One wakes up on the couch, the other in their shared bed. Sam and Eva then meet in the kitchen for coffee. He prepares it, just as he always has – she looks on, arms crossed, as she’s been doing recently. A little oat milk and a whole lot of ice, a metal straw. He hands it to her holding it with both hands, like a child presenting a drawing to a clearly stressed parent. Eva trudges through a thanks and retreats to the bed she’s made her own and her own only, to her phone and the pleasantry of a morning coffee.
Sam joins her for a moment, resting across from her, running his hand on her leg. His eyes linger on her, on the straw, on the hollowness in her cheeks when she sucks on it – all to no avail. Focused on the drink and on the phone, Sam gets scrolled off with a stretch of the legs. He can only bear to stay put in that bed for another second before he gets up and asks her what she wants for breakfast.
Anything really, she says. Today I’m in a cooking mood, he insists; I can make you eggs, benedict, scrambled, sunny side, or an omelette. With cheese, spring onion, tomatoes, peas, ham or anything you want. Anything.
Eva just stares on waiting to answer. Save it for tonight. There’ll be plenty of cooking to do between you and Minnie. Save it for the dinner party.
Sam might be apologetic, as he always is in the face of rejection, but in a lot of ways Eva is right. They’ve got a dinner party tonight with Minnie and Brock, where Minnie and Sam will be charged with cooking. Better save it till then. Keep the excitement for when it’ll really matter.
At the evening’s destination, the home of Minnie and Brock, she’s awake a solid hour before him. In that hour she’s buzzing around the house: mopping up, clearing the table, scurrying to oft forgotten corners of the room to weed the settled dust out. By the time Brock wakes up the house is halfway spotless, which is something even he can’t mind.
Not that he seems particularly attentive once awake. He doesn’t notice and doesn’t comment. He just lumbers to the kitchen and prepares a coffee for both of them. He uses a moka, as he’s always done, spilling a little ground coffee on the counter, and spilling some more liquid coffee on it as he pours it into two cups.
Minnie forces the bitter fluid down her throat and thanks him, just as she always does despite not loving espressos, followed by a tight little peck on the lip before he starts to peel off.
Can I count on you to ready it for tonight, he asks her with a foot out the door.
Of course baby, it’ll be wonderful, a wonderful time, we’ll make it wonderful in here, they’ll love our house, she answers in bullet bursts faster than her mouth. Brock lands his giant hands on her waist and kisses her goodbye and is out the door before she can even settle into place, settle into his arms.
As accustomed as she is to those dashes when the time is about to be right – when the kisses have her just about vibrating, just about to melt in his arms, right before he rushes off, cites some disturbance, blames the heat of their bedroom (he won’t fix the wonky heater), or the exhaustion from that draining work at the lab – Minnie still takes a moment to settle, and to let that little fire, ever dimmer, burning through the middle of her, subside.
She locks her hanging jaw shut and texts Sam, saying she’ll clean-up for the evening, saying that he should come early so they can ready the food for their couples’ night.
He reads this hearing a shower’s rain. Eva washing herself, him sat on the toilet. He tells her he’ll leave early tonight and she yells back what. He repeats it louder, voice clawing through the water’s drumming to let her know: I’m leaving earlier tonight, me and Minnie will prepare the food, is that alright – to which she obviously says yes. I won’t limit you, do as you please, in a tone that during better times had the steeliness of conquest and now just seems to cut right through the climbing desperation for a yes that fills Sam, yearning to hear some warmth coming from his joy, his Eva.
But the shower just cuts off and Eva steps out. Nude, glistening, droplets raining down her body. Looking at Sam she says – pass me the towel please baby – and that’s what he does.
Eva wraps herself up, wordlessly walks out the room, and in her endless precision the floor remains dry as if it were untouched.
While Eve’s preparations for the evening continue, so do Minnie’s. She goes get groceries to make the night’s chicken parm, busied by the moment, giddy to be the evening’s delight: her cooking mastery, her and Brock’s flat – until she gets home to check her phone, seeing it filled with his texts joking about work, calling himself juiced by the day’s demands, exhausted by the thousand things he’s having to do, telling Minnie he just wants to relax with her, striving for what he always puts just out of sight, choosing to work more. When they’re together he tells her a career is the most important thing a man can want, to which she answers yes one way, yes the other way, always thankful and smiling, afraid to shatter the fragile excitement that seems to be his drive.
Minnie rises to the occasion. She rises because knows she can and as she’s done in the past. Like when her and Brock met – he seemed world-weary and she’d barely left her parent’s place. Brock talked an enormous game, he’d made himself seem so large, larger than his thick stocky frame. She climbed up those slippery mirrors one leap of faith at a time, doing more, taking risks. They’d made love in a bathroom club, ran out on plays he wanted to attend, argued and cut off friends he deemed unpleasant who now she really recognized Brock saw as threatening to himself, made love on the couch when she’d feared the neighbours’ curious eyes.
Until she was solidly of his world – belonging, cool – and now treading water in a big apartment answering texts about how difficult and annoying his job must be.
