Mikah
TINY bubbles fizzed around the translucent strips of orange zest. Catching my lower lip between my teeth, I scooped the pieces of candied citrus peel out of the simple syrup, then carefully arranged them on a sheet of waxed paper. Nonna had always insisted that good, homemade candied orange was the key to excellent panettone. This would be the first year she wasn’t around to make the Christmas bread, since she had, unfortunately, decided to stay in Palermo to spend the holidays with my zia Paola and cousins. But even if Nonna wasn’t going to be here, I wanted everything to be perfect. On a marble slab next to the sink, Elena rhythmically kneaded the egg-yellow dough, filling the kitchen with a buttery, yeasty aroma.
Our older brother, Luca, wandered in from the living room, dark hair perfectly slicked back, tapping away on his phone. “Any coffee left?” he asked, not looking up.
“No, Mikah drank the last of it.” Elena threw me under the bus.
Now I’d have to struggle all over again with our dad’s space-age espresso machine. I longed for the easy familiarity of my moka pot back home, the comforting sound of the coffee percolating on the stove. Then I remembered, yet again, that this faux-rustic mansion was my home for the time being. Not too bad, all things considered. But I still hated my dad’s fancy coffee maker.
Popping one of the slightly cooled pieces of orange peel into my mouth snapped my mind right back to where I didn’t want it to go. To the day before. To the way Matt’s body had reacted to me licking the marshmallow off my lips. The sweetness lingering on his tongue. The way his strong hands had gripped my waist and tangled into my hair. The way he’d smelled like fabric softener and pine. The surprising trust he showed for me to help him out with his business even though he hardly knew me.
I splashed a little cold water from the sink on my face and patted my heated skin with a clean dishtowel. The last thing I needed was to get hard while hanging out in the kitchen with my siblings. Scratch that. The actual last thing I needed was to be thinking of Matt at all.
Last night had been restless: punching my pillow, rustling around in bed, thinking of what I might say and what he might say when we saw each other next. I was almost sick with wanting. Finally, failing to pause the looping reel of our kiss in my mind, I’d decided that I was going to cancel our date. If I was already obsessing over Matt to this degree after spending all of a collective hour in his presence, there was no way I could handle seeing him again. Having just emerged from the fog of heartbreak, I was terrified of intimacy, and I was fine with that fact, thank you very much.
As if Elena could read my mind, she glanced up from her steady kneading and pinned me with a long look. “What happened with the Christmas tree dude yesterday? You were gone for a while.” Her perfect eyebrows arched toward her hairline.
Luca looked up from his phone. “Christmas tree dude? You already seeing someone, Mikah? Because you shouldn’t rush into anything….” His broad shoulders tensed under his blazer. I had never seen my brother dress casually. Or act remotely calm. He’d always been overprotective and intense.
“Stai zitta,” I hissed, shushing Elena and ignoring Luca altogether.
But my brother, undeterred, set his phone down and started efficiently preparing himself an espresso. He spoke with his back to me. “Dad says you’ve been sullen since you got here. And I don’t blame you. The way Josh handled the breakup was bullshit. All I’m saying is you should take some time. You’re only twenty-four. Relax. Go skiing. Get to know yourself again. You don’t need to be jumping into a new relationship just a few months after you got dumped.”
My stomach dropped at the mention of Josh’s name. Dumped didn’t even begin to describe what he’d done. But what word did one use to describe an abrupt radio silence after three years of dating, one of them a desperate attempt to make things work long-distance, followed by a curt letter detailing his engagement to someone else? I guess dumped would have to work.
“Luca, drop it.” Elena’s voice was gentle. But then she turned to me. “That guy was gorgeous. And he couldn’t keep his eyes off you. Please, please tell me he, like, bent you over a hay bale and had his way with you.”
My cheeks burned. “Jesus, El. You’re disgusting.” Actually, though, that sounded really hot. Or it would have if it weren’t my damn sister saying it.
“Oh my God. Something did happen!” Elena clapped her hands together. “Dimmi!”
I threw my head back with an exasperated sigh. “We kissed, you weirdo. Whatever. It wasn’t a big deal.” Lie. I couldn’t stop thinking about the perfect way our mouths had fit together.
Luca took a break from stirring sugar into his coffee to drag a hand over his trim beard. He and our father sported identical facial hair. And now he was also wearing the exact same all-knowing, patronizing expression our dad favored. Great. “Mikah,” he began, and I half expected him to call me caro the way our mom did, “are you sure this is a good idea? You know you don’t exactly have the best track record.”
