"Then how'd you learn all this stuff?"
"Easy. All you have to do is follow the directions. Besides, I'm a quick study." She met his eyes and held his stare, as if challenging him. Until a bell chimed. "Pizzas," she said with a delighted smile, breaking their link, which had felt to him a little weird but not exactly unpleasant. Just, well…significant. Careful, he warned himself.
He watched her slip on an oven mitt and told himself he should really look away as she bent over to retrieve the appetizer. Her breasts, he could see, were not large, yet were ample enough to illustrate gravity. They reminded him of the firm doughy rounds she had worked beneath her fingers minutes ago. As she reached inside the oven a little burst of heated air gently raised a few stray wisps of her hair, and an instant later the delectable aroma of her creation wafted his way. He swallowed.
Then something about her startled him and he felt his throat abruptly tighten.
As she was rising, holding the tray in one hand, she swept her hair aside with the other, and he had the opportunity to see, just for an instant, inside the collar of her shirt, in back of her neck.
What he saw was his own name - the code name the dry cleaner used to label his shirts. Something that felt about the size of a marble felt as though it had suddenly become lodged in his chest. A little to the left. Yes, there. In his heart.
"What?" she said, freezing in place.
"Oh," was all he could manage at first. He gave a little laugh. "Nothing, oh nothing. Sorry. I just zoned out there for a second." His lungs moved, he was breathing again.
"Hmm," she said, a moment's scrutiny, then she shrugged and transferred the miniature pizzas to the butcher block counter. "Where's the cutter thing?"
"I'm sorry?" he said. He had blanked her out for a moment, and was just beginning to recover from his jolt. The cutter thing. He wanted to be helpful, to tell her where to find it.