Tara’s house is beautiful and I hate it.
Not in the way you hate something ugly. In the way you hate something that makes too much sense, that fits around you too easily, that doesn’t give you anything to push back against. High ceilings. Clean lines. A couch that managed to be the right amount of soft. I’ve been sitting on it for four minutes and I can already feel it trying to keep me.
I’m gripping my own knee hard enough to leave marks through my jeans.
Tara comes back from wherever she went with the bags, and she stops when she sees me.
“Leo,” she says. “You look like a nervous wreck.”
“No, not at all. I’m great. Love the couch.”
She doesn’t say anything.
She crosses the room, and then she does something I don’t expect. She doesn’t sit beside me or loom over me or deliver some measured speech about how this is going to go. She just folds herself down until she’s kneeling on the floor in front of where I’m sitting. Eye level. Her red eyes steady on mine.
“Are you afraid of me?” she asks.
“No, Tara.” I exhale slowly, forcing my grip on my knee to loosen. “It’s not that.”
She waits.
“It’s just.” I look at the window. “A month is a long time.”
Tara rises from her knees and settles onto the cushion beside me. Not close enough to crowd me. Just close enough that I’m aware of her warmth.
“This will be good for you, Leo,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say.
The word comes out flat and unconvincing even to my own ears.
“No. I mean it. Give me a chance, Leo. Let me make you happy.”
I look at my hands. The marks from gripping my knee are still faint pink lines across my palm.
What I want, with a sudden and almost violent clarity, is to be on our couch at home. Sabrina’s feet in my lap. Some terrible netflix show on the TV that she picked. The specific quality of a Saturday afternoon that belongs to no one but us.
Except Sabrina doesn’t want that right now. She wants this. She practically glowed packing my suitcase. And Tara is sitting here with something exposed in her expression that she would never let most people see, asking me for a chance, and I’m acting like I’ve been brought here at gunpoint.
Tara doesn’t deserve that.
I don’t let myself think about it any further. I close the distance between us and kiss her.
I feel the exact moment it registers. Her whole body goes still. Her hands don’t move. Her eyes are still open like a deer in headlights. And then they close. And then she kisses me back.
She responds with desperate hunger. Her tongue finds mine like it remembers the way, like it never forgot the way, seven years and several lifetimes of distance, and it still knows me with a familiarity that makes something ache behind my sternum.
She makes a sound low in her throat and her hand comes up to my jaw and I feel myself starting to lean into it, starting to actually be here instead of performing being here, and then…
She pushes me back.
Not hard, but firmly. Both palms flat against my chest, and I can feel that it costs her. Her fingers curl slightly against my shirt before she makes herself straighten her arms.
“Not yet,” she says.
“What?”
She’s breathing hard. Her hands are still against my chest like she hasn’t quite decided whether to push or pull.
“I want you to settle in first,” she says. “Feel safe here. Before anything happens.”
I stare at her. “You’re serious.”
“I know you don’t feel that way right now.” Her eyes don’t waver. “Safe. I know that. But I want you to.”
Something about the honesty of it disarms me more than I’m ready for. I look at the coffee table. Then back at her. Then I say the thing that seems, from where I’m sitting, like the obvious question.
“Tara. Isn’t this supposed to be a month-long...” I gesture vaguely at the space between us. “I mean. Sabrina seemed to think it was going to be fairly... You know like a fuck fest…”
“No,” she says.
She stands up from the couch in one smooth motion, exhaling as she goes, her breath leaving her slowly like she’s expelling a curse out of her system.
Then she holds out her hand.
Her fingers are steady. Her red eyes are on mine.
“Come on,” she says. “We’re making dinner.”
I take her hand. Her fingers close around mine, and she leads me towards the kitchen, and I follow her through the high-ceilinged hallway with the clean lines and the art on the walls that somehow manages to be interesting without trying too hard, and I think, distantly, that I hate this house a little less than I did a few minutes ago, which is somehow worse.
The kitchen is bigger than ours. The second thing I notice is that it’s stocked with much higher class cookware. Knives in a magnetic strip on the wall, a cast iron pan hanging from a hook, herbs in small pots on the windowsill that look like they’re actually alive and haven’t just been bought and abandoned.