God, my family was never going to let me live down my romantic failures. I’d been a shy kid. So when I finally came out in high school and started dating Steven, everyone had been thrilled. He took me to concerts. We went to parties together and hung out with his friends in artfully shabby apartments in the Village. My family’s joy had evaporated, however, when Steven came over for dinner, and they discovered he was a senior at NYU. I was seventeen and hadn’t even seen anything wrong with the whole arrangement. I’d felt lucky he was interested in me. Between that debacle and the recent collapse of my relationship with Josh, I didn’t really blame Luca for being concerned. Well, logically I didn’t blame him. I was concerned enough for the both of us, though. I’d recently learned that opening up to someone was basically a recipe for disaster. Clenching my fists, I stared anywhere but my brother’s face.
“You don’t have to worry, because I’m not going to see him again.” The embarrassment surging through me only made my voice sound brittle. I was already tired of talking about this. All I wanted to do was finish making the panettone and switch off my overheated brain, maybe lose myself in a book or go for a long run on the treadmill in the basement. Anything to get Matt out of my head.
“No?” Elena rested her hand on mine.
“No,” I insisted. “I want to, but I’m not going to.” That made perfect sense, right?
Now Luca had the dignity to look abashed. “Well, if you like him….”
“I do.” I can’t fucking stop thinking about him. Keeping the second admission to myself, I turned back to the recipe card printed with Nonna’s spidery script, hoping neither of my siblings could see how hard I was blushing. My grandmother’s handwriting brought a wave of cool comfort, reminding me of letters filled with gentle, encouraging words and practical advice. “But there’s no point. If I see him again, I’ll just like him more. Then it’ll hurt worse when I go back to New York in January. Or when he decides he’s not into me after all. So, yeah. No point. Not going hiking with him.” I said this more to convince myself than my siblings.
Luca’s face was a mask of exasperation, but Elena looked sympathetic and a little amused. “Yeah, okay, Mikah. That makes sense. You might like him, so you should avoid him. Super-reasonable.” She laughed.
“It is!” I insisted. “I don’t even live here. The whole thing would be a waste of time.” My conviction was starting to fail, however.
“In what world is a sexy holiday fling a waste of time? I’m not saying you have to fall in love or something, but it wouldn’t kill you to have a little fun. I would be all over that if the dude looked at me the way he was checking you out. And I don’t even like guys that much.” Elena’s voice lilted. She bit the inside of her cheek. “So, hiking? That sounds, um, wholesome.”
“Ugh. I know. I don’t even have a warm enough coat.”
Luca’s irritation seemed to multiply. “Jesus, Mikah.” Now he really sounded like our dad. “You lived in Boston. How do you not own a warm coat? It’s not like you can’t afford one.”
Not wanting to admit I’d lost my heaviest coat, in addition to my dignity, at a bar after getting blackout drunk the night I received Josh’s stupid breakup letter, I shrugged.
“Borrow my Canada Goose coat. And go on the damn date,” Luca insisted. Then he picked up his phone and stalked out of the kitchen to make a call.
FOR the second time in as many days, I would be hanging out with Matt while looking like an extra in Oliver Twist. Like Matt, Luca towered over me and was significantly bulkier than I was. My brother tended to obsess over his body a little bit, spending tons of time at an expensive gym, working out with his personal trainer. So, naturally, his coat looked ridiculous on me.
“Don’t say a word,” I growled at Matt as I trudged through knee-deep snow to where he leaned against the sign marking the trailhead. His eyes were locked on me, steady and warm, making my heart falter in my chest and blood rush to my cheeks. And he looked unfairly gorgeous with his close-cropped blond hair, perfect scruff, and brown work coat, like he’d sprung to life from the pages of some kind of rugged outdoor outfitters catalogue. Next to him, Moose snorted and pawed at the snow. I was thankful the dog didn’t go for an encore performance of his tackling routine. Instead he gave a happy bark and wagged his fluffy tail.
“I brought an extra coat for you.” Matt patted the hiking pack on his back. “But it looks like you found something warm enough. Kinda big, though.” The damn smirk reappeared on his lips. I wanted to kiss it away.
“It’s my brother’s coat. He’s a sasquatch like you, so….”
Matt chuckled, and we started along the trail. Thankfully the snow was tamped down with footprints, and the path was well maintained. “How many siblings do you have?” he asked after a moment of walking in pleasant silence. I got the impression that he, like me, wasn’t big on idle chatting.
“Only two. Elena and Luca, my older brother. He’s an attorney. A senior partner at the LA office of my dad’s firm. He can be… a lot, but he’s a good guy.”
