It worked great because Mag was a master at breakfast, and he loved my cooking (we could just say I’d wowed him with far more than my burgers—he’d lost his mind, in a Mag way, when he’d had my spicy noodles).
Still, it had been fun to fight about it.
“What’d you want to be when you grew up?”
Mag’s question cut into my thoughts and I stopped watching him wield the pancake flipper (okay, I had to admit, I was part watching his long-fingered, veined hand wield the flipper and part staring at his ass in his shorts). I looked up to his face to see he was twisted at the waist, and his eyes were on me.
“Janet Guthrie,” I answered.
His head jerked with surprise. “You wanted to be a race car driver?”
I shook my head.
“She was an aerospace engineer first,” I told him. “For her early cars, she built her own engines.”
He turned fully to me, openly impressed. “Serious?”
“Yup. She was, like, the whole package. The real deal.”
“Shit,” he muttered, going back to the pancakes. “I didn’t know that.”
I reached out, grabbed my phone, poked at it, found what I wanted, and then quoted, “‘You can go back to antiquity to find women doing extraordinary things, but their history is forgotten. Or denied to have ever existed. So women keep reinventing the wheel. Women have always done these things, and they always will.’”
Mag slid a filled plate in front of me and shoved the butter my way, asking, “What’s that?”
“It’s a quote from her. Even though the feminist movement was gaining steam back in those days, she wasn’t a feminist. Not at first. She just wanted to race cars. She just wanted to go fast. To compete. Her story is actually tragic. She was incredibly bright, and incredibly talented. But no one would sponsor her. You need money to race and she couldn’t get anyone to back her. She had the chops. But she also had a vagina.”
I did some more poking on my phone and then turned it his way, doing so reaching around it with my finger so I could scroll up, and more, and then some more.
“That’s Danica Patrick’s entry in Wikipedia.” I turned my phone back to me, returned to Guthrie’s entry, showed it to Mag and did some more scrolling, just not much of it. “That’s Janet’s.” I put my phone down. “They both had talent. But that’s the difference of thirty years and looking like a model.” I finished on a mumble, “Though Janet was no slouch, she was really cute. Still is.”
Mag shot me a crooked grin. “I didn’t know you were a race fan.”
“I’m not. I’m a Janet Guthrie fan.”
“Then get on it.”
I blinked because his tone had shifted to heavy with meaning, and it did this even though his words didn’t make sense.
“I’m sorry?”
He turned around, grabbed his own plate, came back to the island and set it in front of him, standing opposite me.
But he didn’t reach for the butter.
He shared, “I’ve been thinking.”
“Okay,” I said slowly.
“And I have a plan,” he declared.
And it was a declaration.
A serious one.
Seeing as that was so, it was hesitantly when I asked, “What…plan?”
“We’re good together.”
“We…are,” I continued talking hesitantly.
He nodded his head once, briefly, and spoke on.
“I suppose you can make the salespeople at Urban Outfitters super fuckin’ happy and drop a load fixing up your place. Or you could move in here and use that money you got from the girls to get back to school.”
I stared at him.
He wasn’t quite done.
“Bonus, your overhead will be lower since we’ll be sharing expenses. That means you can quit Smithie’s, take on more hours at Computer Raiders, and the rest of the time, focus on your future.”
“Are you asking me to move in with you after we’ve been seeing each other for less than a month?” I queried.
He looked side to side, then pointedly down at me in my jammies sitting at his island, where my butt had been every day practically since we met, but definitely since we fell into our Food Regime.
What could I say?
I liked to watch his ass in his shorts while he was at the stove and this was the best vantage point.
“Okay, Danny, I catch your point but there are extenuating circumstances to why I’m staying with you,” I pointed out.
“Do we fight?”
“No…”
“Gert likes me.”
I pressed my lips together because I didn’t think it was appropriate that I wanted to bust with