Meet Cute by Elise Faber (buy e reader .txt) 📕

“And?” she asked, waving a hand.

“And ramen noodles.”

“That’s it?”

I shrugged. “I was a starving actor. They were cheap and came in bulk. It was the perfect food.”

“Except for your arteries,” she said. “The salt in them alone will kill you. How did you keep your body”—a wave of that knife, down and up in the direction of my torso—“in that kind of shape?”

I waggled my brows. “What kind of shape are you referring to?”

She snorted, went back to chopping the cucumber. “You know exactly the shape.”

“You should also know that this is my job,” I said. “I hate exercising, but only do it for one, roles, and for two, so I don’t get so giant and out of shape that I bite it prematurely.”

“All of this”—another wave of the knife—“is normal?”

“I told you, I have a movie role coming up,” I said, giving in to the urge to run my fingers through her hair. It was like silk, even though she’d done absolutely nothing to it except to allow it to hang over her shoulders and air dry.

“So swordplay is responsible for all that . . . yumminess?” Heat in her eyes.

I smiled at being referred to as yumminess. “No,” I said. “This—” I couldn’t resist lifting my shirt, just a little bit. Because while I might hate exercising, I didn’t hate the way Tammy looked at the product of said exercise.

She made a garbled noise, dropped her gaze to the cutting board. “This what?”

I shifted a little closer. “This is leftover from my last project . . .” I named the superhero film that I’d just wrapped, pleasure sliding through me when her eyes widened.

“Are you really going to be in that?” she breathed.

More pleasure at her being so excited. Maybe I could get her a set visit if we had to do any reshoots. I’d bet she’d get a kick out of meeting my female co-star, who was headlining the film. Bri was seriously awesome.

“I am.”

“Wow.” Her knife continued clicking on the cutting board. “Color me suitably impressed.”

“Yeah?”

The edge of her smile was just barely visible, a tiny upside-down rainbow creasing her cheek. “Yeah.”

Quiet descended, and I watched her chop and cut and prep like a pro. Sure, there weren’t any flourishes or fancy flips of the pan, but there was a quiet efficiency about her movements that I admired. Graceful and clean, without anything extra added in.

Which was more than could be said of my own chef skills.

I was all flourish, all flash.

“Ramen noodles,” she said again, that tipsy-topsy rainbow making another appearance as she shook her head.

“Truthfully, they’re a godsend.” I chuckled. “Plus, when your water gets turned off, you can even eat them dry.”

A shudder. “That sounds horrible.”

“I’ll turn you on to my delicacy when it’s my turn to cook dinner.”

“That’s not happening.”

“Me cooking dinner? Or you trying dry ramen?”

“Both,” she said, drizzling some oil into the pan. I focused back on the space in front of her, amazed that she’d somehow filled a bowl with a salad and also coated two chicken breasts with eggs and breadcrumbs. She put them into the pan, where they started sizzling, then went to the sink and washed her hands.

Then she leaned back against the countertop opposite me, and we listened to the food cooking while staring at each other.

Probably it should have been boring.

Instead, it was the most interesting silence of my life.

The way the light played over her skin, the lights above gilding it. How it passed through her eyes, showcasing all the changing browns and golds and greens in her irises, each glimpse a new and more beautiful combination. She had freckles on her nose, and her top lip was slightly larger than the bottom.

“Tell me about your favorite movie,” she said, pushing off the counter and moving back to the pan to flip the chicken.

“You sure you want to hear me blabber on about work?”

“It’s got to be more interesting than my job.”

“I highly doubt that,” I admitted. “It’s just a lot of me reading lines and then posing in front of the camera with varying degrees of makeup on.”

“Except you get to travel all over the world and pretend to be a different person.”

“That is one bonus,” I agreed. “Though the travel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for example, I just spent the last three months in the desert, scorching during the day, freezing my ass off at night. Filming is always fun because it’s the cap on all the hard prep work. But it’s just like any job. There are good and bad things.”

“I could see that.”

“What’s something bad about yours?”

“Besides the whole saving someone and then having paparazzi trying to find out my every movement part?”

I smiled as she got to work on peeling the tomatoes, on whipping together a sauce, which she ladled over the chicken. “Yes, that.”

Her laughter filled the room as she topped everything with cheese then stuck the pan in the oven.

“Is this about the Milk Caper?”

“You remember that?” she asked, closing the door and spinning to face me.

I remembered everything about her, but I couldn’t say that. Instead, I just shifted closer and rested my hand on her hip. “You never did tell me,” I said. “It’s like I’ve been on a cliff-hanger for a full day. That’s pure torture.”

“Clearly, you never read any good books,” she said, picking up the bowl of salad and carrying it to the square table that was located in one corner of the kitchen.

I reached into the cabinet behind me, pulled out a couple of plates, collected two more sodas from the fridge, silverware from the drawers, and napkins from the container on the island. Together we set the table, and it was natural, as though it were something we’d done a hundred, a thousand times before.

“What do you mean?” I asked when she didn’t elaborate on her statement.

“Good books often end on cliffies. Cliff-hangers,” she added when I looked at