“I liked your sister. She said she’s an engineer?” Matt’s strides were so long, I had to hurry to match his pace. So naturally I slipped on a snow-covered root and bumped into him. I was making a great impression so far. Matt chuckled and ghosted his fingers over my cheek before continuing down the trail more slowly.
“Uh-huh. She studied civil engineering at the Cooper Union. She’s wicked talented too. Super into sustainable design and always going on and on about infrastructure and stuff. Right after graduating she got hired at some eco-friendly start-up… to be honest I’m not really sure what she does. The hours are insane, but she works from home most of the time. I’m proud of her, though.”
“That’s so cool.” Matt seemed to perk up. “Must have been nice for her to be able to stay close to home and work with such interesting faculty.”
I was startled he’d even heard of Elena’s school. Then I felt like a pretentious jerk for being surprised. Just because Matt was a farmer from Idaho didn’t mean he was unaware of institutions of higher education. But the Cooper Union was fairly small and kind of niche.
“Yeah,” I said slowly, trying to figure out a tactful way of asking why the hell he seemed to know so much about the school. But he supplied the answer before I could even ask the question.
“I wanted to be a mechanical engineer when I was in high school. It was a total pipe dream obviously, but I thought about applying there because of the scholarship program and stuff.” He seemed a little embarrassed, as if he were admitting a dark secret rather than an adolescent career goal.
“That’s awesome. What did you end up studying?” Immediately I loathed myself for asking the question. I sounded like a snob, subtly digging to find out where he went to school so I could slot him into a bullshit status hierarchy. Matt and I were walking side by side now, so in an attempt to distract him, I grabbed his hand and ran my fingers over his rough knuckles. His hand was warm and heavy in mine.
“Nothing. Didn’t go to college. Kept on working the farm.” Coming to a sudden halt, he threaded our fingers together and then hauled me up against him, holding me in his big arms. Without thinking, I nuzzled into his chest. We had stopped in a small clearing, and the wind whistled through the trees. I let my eyes drift shut as I breathed in the woodsmoke smell of Matt’s coat.
“Beautiful here, huh?” The words rumbled through his body.
My eyes snapped open. I’d been so hung up on Matt, I’d failed to take in our surroundings. But the forest was, indeed, beautiful. A vast unencumbered view stretched below us: snow-tipped pines, rolling foothills, and swirling clouds promising snow. The cold quieted everything; even the gusts of wind and the occasional tap of a woodpecker searching the bark of a nearby tree seemed muted. If I could, I decided I would stay here forever: secure in Matt’s embrace, breathing him in, with nothing to disturb me but the occasional distant crack of a stick or the icy prickle of a snowflake working its way down the collar of my coat. I barely knew this man, but I already felt so safe in his arms. Comfortable. Like I could say anything and he would just reply with a soft smirk and a fast kiss.
“It really is. Do you come hiking here a lot?” I was literally making the weakest small talk known to man.
“Yup.”
“I don’t exactly do a lot of outdoorsy stuff.” I was babbling. My voice had gone all weird and shaky because Matt’s fingers were brushing my skin, pushing my hair back from my face. I felt like an exposed live wire, sparking each time he touched me. “Like, some of my friends in grad school were big into camping and stuff, going up to Vermont or New Hampshire on the weekends, but it wasn’t my thing. I’ll bet you were a Boy Scout or something, though.”
A tiny wrinkle appeared between Matt’s brows, and his lips pressed into a firm line. Then as quickly as the concerned expression appeared on his face, it lifted, like one of the clouds passing over the mountain peaks surrounding us. “Nah. Mostly did stuff around the farm. John and I went camping sometimes, though. Hiked a lot. Went fishing.”
Moose raced ahead of us as we started back along the trail, Matt’s hand still engulfing mine. He was so much taller than me, I had to imagine it was almost awkward for him to walk this way, but if it bothered him, he kept it to himself. Besides, I liked being close to him. Probably too much.
“So what kind of kid were you?” I asked, still apparently hell-bent on making dull small talk. I never did this. Throughout college and grad school I’d been nothing but irreverent in response to the boilerplate getting-to-know-you questions: where did you grow up, what do you do for fun, if you could have dinner with one person living or dead who would it be? But with Matt I wanted to know every single detail of his past and present. I actually wanted to know what his favorite book was. How he took his coffee. Did sleep find him easily, or did he toss and turn like I did.
“Normal, I guess. Super into vo-tech. Kept to myself.” Matt shrugged his big shoulders, then glanced down at me, his lips quirking up. “I bet you were all goth, right? Real into poetry and music and stuff.”
