I reach into the pastry case. “Well, I am having a cinnamon roll. And you should too.”
It’s not a perfect spiral, because as Colleen is fond of telling us, imperfect-looking food tastes the best. I hold the plate near Neil’s face, letting him inhale the sweet cinnamon sugar. Before he can take a bite, I snatch it away.
“Icing first,” I say, heading back into the kitchen.
All I want is for us to be normal after what happened in the library, and my brilliant plan is to ignore it. I cannot like him this way. It’s the opposite of destroying him, and even if that’s no longer my goal, until about seven hours ago, he was my enemy. He’s Neil McNair, and I’m Rowan Roth, and that used to mean something.
I open the refrigerator, the cold a welcome blast against my face, but it doesn’t slow my wild heart.
“Cream cheese icing?” he asks, a teasing lilt to his voice.
“I’m never going to forgive my parents.”
“I for one appreciated the Rowan Roth Fun Facts.” He leans against the counter, and it looks so casual. Maybe the dance loosened him up, which is ironic because it only tied me into knots. I haven’t felt this tense since my AP Calculus test, and maybe not even then. “Like Kevin fever. That was gold.”
I groan. After I rejoined the dinner table, my parents told him all he could ever hope to know about the Riley books and their lives as writers, including how they used to complain they had cabin fever when they holed up in the house on deadline. When I was younger, I thought they were saying “Kevin fever,” and one day I asked, thoroughly worried, if Kevin was okay.
“I’m not afraid to use this as a weapon,” I say, holding up the tub of icing. “And hey. If you want to talk embarrassing parents, we should talk about how your mom knew exactly where I’m going to school.”
“The school sent out a list. My mom is very invested in my education.” He nods toward the icing. “And I think you’re bluffing.”
Only because I’ll rinse out this tub afterward, I dip my index finger inside, and before I can overthink it, I dab icing onto his freckled cheek.
For a moment, he’s frozen. And then: “I can’t believe you just did that,” he says, but he’s laughing. He reaches into the container and swipes an icing-coated finger across my eyebrow. It’s cold but not unpleasant. “There. We’re even.”
Our gazes lock for a few seconds, a staring contest. His eyes are still bright with laughter. I’m not about to turn this into an all-out food fight, not when the library dance is still so fresh in my mind. That just sounds dangerous.
Then something frightening happens: I get the strangest urge to lick the icing off his face.
This is fun. I’m having fun with Neil McNair, whose face I want to lick icing off of.
Thor help me.
“Somehow I get the feeling this is the opposite of what we were supposed to do here,” he says, reaching for the roll of paper towels behind him.
With the back of my hand, I wipe icing off my eyebrow, trying to ignore the hammering of my heart. In one swift motion, I grab a palette knife and spread icing on a much safer place: the cinnamon roll. I slice it in half, the sugary cinnamon oozing out the sides.
His eyes flutter closed as he takes a bite. “Exquisite,” he says, and I feel a little thrill, as though I baked it myself. I don’t even have the urge to make fun of his word choice.
“You eat. I’ll wash these dishes.”
He frowns, setting his plate down on the counter. “I’ll help you.”
“No, no. It’s my job. This is why they pay me the big bucks.”
“Artoo. I’m not going to sit here watching you do the dishes.”
I polish off my half of the cinnamon roll. I guess we’d get done faster, and it would be weird for him to just stand there watching. So he turns on some Free Puppies!, insisting this is their best song, but that’s what he said about their last three songs. And then together, we wash dishes.
He even sings along in this unselfconscious way. He has to change registers to get all the notes, which sometimes happens in the middle of a line, and it cracks me up every time. Most people wouldn’t feel this confident singing around someone else. I can admit the band has one good song. Fine, maybe two. And maybe I join in when “Pawing at Your Door” comes on, and we belt out the chorus together.
This is officially the weirdest day of my life.
“Seriously, thank you,” I say for the tenth time, hanging a frying pan on the drying rack. “Is this what being friends would have been like?”
“Washing dishes and eating cinnamon rolls and talking about being Jewish? One hundred percent,” he says. Soapsuds climb up his caramel-dotted arms. “Think about all the movies we could have seen, all the Shabbat dinners we could have had together.”
Something about the way he says that last one tugs at my heart. The feeling is similar to the nostalgia I’ve felt all day, except this is a nostalgia for something that never actually happened. There has to be a word for that specific brand of wistfulness.
Regret.
Maybe that’s what it is.
We could have had this. Four years of sparring when we could have had this: his awful singing voice, his hip bumping mine to encourage me to sing along, the scarlet on his cheeks when I attacked him with icing. While I was so focused on destroying him, I missed so much.
“It turns out I’m a bad friend, so maybe you’re better off,” I say, and immediately wish I could take it back.
I pass him a plate, but he just holds it under the water.
“Is that… something you want to talk about?”
“I’ve been holding on to the idea of my friendship with Kirby and Mara, but I haven’t really been there for them lately. I’m going to try to be better, but—I might do this with a lot of things, actually. I idealize.” I let out a long breath. “Am I not realistic enough? Am I too… dreamy?” I cringe when the word comes out. “Not dreamy as in hot, dreamy as in… dreaming too much.”
He considers this. “You’re… optimistic. Maybe overly so, sometimes, like with that success guide. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, though. Especially if you’re aware of it.”
“I’ve been aware of it for a whole three hours.”
One side of his mouth quirks into a smile. “It’s a start.” He makes a move to point, but since his hands are buried in soap bubbles, he gestures to me with his elbow instead. “But are you aware you have icing, like, all over your eyebrow?”
My face flames. His eyes pierce mine, and there’s an intensity there that pins me in place.
If we were in a romance novel, he’d run his thumb along my eyebrow, dip it into his mouth, and give me a come-hither look. He’d back me up against the kitchen counter with his hips before kissing me, and he would taste like sugar and cinnamon.
I’ll give my brain points for creativity. This shouldn’t be a romantic moment. We are scrubbing other people’s crumbs and chewed-up bits of food off plates. Still, the thought of kissing him hits me like an earthquake, the tremor nearly making me lose my balance.
“Are you… going to clean it off or wait until it gets all crusty?”
Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner for the word most likely to kill the romance. Congratulations, crusty.