Chapter Seven

Dinner with Orion turned out to be neatly portioned pieces of quiche in glass containers with locking lids. The containers were cool. Glass, you know, very environmentally aware. When I caught a glimpse into the refrigerator, it was actually like two stacks of glass containers, a pint of heavy cream, a jar of relish ... and probably other stuff I didn't see because it was only a glimpse. Point being: Orion apparently prepped meals in containers and didn't keep a ton of food on hand. Though I was pretty sure he had two of those boxes of butter, like, boxes with wrapped bricks of butter inside them.

Who needs that much butter?

The quiche, or whatever, was really good. I started to think he probably hired someone to cook for him. A lot of athletes did that. Not a personal chef or anything that fancy, just a person who liked cooking and had a side hustle making meals for people, perfectly proportioned meals in neat glass containers.

I was really warming to this idea—she, I was sure it would be a she up here in the sticks, was probably someone's grandmother, maybe that kid at the gas station's, and she'd have blue-rinsed hair and a super-organized kitchen, probably with one of those Instagram-able pantries that look like restaurant dry storage. I was debating what she'd have on her apron (she definitely wore an apron, but would it be delicate florals or something more edgy, like maybe Wonder Woman?) when Orion blew away my fun grandma-chef idea by saying, "You don't have food allergies, do you? I was making peanut butter the day I did the quiche, so it's probably cross-contaminated."

It took me a second to get over my You were MAKING peanut butter? moment and recover long enough to shake my head. "So you made all this?"

He shrugged. "A guy's gotta eat."

I did not think he would appreciate my fantasy that he hired someone to cook for him. If you're the type of person who makes peanut butter, you'd probably be insulted by that. "It's really good," I said, and meant it. Which was annoying.

"It's just a basic quiche." He sounded defensive. Like I'd been taking the piss or something, when I very much hadn't.

"I mean, I've never made any level of quiche, and it tastes good, so."

Annnnnnd, awkward silence descended. Again.

Had I said something actually wrong? But this time I didn't think I had. I'd literally just complimented his quiche.

Damn, I wanted that to be a euphemism. Hey, hot stuff, I really like your ... quiche.

What was happening to me? I'd been in the sticks for six hours, and suddenly I was thinking about sex and quiche in the same sentence.

Should I be making conversation? Was that burden on me because I was the uninvited guest? I grasped for something to say that he couldn't misinterpret.

"You have perfect teeth," I said inanely.

He blinked at me. "What?"

"Your teeth. They're. I mean. Did you have braces as a kid or whatever? I didn't have braces. So I notice other people's perfect teeth." I tried not to visibly cringe as I stared down at my quiche.

"Thanks, I guess?" His tone was less Thanks and more What did I do to deserve this?

Dinner ended, at last, and I immediately offered to wash the dishes and was immediately rebuffed. So I escaped to the couch again. The bathroom was like a hotel. The living room was a lot more like a family cabin. It was hard to imagine movie stars living in such a place, even for a vacation. Wood paneling on the walls and built-in bookshelves up the entire exterior wall, only broken by the long window. Lots of murder mysteries and magazines. Stacks of National Geographic and yellowing Reader's Digest s, with dates way further back than Orion's presence accounted for. Had he inherited fifty years' worth of back issues from the previous owners?

The bottom shelves were lined with closed boxes, but they looked a lot more recent. I skipped them, since I didn't think opening a dude's boxes was really all that cool (at least not when he might catch me doing it), but on the far side of the window, what I'd initially assumed was more stacks of National Geographic was actually Sports Now . A.k.a. the magazine I'd dreamed of writing for since I was a literal child. My dad had loved it.

" Sports Illustrated is for wankers," he'd told me. "People who care about sport read Sports Now ." So I'd cared about it too. It was the sports world version of Rolling Stone . In-depth features alongside stats and a column I'd loved when I was younger called "Where's Sporty?" which would just show a photo of people somewhere doing A Sport, and challenge readers to guess where and what the sport was. My dad's claim to fame was getting his letter published, in which he'd correctly identified rugby being played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground and gotten the year right, earning a "high score" badge from the editors.

Everything that happened to my dad after that failed to live up to such a singular achievement, including having me.

