, “Huh?”

“Just, uh, hang on right here for a second,” Nico told him. He turned on his heel and walked around the corner, heading into his bedroom. He had set Will’s certificate on top of his dresser before Will had arrived that evening, knowing that it was finally time to give Will an out to this whole thing if that was what he chose. He really hoped that wouldn’t be what Will chose.

He returned to the kitchen to see Will cleaning things up again, and walked straight up to him. He didn’t really know what to say as he held up the certificate, though he was sure his face was bright red - how could he not have considered how awkward this was going to be? Why hadn’t he thought of something to say? He felt like he was in middle school, passing a note to his crush that said, do you like me? Check yes or no. And now Will was staring down at the certificate with this adorable, wide-eyed look on his face that Nico was probably never going to see again.

“Um--” Nico started, but before he could get any further, there were hands on his cheeks and lips pressed to his own. Nico felt himself going cross-eyed as he tried to focus on the freckled skin so very close to him, and somewhere in the back of his mind it registered that the certificate had slipped out from between his fingers. 

After a few stunned seconds, Nico felt as Will started to pull away, his fingers no longer pressed into his skin but rather grazing his cheeks, his eyes fluttering open and looking almost...fearful?

Will whispered, “Oh god, I’m so sorry--”

Nico twisted his fingers in the front of Will’s shirt and yanked him back in, kissing him sloppily and licking his way into Will’s mouth until he tasted chocolate. Soon, Will’s arms had wound around Nico’s waist as he pressed him back against the island, and one of Nico’s hands had twisted into Will’s hair, keeping the two wrapped around each other.

Eventually - unfortunately - they did have to breathe, though even as they pulled apart they didn’t loosen their holds on one another. 

Will set his forehead against Nico’s as he panted for breath. “I don’t want this to end,” he whispered. “Not when it feels like we’re just getting started.”

Nico twisted a curl around his finger, and cocked his head as much as he could without knocking Will back. “Do you mean with the kissing, or with the rest of this?”

Will chuckled. “Both.”

Nico stretched up to peck at Will’s lips. “Then let’s not stop.”

Just as their lips met once more, Nico heard the distant sound of the deadbolt turning in the front door, and he pulled himself back. 

Will frowned down at him, clearly not understanding why Nico wasn’t kissing him when he’d so clearly just said that he was going to, so Nico said, “My roommate is here.”

“What? How do you know?” Will asked, though before Nico could answer, he heard the door open. 

Nico forced himself out of Will’s hold, then snatched one of Will’s hands to drag him across the kitchen, around the corner, and into Nico’s bedroom before Nico slammed the door shut and leaned back against it.

“Um,” Will said, standing awkwardly in the middle of Nico’s bedroom.

“Sorry!” Nico exclaimed, his eyes widening and cheeks flushing in embarrassment as he realized when he’d just done. “I just-- I, uh…” Nico groaned and buried his face in his hands. “I’m pretty sure my roommate has a bet going with his girlfriend about how long it would take us to get together, and I don’t want to deal with that right now, when there are much better things I’d rather be doing.”

“I get it.” When Nico looked up, Will was smiling at him. “You’d rather make out with a hot guy in your room than deal with other people. The feeling’s mutual. Besides, now that you mention it, I’m pretty sure my best friend did the same thing with her boyfriend.”

Nico pushed himself off the door and stepped toward Will carefully. “So… I bet my bed is a lot more comfortable than the kitchen counter.”

Will stepped closer, meeting him in the middle, and grabbed his hips to draw him in, planting another kiss on him as he walked Nico over to the bed. He sat down on the edge of the mattress and guided Nico to stand between his knees. Nico ran a hand through Will’s hair, causing Will to lean into his touch and rest his cheek in Nico’s palm.

“So, um,” Will started nervously, “what did you expect out of...this? Tonight?”

