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Murphy pulls away first, with an abrupt and jerking movement, but doesn’t break eye contact or step back. Raven’s hand is still resting on the back of his neck, the touch she used to pull him close. In her other hand, her glass of water sweats, cold and numb against her fingers. Some of it has splashed down the front of her shirt.
Behind her, the narrow window is still open, and city evening sounds waft in: two car horns honking and a distant siren, floating on a thin breeze that, though summer-warm, is still cool enough to cure the stuffy closeness of the kitchen. At first, the siren is the only thing Raven can focus on. That, and the way Murphy’s gaze flicks across her face. How, for once, she isn’t sure how to read him.
He’s still holding the ladle of chili in his right hand, his left hand cupped under it to catch anything that might spill.
As she watches him, her lips still parted, a grin creeps slowly across his face.
“If you don’t want to try my cooking, you could just say so, Reyes,” he says, and his voice sounds almost normal, only slightly parched still with surprise. She has tasted that shock, felt it on her lips in that first second of stillness, when she thrust herself the last few inches into his space and kissed him, before he realized what she was doing and kissed back.
When he speaks, the last of the spell is broken. She rolls her eyes and grins.
“I did say so,” she reminds him. “Several times.”
He’d been bugging her to taste the latest iteration of the chili, while she crouched behind the door of the fridge, filling her glass from the water filter on the bottom shelf, both of them half-shouting over the noise of the sorry fan above the stove. She hadn’t realized he was just behind the door, closed it and turned and there he was, right next to her.
“Resorting to kissing me, though—” He clucks his tongue and shakes his head. “I should have known this day was coming.”
“Yeah, we’ve lived together how many months now?” Raven asks, shoving aside his cookbooks for a spare bit of counter space, setting her glass down. They’re not touching anymore but he’s still standing too close. She wipes at the water on her shirt, pinches the fabric and fans it against her chest as if this could help it dry. “And I’ve managed to go every single day, resisting the urge to lay one on you.”
“Are you talking about a kiss or a punch?”
She pauses. The shirt is not salvageable. She’ll have to change. When she glances up, she sees Murphy gently grabbing a bit of chili from the ladle with his teeth, warm steam still drifting up across his face.
“Little of both,” Raven answers, with a half-smile, a very small but affectionate smile. Then, half-shrugging, taking another half-step forward again: “Mostly the first.”
“Obviously.”
He tips the ladle toward her and raises his eyebrows, a silent question, and Raven sighs, as if this were a great capitulation, and takes a small bite. Murphy watches her impatiently.
“Well?”
She has to hold her hand in front of her mouth, unable to keep her lips closed against the burn, fans her fingers in front of her as she finally swallows.
“First—I was right. It’s too hot still. And second—” She swipes her thumb across the corner of her mouth. “I think you’re almost there with the spices.”
“Oh, almost?” He makes it sound like a dare: incredulous, almost insulted, as he puts the ladle back in the pot on the stove and steps a little closer again. His hands settle on her hips. This bit of new closeness feels right, feels like something that should have been between them all along. She slings her arms over his shoulders, looks up at him with her eyes narrowed but laughter bubbling on her lips.
The kitchen smells of spices and steam, the overhead fluorescents their own spotlight, their own pocket of warm glow against the deepening night outside and the rest of the small, dark apartment beyond the door.
“That’s the expert opinion you asked for,” she says, and before he can argue, she reaches up and kisses him again.