Somehow I feel more nervous in here than I did on the couch.
The couch I had a physical object to grip. In here there’s just counter space and the smell of something clean and the awareness that Tara is moving around me with the easy confidence of someone in their own territory, opening the refrigerator, pulling things out, setting them on the island in a way that suggests she already knows exactly what she’s doing tonight.
She sets a cutting board in front of me and places a bundle of vegetables beside it without ceremony.
“Do you want to chop?” she asks.
I look at the vegetables. Then at her. “What are you making?”
“Pasta.” She opens a cabinet, pulls down a pot. “With a roasted tomato sauce. I was going to do a proper ragu but that takes three hours and I didn’t want you to starve while I made it.” A brief pause. “I’ll make the ragu another time.”
I look at the vegetables again. Zucchini, a red onion, a fat clove of garlic still in its paper. My hands move toward the cutting board on reflex, and then I stop.
“I can just cook for us, if you want. You don’t have to…”
“No,” she says.
Not sharp. Just immediate. She’s filling the pot at the sink, her back partially to me, and she doesn’t turn around when she says the next part.
“Whenever we have the chance, I want to do this together, Leo.”
I pick up the knife and it finds the cutting board without me having to think about it.
I watch Tara move around her kitchen. The way she sets the pot on the burner without looking, the way she already knows which drawer has the wooden spoons, the way she hums something low and tuneless under her breath while she quarters the tomatoes.
Something in my chest pulls sideways.
She’d be so good at this. At all of it. The cooking together, the easy domesticity of it, the kind of life where you learn someone’s kitchen by heart because you’re always in it. She has all the architecture for a real partnership, the space for it, the instinct for it, and instead she’s spent seven years looking for me, and now she has me for thirty days on loan from my wife. She deserves to be with someone she doesn’t have to share.
“Tara.”
She looks up from the tomatoes.
“I know I’ve said it before.” I set the knife down. “But you deserve…”
“Don’t.” The word comes out fast and clean. She points the handle of her wooden spoon at me across the island, her red eyes steady and a little fierce. “None of that.”
I open my mouth.
“Talking like that to me,” she says, her voice dropping to something more deliberate, “could upset Sabrina, couldn’t it?”
I think about it. About Sabrina’s voice this morning, soft and certain against my ear. Let yourself fall for her even just a little bit. The way she said it like she was giving me something rather than asking for something.
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess so.”
“Then be a good boyfriend,” she says, “and help me cook dinner.”
“Alright,” I say.
I slice through the onion as the silence gets worse. It expands. It fills the kitchen the way smoke fills a room, slow and then all at once, and I become aware of every individual sound. I can feel the awkwardness like a physical thing sitting on my chest and I need it to stop right now or I’m going to lose my mind.
The first intrusive thought that arrives, I say out loud.
“Tara.” I set the knife down. “Do you think anyone in the bestiality community has ever been in the middle of getting knotted, and said to themselves ‘I’ve got that dog in me?’”
The spoon stops moving.
Tara goes completely still again, like a person who has been paused by a remote control, her hand on the pot handle, her back to me.
I watch her shoulders.
Ten seconds. Twenty. I start doing the math on whether I’ve just ended this month before it properly started, whether Sabrina is going to get a very strange phone call, whether there’s a version of this where I can reasonably claim I was talking about something else entirely.
Thirty seconds. Thirty-five.
Then her shoulders start to shake.
She turns around and she’s smiling, this slow, deliberate, deeply dangerous smile that makes something in my stomach drop two floors.
“Leo,” she says. Her voice has that particular quality of someone choosing their words with surgical precision. “Why is it that every time you get nervous, your brain goes directly to bestiality?”
Heat rushes to my face so fast it makes me dizzy. “That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No.”
She tilts her head. Those red eyes are doing the thing where they see through every layer I have down to the embarrassing truth underneath. “Are you trying to shock me so badly that it changes the mood?”
“No,” I say, and I can feel the smile starting at the corners of my mouth and I absolutely do not want to give her the satisfaction but it’s happening anyway. “I’m not doing that.”
“Mhm.” She turns back to the stove. “Interesting. But it’s okay to just talk to me like normal.”
“Yeah… alright…”