Obviously she welcomed Sam over to cook, happy to break the monotony of her days and have some fun. Make a meal together, make an evening run smoothly: a homemaker’s reward. And even more obviously Sam was ready to run over and let that stammering pleasing of his take control fully, unbridled and unashamed by how it could be misconstrued as too much.
The two of them met up at Minnie’s place, about an hour and a half before their respective partners would join them, both ready to delight.
Sam comes earlier than agreed upon, always surprised by the skitter of his own step, looking like he’s failing to catchup to himself. He steps in and him and Minnie sink into a long, long hug. The sort where you sway, where a hand clasps a hip, and once they leave it, words seem to say a sliver of what the hug was.
So Sam hangs off from heading for the counter of her apartment, cooking in a place he’s visited a thousand times. Instead he compliments her on the cleared out corners, and she thanks him. He compliments her on the cleared out counter, and she thanks him. He opens ups the fridge and jokes that Eve always forgets to buy at least one item from their shopping list, burrowed deep in her own head as she is, and Minnie appreciates feeling better than.
Shit, she even lets a little giggle split.
They get to cooking in a way neither have done in a while. Slinking past each other’s bodies’ like a pendulum in Minnie’s narrow kitchen, Sam reaches out for the knife and she hands it to him. A little thank you to which Minnie steps closer, saying I appreciate that, meaning every word. When she says it she’s still, the clover rests in her hands.
Pass me some more basil, asks Sam, to a bouncy, ready Minnie, who jumps, because there’s a smile on her face, because she knew she’d have to do that, she knew a step ahead, and because she’s unsurprised when after her fast response Sam says thank you- it’s as if you read my mind.
Her excitement gets channelled into the knife, crushing garlic, peeling it with its sharp tip, holding minuscule cloves between her nimble fingers and cutting them down with a dangerous violence. Sam questions if it’s safe, he grabs her hand and moves her back, taking over the garlic himself – cutting it slower, keeping eye contact. He smiles at her and she smiles back glad to get some help, at least this one time.
Minnie makes a beeline for what’s fallen off the cutting board but Sam shoos her off, he’ll take care of it, so she goes for the chicken and makes him scoot to fit a second cutting board on the narrow counter. They stand shoulder to shoulder, Minnie sinks the blade into a chicken breast, slices it in half, and begins to whack it with a pan to flatten it, acutely aware of how her arm keeps sliding up and down Sam’s.
Sam’s done with the garlic, Minnie blocks his way to the sink. He slides his hands around her to reach it, telling her to be careful, he doesn’t want to get whacked, he doesn’t want his garlicky hands to make her cry. A little laugh. She won’t move out the way. He washes his hands, freezing them in that awkward position, reaching for the water to refresh himself, Minnie stands in the way, hearing each other’s breath, forced into each other’s grasp.
Only once he’s done washing his hands, undoing their silent tableau of touch, Minnie grabs at his forearms with surprising firmness, Sam puts the towel down, and their lips meet.
They kiss and Sam tries to put the towel away.
Don’t bother, throw it on the counter, she commands Sam. Lean in for a kiss harder, commit to it, she motions to place a hand on her hips, to drop it to her ass. And the orders have a life of their own inside Sam, guiding his tongue to hers, his hands to her hips, grabbing a fistful of ass – velvet tones that whip him into loving shape, he kisses with all the intensity he can muster, he holds, and he grabs.
He hears Minnie, and he does his best to please. He’s thinking of nothing besides what Minnie tells him, how she orders him to the couch. She takes Sam there in a playground chase of kisses, as Minnie makes Sam sit down and gets on top. She straddles him, he starts pulling her top off, so she shifts on her back, Sam chasing a skipping step behind, confident he’ll catch up every time, guided by her commanding sleights. She giggles and crawls out from under him, getting on all fours, her body does the ordering for what comes next.
They laugh, they giggle, they tangle, and amongst those lips and hips and thrusts they disappear, for twenty minutes, thirty minutes, forty – neither cares, both needed this, and both fear the hour of their partners coming less and less as it nears. By the end Sam has been giddily led in making love by Minnie, and laying down naked, sweaty, tired, happy, they agree they’ve got to make dinner fast, sparing no words for what just happened. Sam believes Minnie can make something up for their partners about why dinner’s late for the day, not that they care, not that they’d care.
Luckily Eva comes first. Sullen as always, answering questions is the best conversation she can make. Answering Sam’s beaming little bits of light that grazes the outside her narrow sight. Putrid as she might feel, she can at best give Sam and Minnie platitudes. It was alright, I worked from home, I didn’t sleep well, and what she won’t say is that she never does sleep well, feel good, she won’t say she always feel grave, I always struggle to stay awake throughout the day, all things that Sam knows well enough to hold her tight, and kiss her on her little corrugated forehead.
Brock comes a little later. Heaving and huffing, he guffaws necdote from work – about exciting colleagues, the effort he’s put in, the importance of the lab’s research, the effort invested from everyone there. His ornery stories find their reward in Minnie’s cooking. Brocks thanks her, he says he needed it more than anything, he loudly tells the other couple, this is my applause. The others don’t know he called the day difficult because of useless bureaucratic muck, and Minnie won’t tell them. Minnie is glad to let others believe. That her man has struggled through it, that he’s conquered his way home, believing that everything he did was enough to justify what came along.