A laugh erupted from me. I hadn’t even been original enough to dress goth in high school. My school had required us to wear uniforms, tidy red-trimmed navy blazers and starched white shirts. Unlike other kids who pushed the limits of the dress code, I went along with it, not caring enough to make waves. My weekend clothes had been designer samples my mom handpicked for me: cashmere sweaters, tailored jeans, artfully distressed T-shirts that cost far more than any swath of cotton ever should. I just put on the stuff I liked and left the rest in the fancy shopping bags in my closet for her to take back to the office.
“No, I was kinda weird. Quiet, gay as hell, worried all the time, obsessed with doing well in school. I didn’t have a ton of friends to be honest. I was big into reading, though. English was always my best subject. I was even the editor of my school’s literary magazine. Very cool stuff.” I glanced up at Matt, at his solid frame and long limbs. “To be honest I’m kinda surprised to hear you weren’t some star athlete. Like a linebacker or… okay, I don’t know anything about sports.”
Matt had gone tense again, and I was starting to get that maybe he didn’t particularly like talking about his childhood. “I did play football. Stopped my junior year, though.”
We’d turned off the main trail and were now descending a narrower path through dense forest. Moose bounded forward, the sound of his paws crushing over frozen snow a steady rhythm. Matt hadn’t once stopped to look at the trail maps, and I realized I’d been following him blindly. He seemed so sure of where we were going, I didn’t even think to question it. But the sky was already darkening a bit, and my skin prickled with a tiny flash of worry.
“Is it getting dark already?” My voice totally betrayed my anxiety.
Matt glanced up at the sky, now a deeper gray as the snow had started to fall in earnest. “Yup. Sun sets before five this time of year. But we’ll be back to the trailhead soon. This path loops us back around to where we started.”
I followed him and Moose through the silent woods, calm firmly back in place since Matt did actually seem to know the trails. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him, and when he looked down and saw me staring, he just grinned. He seemed so solid and comfortable in his own skin, moving through the snow like he never second-guessed a single step.
Moose bounded alongside us, occasionally darting into the underbrush to sniff or dig, but otherwise sticking close. Every ten minutes or so, Matt would stop and kick at the snow with the tip of his boot. I had no earthly idea what he was doing. Marking the trail? Checking for tracks? But when he came to a dead halt and crouched down to brush powdery snow away from a clump of loose rocks, I finally had to ask what he was up to. In response he lifted a snow-damp brown and ochre rock, smooth and striated with blueish gray.
“Sandstone.” Matt held the rock up, seeming to address it directly. “My niece, Abby, has a huge rock collection. Right now she’s on a sandstone kick. This one’s pretty nice, huh?” He slipped the rock into his coat pocket, patting it once as if ensuring it was tucked away safely. Something about the gesture was so tender and sweet. It was like Matt had been designed specifically to appeal to every one of my innermost desires. Big and burly? Check. Ruggedly handsome? Check. Surprisingly thoughtful and adorable? Double fucking check.
I was usually terrible at initiating physical affection, vacillating between bumbling conversation and getting tangled up in my own thoughts, but the desire to be close to Matt overwhelmed my usual self-consciousness. I leaned into his broad frame, pressing myself up and pulling him down to claim his mouth with mine. Matt’s lips fell open with a soft moan, the kind of satisfied sound I imagined he might make upon biting into a perfectly ripe piece of fruit. My pulse raced, and I tugged him closer, slipping my tongue against his. I was surprised by my own desperation for contact, his skin, his mouth, his hands. Matt gripped my shoulders, firm and strong. My pulse quickened. But instead of hauling me against him, he gently pried me away. I whimpered, still thrumming with need.
“I like you.” He grinned, and his voice warmed me straight through, like sinking into a hot bath.
All my words left me, and I stared at the path while my heart soared up to fly among the swirling snowflakes.
“You want to maybe get some dinner? No worries if you can’t. I know you might have plans with your family. But it’s getting pretty cold, and I’m starving. We’re only about a ten-minute walk from where we parked. If you want, you can follow me into town. This place, Café Ines, is really good, and it’s dog friendly.” He scratched the top of Moose’s head, not meeting my eye. It was probably the most Matt had spoken since we met.
“Yes,” I said quickly. Now that I’d forced myself to go on this date, I was dreading us parting. Dreading the moment that Matt, like Josh, might decide I wasn’t worth it. I didn’t know if I could handle more heartbreak, more unanswered texts, more letting myself be vulnerable, only to feel like a complete fool. Already I knew I liked Matt too much. One more afternoon with him, and I’d let my fantasies shift from making out to waking up together.
My face burned despite the cold wind. I shivered at the thought of spending the night with Matt, laying my head on that broad chest, his heartbeat lulling me to sleep, soothing and steady like a metronome.