Orion came out of the kitchen sometime later and looked at me, pausing for a long second just standing there, as if he was about to say something. But he didn't. At least, not the way it seemed like he was going to. His eyes landed on the magazine I was currently reading, a packed issue from the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, which featured the German team on the cover, all of whom were covering their mouths to protest FIFA's ruling against allowing teams to wear armbands in support of LGBTQI+ rights.

I gulped, wishing I'd been reading literally any other issue. Hey, you know how I fucked up your whole life trying to prove the sport was ready for gay players and then later that year the World Cup was held in a country where being gay is literally illegal? Uhh, yeah, that happened. But he didn't say anything about the magazine, the awesomeness of the German team taking their World Cup photo with their own hands muzzling their ability to support queer people, or how screwed up it all was. Finally, with a small, attractive frown line (not a whole archaeological stratum of lines like certain other people), he said only, "I'm turning in. There are blankets in the hall closet and a pillow in a vacuum bag, so ... help yourself."

That was it. Hospitality Chez Broderick.

"Thanks," I managed to say before his door shut.

No response.

I mouthed Okey dokey to the empty room and checked the time on my phone.

Not quite ten p.m. Right. Okay. So here we were. I considered the stacks of Sports Now and wondered how far back they went. Maybe I could even find the one with my dad's letter. Since there was literally nothing else to do.

Just to check, I hit airplane mode on my phone, then turned it off again and watched as the phone searched for a signal. But no. Not even a tiny hint of a bar.

I grabbed a stack of magazines, brought them over to the couch, and pretended I was at a super-comfy library instead of the isolated mountain cabin of a guy who detested me.

You know how you read about people waking up in a strange place super disoriented? I kind of wish that had happened to me. Instead I woke up feeling the familiar certainty that I had royally screwed up, and now I was paying the price for it.

It was still pretty dark out, even though it was seven in the morning. I'd finally numbed myself with articles about the history of recreational running and the relationship between the ancient Greek sporting events and the modern Olympics by around midnight. I had found a pile of dust-smelling blankets, but no pillow aside from the couch cushions, so I'd huddled under a bunch of quilts and used my still-damp hoodie (which Orion had hung up on a chair in the kitchen) as a pillow.

Also, the cabin was freezing . Like epically, ice-aged cold. By the time I'd gone to bed, it was definitely cooling off (Orion was probably the kind of guy who had his heating set to only go on at certain times of day or something). When I woke up in the morning, it felt like I should've been able to see my breath.

I couldn't. I tried. But that's how cold it was. It was outside levels of way too fucking cold.

Still, after another few minutes of lying under my blanket imagining ice crystals forming on the tips of my eyelashes, I gave up and got out-of-bed-slash-off-the-couch. And hung up my hoodie. Again. Because me sleeping on it had not helped it dry. And it being damp had probably also not helped me stay warm.

No sounds from Orion's room, so naturally I went to the bathroom and then decided to have a good snoop in the kitchen.

It wasn't as bad as it had seemed the night before. He had more eggs on the door of the fridge, a loaf and a half of bread in the freezer (which was weird), and a pantry stocked with three varieties of pasta and one dusty jar of pesto. Plus some other random bits.

No snack food. No chips, crackers, whatever. Two huge bags of white sugar, a huge bag of brown sugar, a huge bag of rolled oats, two big plastic bins of something that looked like it was maybe flour, and enough canned tuna to last through the end of the year.

Eggs, tuna, pasta, no junk food. The diet of a man who is used to paying attention to protein and carbs, but not in the habit of snacking. Five more glass containers with quiche, and two in the freezer with what looked like maybe soup.

It took me that long for the real horror of what I was seeing—or rather not seeing—to sink in.

No. It couldn't be. It could not be.

So I went through the kitchen again. Protein, check. Carbs, check. Frozen bread for some reason, check.

What wasn't there, the glaring omission that was beginning to make me sweat, was coffee. Or tea. Or literally any source of caffeine.

But surely ... he seemed to kind of work at a place with "brew" in the name. I must just be missing it. Except also I didn't see a coffee maker or espresso machine or even a French press. Even non-coffee drinkers often had a dusty old French press in the back of a cabinet somewhere! Or an ancient drip machine. I didn't need anything fancy. Hell, if I found some coffee grounds, I could just boil them on the stovetop for cowboy coffee, really cement the parallels between this cabin and actually camping in the open air.