Nico seemed surprised by the question. “Oh. Well, to tell you the truth, I wasn’t expecting this to happen at all. I kind of assumed you would take your certificate and leave, and then if I was lucky, you’d text me sometimes. And, well… I didn’t really think I’m all that lucky. I didn’t think any of this was going to happen.”

“Really?” Will asked, eyes widening in shock. “I mean, I didn’t think I was really being subtle about liking you. I just sort of thought you weren’t interested. So then when I kissed you--”

“Yeah, remind me why we aren’t doing more of that right now,” Nico cut in, so Will pinched his hip and tried to hold back a laugh.

“Because I want to make sure we’re on the same page,” Will said. “I really like you, Nico. Like, I don’t think I’ve ever liked someone as much as I like you. I just want to make sure this isn’t a one-night thing.”

Nico sat down beside him, his hand still resting on Will’s cheek, which kept Will’s eyes on him as he moved. “I didn’t bring you in here for a one night stand, Will. I was kind of hoping for, well, this. Figuring this out. And more kissing would be great too--”

Will obliged, kissing Nico with so much force that he knocked him onto his back. When he pulled away, Will laid down beside Nico, watching as a big smile spread across Nico’s face. 

Nico rolled onto his side. “I really like you, too.”

Will woke up to the feeling of pins and needles in his leg. At first, he thought it might have just been because he had somehow managed to fall asleep in his jeans the night before, but when he opened his eyes, he realized that that wasn’t it - at least not entirely. He was still in his jeans, but there was a lot more going on that his tired mind couldn’t fully compute. It took him a minute to register that he wasn’t in his own room in his own apartment, and instead in Nico’s apartment, Nico’s room, Nico’s bed. With Nico’s leg thrown over his own, apparently, and cutting off his circulation. 

He looked to his side to find a sleeping Nico, his face squished into his pillow, one of his hands reached out and grasping Will’s t-shirt. He looked even more adorable than usual, though Will was starting to think that everything about Nico would get better with exposure. And he was happy to be exposed to as much of Nico as possible, as often as he could. 

Will shifted his leg in the hopes of regaining feeling without dislodging Nico, though at the slightest movement, Nico whined in his sleep and rolled onto his other side, releasing Will from his hold completely. Will couldn’t control the smile that grew on his face until his cheeks started to hurt. He wanted to follow Nico to the other side of the bed, wrap him up in his arms, and smother him in kisses, though he figured he should try to get feeling back in his leg first. 

Will laid in Nico’s bed, simply observing the room around him as he wiggled his toes in order to get the blood flowing back into his leg, until he felt that he would be able to stand without stumbling. He moved as quietly as he could so as to not wake Nico, and stretched his arms over his head once he was standing.

He noticed for the first time the empty sensation of hunger and briefly considered the awkward possibility of stumbling across Nico’s roommate if he went to make breakfast before he left the room silently. Will peeked inside a few of the kitchen cabinets until he found a box of pancake mix, then saw on the counter across the room a bunch of bananas, and decided in that moment that he would wake Nico up with breakfast in bed. That wasn’t a weird thing to do after making out with a guy, admitting you like each other, and then falling asleep in the same bed, right?

He managed to make a small stack of banana pancakes before he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Will grinned when he realized it was Nico, and said, “Good morning. I made you pancakes.”

Nico seemed frozen in place, his eyes wide and mouth hanging slack, though Will could see his fingers fiddling with the cuffs on the flannel shirt he’d put on - the one Will had taken off before falling asleep. He muttered, “Nobody’s ever cooked for me before.”

Will stepped away from the stove to grab Nico’s hand, drawing him close and pressing a soft kiss to his lips. “Then it’s a good thing you taught me how.”

Nico flung his arms around Will’s neck and pulled him down for another kiss - harder, longer, filled with so many emotions yet Will couldn’t pinpoint a single one. Without allowing the kiss to break, Nico started pulling Will back the way he’d come, and Will followed without hesitation, his mind blank to anything that wasn’t Nico Nico Nico.

