“You’re going to make me fall for New York.”
“That’s the plan.”
He didn’t move his hands. He didn’t have to—she was melting just from their weight and heat at her hips. Her fingertips took tiny excursions on his arms. Up and down. Over the swell of his bicep, along the groove between bicep and tricep.
“And we’ll find you an apartment, somehow,” she said.
“And visit some bees.”
“What if they don’t like me?”
“They’re going to love you,” he said. “How could they not? You’re exactly the right height.”
She smiled, and he ducked his head and laid it against her neck. His strong arms gathered her close and wrapped around her, possessive and comforting.
She stroked her fingers along his hairline and up and down his neck, letting herself touch him. She wanted to know all the shapes of him, all the secrets he was made of.
But one at a time. Shape by shape. Secret by secret.
“When the laundry’s done, can we watch a movie?” she asked.
“I do fantastic popcorn.”
He kissed the patch of her skin that was closest to his mouth, and she closed her eyes again and let him hold her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In the morning, he offered her a tour of the garden at Figs.
It was a short tour. The restaurant’s rooftop was small, and its garden consisted of a series of low raised beds, each sporting tidy rows of green at various heights. Ben told her the restaurant was coming to the end of its first growing season.
He talked about both the garden and the restaurant as though they belonged to him, but when she asked him if they did, he said no. She hoped he’d volunteer more information about how he knew Cecily and Sam and how deeply he was involved with Figs, but he didn’t.
Still, he seemed cheerful as he harvested a few dozen tomatoes, some squash, and fresh herbs. He told her the names of things with a certain measure of pride, teasing her when he asked her to pick some basil and she revealed that she didn’t know which part to pick—the leaves alone, or the whole stalk? She’d never had a garden.
After that, he maintained a running monologue as he gathered the day’s bounty, and May trailed along behind him, pleasantly surprised by how much she liked being up here. She remembered snatches of a song about city rooftops—how peaceful they were—but this wasn’t that sort of rooftop. They were only one story high. She heard every car go by and caught bits of conversations from the sidewalk.
But even so, she liked looking down on the Village. She liked the way her boots squished into the humus when she took a step into the bed to pull a weed at Ben’s direction. The coolness of her forearm after the carrot tops deposited their morning’s collection of dew on her skin.
She liked Ben’s dimple-crevasses and the easy way he moved up here.
After he’d finished, she followed him down to the empty kitchen.
“Do they serve breakfast?” she asked.
Ben smiled. “If they did breakfast, it would be a madhouse in here right now, and Cecily would kick us out so fast it’d make your head spin.”
“Just dinner?”
“Yeah.” He glanced at the clock. “The prep crew will get here soon, and the pastry chef. But this early in the morning is about the only time it’s quiet in here.”
Ben turned on the taps and dumped his harvest on the metal countertop next to the sink. While he sorted through the pile, snapping the tops off carrots then throwing what remained—as well as some tiny potatoes—under the water, May tried to imagine the kitchen with fifteen people bustling around it. Every galvanized surface covered with food, the burners all lit, the pasta cooker bubbling, the dishwasher letting off clouds of steam. She’d worked as a waitress once, so she had a sense of what it would feel like in here during the service.
Crazy.
“So can you cook?” Ben scrubbed a small blue potato with a brush and then added it to the collection of clean produce on the countertop beside the sink.
“A little.”