There had to be some form of caffeine in the place. I would wait for Orion to get up. No big deal. I would not panic. Who in this day and age has zero caffeine in their house? That was bananas.

I'd make breakfast. I would make us both breakfast—I mean, I couldn't cook real meals, but how hard could scrambled eggs be?—and he'd wake up, and he'd be touched and impressed, and then he would magically bring out coffee from wherever it was hiding, and voilà, life could go on.

His bedroom. That was probably it. Maybe he'd set it up like a European B and B, with a little coffee maker and a cute jar of brightly colored pods for it. All different flavors. Yeah. It'd be fine.

Eggs, butter, a frying pan that had frankly seen better days. Salt and pepper, so at least he had those. Three kinds of salt: pink, kosher, and the regular "iodized" stuff. I hadn't ever wondered what that meant, but now I did. As I sprinkled it into eggs I'd more or less beaten together in a bowl. Salt and pepper. Butter in the pan. Everything was going smoothly.

Were you supposed to heat the pan first or not? I thought so. I heated the pan. But then the butter I'd put in it started to burn. I lowered the heat and added more butter, which went brown immediately. Get it together, stove. I waved the pan around a bit until it was cooler and put it back on the heat. I added the eggs.

Which immediately started to burn in the center of the pan, but didn't even seem to be cooking along its edges. Fine, I could stir. Except it took me precious seconds to find the wooden spoons in a drawer (I wasn't about to destroy Orion's pan with metal, even if it did look older than I was).

Still fine. I started stirring, scraping, scrambling? Scrambling the eggs, which didn't smell that great by then, and finally took the pan off the heat again to slow down the cooking, but it wasn't slowing very fast, so I started waving it around just to help the cooling process along. The room was freaking frigid , right? It wouldn't take that long to—

"What the hell are you doing?"

My careful swooping motion jerked to the side as I spun to see that I'd been caught fucking up eggs in another man's kitchen, and the eggs themselves, in various states of burned, scrambled, and raw, slid to the floor. I don't know if it's right, that thing about objects moving through space at the same time, because it definitely seemed like the burned stuff hit the floor first, then the stuff that looked edible, then the runny junk went splat right on top.

"Umm." I looked down at the ruins of my Sorry you detest me breakfast. "Trying to make breakfast?"

"Charming. Could you maybe put my pan down before you drop it?"

Chagrined, I set the pan on an unlit burner and turned off the one I'd been using. "Sorry, I couldn't get it to heat consistently, and then it was too hot, or not hot enough, and—"

He brushed past me and grabbed a handful of paper towels.

"Oh no, let me—"

"I've got it."

And he did. You know. It being eggs in a rather interesting impact pattern across his tile floor. Orion crouched down in the middle of a mess I'd made while I stood there, impotently, wishing I'd never been born.

So nothing new there.

"Sorry," I said.

"It's fine."

"Should I start a new batch?" I offered.

"No."

"I could make toast?" I could manage that. Maybe.

"I'd really rather you didn't." He was still on the floor. How many paper towels did this endeavor require?

"Okay."

"Great."

I winced. This was coffee's fault. Or lack-of-coffee's fault. If I'd had some caffeine in my brain, everything would have gone so much more smoothly.

Uhh, could I ask him about coffee now? No, right? I mean. I'd be embarrassed, but it might be worth it?

"You're in my way," he said without looking up.

I didn't think the eggs had really splattered that far? But also, what was I going to do, argue with him? "Sorry," I mumbled again, and I fled to the living room. Then, when that wasn't far enough, I put on my damp hoodie and called, "I'm just gonna go outside and look around!"

He said something too low for me to hear, then raised his voice and added, "At least wear boots this time. Try the closet."

I gulped in discomfort and tried the closet, which did have three pairs of boots. I picked the oldest-looking ones and slid my feet into them. A little too big, but not much. I tried to thank him, but as I passed the kitchen he was still on his hands and knees, and the words died in my throat.

Never in my life had I known there would come a day when the idea of going out into a blizzard would be preferable to staying indoors, but here we were. I stomped out into the snow, and ... well, anyway, at least I wasn't watching a famous soccer star clean eggs off the floor anymore. That had to be an improvement in circumstances. Yeah. Right.