They stumbled back into Nico’s room. Will leaned back against the door just long enough to push his flannel shirt off of Nico’s shoulders before he was being led toward the bed. Nico pushed Will down onto the mattress and climbed into his lap, twisting his fingers into Will’s hair as Will kissed along his jaw and down his neck, his hands slipping underneath Nico’s t-shirt to trace patterns over his spine. Just as Nico pressed Will down onto the mattress, they were interrupted by a shrieking sound coming from the hallway. 

“Oh, shit!” Will exclaimed, by now intimately familiar with the blaring sound of a fire alarm going off. He rolled Nico off of him and rushed out of the room. 

The screeching became louder as soon as he opened the door, and more so when he rounded the corner, though the sight of the kitchen had him stopping in his tracks. 

“Piper?” he shouted over the sound of the alarm. 

She was standing on a chair, waving a dish towel directly under the smoke alarm, right behind Jason, who was spraying the stove with a fire extinguisher. Piper merely glanced down at him before she rolled her eyes and returned to her fanning until the noise finally ceased. By that time, Nico had joined Will in the entryway to the kitchen, his eyes darting around the room as if to make sure none of his precious appliances had been severely damaged.

Piper climbed down from her chair and tossed the dish towel on the island. “I should’ve known it wasn’t Nico that set the stove on fire.”

“What the hell are you doing here?” Will exclaimed. “Do you all know each other?”  

“You know Piper?” Nico asked, at the same time that Jason said, “I live here.” Which, while it was incredibly important information, wasn’t helping Will’s train of thought at the moment. 

Piper crossed the room and pushed open the window above the sink to help air out the smoke. “Please, Will, I think you know exactly what’s going on here.”

Will dropped back against the counter behind him and buried his face in his hands. “Hang on a second. Let me just...get this straight. You’re dating Jason, and Jason is Nico’s roommate. You set this all up from the very beginning? You told me to sign up for Nico’s class on purpose?”

“Of course I did,” Piper admitted, rolling her eyes once more, like Will was boring her. It reminded him a lot of her sister. “I thought I would kill two birds with one stone, you know?”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Will whispered, shaking his head.

“It’s not like it was a bad thing that you signed up for my class,” Nico pointed out, a hint of hurt in his voice. “Besides, Piper sets people up in her sleep. It’s not like it’s that big of a deal that she set us up. Despite the fact that I specifically told her not to try setting me up ever again.” Nico shot a glare at her before returning his attention to Will. 

“No, babe, of course it wasn’t a bad thing,” Will assured him, grasping Nico’s hand and squeezing, triggering the rise of a blush to Nico’s face. “It’s just… God, I should have seen this coming! I’ve watched her do this a hundred times - how did I not notice?”

Piper shrugged, a proud smirk planted on her face. “What can I say? I’m the ultimate matchmaker.”

“Uh huh, sure,” Nico said. He squeezed Will’s hand once and then released it, walking across the kitchen to retrieve the plate of pancakes Will had made before Nico had dragged him away - though not before checking them for fire extinguisher residue and deeming them safe enough to consume. He might have to get into the habit of checking his food for edibility before eating it if Will ever decided to cook for him again. “Anyway, my ultimate boyfriend made me breakfast, so if you don’t mind, we’ll be in my room eating these pancakes.” On his way back over to Will, Nico took two forks out of the silverware drawer and grabbed the syrup from the pantry.

“Aren’t you going to clean this place up?” Jason asked, gesturing to the foam-covered stove beside him. 

“Why should I? It’s Piper’s fault,” Nico said, shooting her a smirk. “She’s the one that set all of this up, after all.”

Nico hooked his arm with Will’s to lead him back into his bedroom, smiling proudly at the frustrated look he’d put on Piper’s face. 

Will stared down at Nico in awe, his heart still fluttering from being referred to as his boyfriend - no, his ultimate boyfriend. That probably didn’t mean anything different, and Nico probably just said it to mess with Piper, but it meant something more to Will. 

Was it too soon for Will to say he was in love?