forget that I have them or forget what I planned to do with them and they get rotten.”
Again, he couldn’t really judge. He didn’t think he’d ever had a fresh vegetable in his refrigerator. But that didn’t mean he didn’t eat them. He ate them at his grandmother’s all the time.
“Vegetable powdered drink mix?”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds. Though it’s not as good as it should be. Still, it’s a way to get the equivalent of three vegetables for the day. And it doesn’t go rotten.”
She’d said bread so he asked, “And you eat sandwiches?”
He couldn’t explain why, but he was fascinated by all of this.
“Of course.”
“So do you like turkey or ham or roast beef or what?” He suddenly really wanted to know what kind of sandwiches this woman ate. But why? He wasn’t sure he even knew what his cousin Kennedy’s favorite sandwich was and he spent nearly every day of his life with her. And Jill was a little odd. And some of her oddities were kind of annoying.
Just put a fridge in your fucking kitchen, woman.
“Peanut butter and jelly,” Jill said.
“Just peanut butter and jelly?”
“Oh jelly. I would need to put that in my fridge. Maybe I do need to make a list.”
Zeke felt the corner of his mouth curling up. There was something about this woman that was just so…different.
He didn’t get a lot of different in his life. His family was a bunch of crazy, quirky characters and they certainly all had their own personalities, but underlying it all was a commonality because of how they’d grown up and lived together all their lives.
The women who had come into his cousins’ lives—Tori and Juliet and Paige—had brought a breath of fresh air to the bayou. They were all from other places and had come to Autre for various reasons, but had fallen in love with the Landry boys as well as the town and the rest of the family and had stayed.
Maddie, Kennedy, and Charlie, the other girls in the family by marriage or blood, had all spent time on the bayou growing up so they’d fit right in with the Landry craziness.
Jill was turning out to be one of those breaths of fresh air. And damn if Zeke didn’t want to breathe deeply.
“So you only eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? No other kind?” he asked.
“Peanut butter and jelly don’t go bad.”
Right. Back to that. So she tended to buy food that didn’t have strict expiration dates.
“But milk and yogurt both go bad,” he pointed out.
He wasn’t sure how they’d even gotten on this topic and why he felt compelled to keep talking about it.
“They do, but I eat them every day, so they’re habits and I’m much less likely to let them go bad,” Jill said.
“Do you forget a lot of things?”
“A startling amount, actually.”
He gave a soft laugh. He really liked her ability to be self-deprecating.
“Do you need a keeper, Jill?”
She didn’t even blink. “You have no idea.”
He opened his mouth to say something flirtatious about how he’d like to take care of her, but hesitated. He wasn’t really a guy who took care of other people. He got taken care of. He wasn’t exactly forgetful. Then again, he also never had a zucchini in his crisper drawer in the fridge. For all he knew he would forget it was there and let it go bad. He did love a good turkey sandwich, but he always ate them at his grandma’s or his mom’s house. How long did turkey stay good in the refrigerator? He didn’t even know.
Yeah, if this woman needed someone to take care of her—or perishable food—he was probably not the guy.
Suddenly remembering the shoes, that had ironically made him feel like he was taking care of her, he held them up. “Gotcha these.”
She reached for them with a smile. “These will be perfect.”
“These too.” He handed her some socks from his own drawer.
She took them with a questioning look. She turned the boots all directions, checking them out. “They look…pretty.”
The boots were a pale pink. “They’re Paige’s. She does go walking around and out on the swamp boats and loves the otters, but she is not a real outdoorsy girl. And when she’s with the otters, for instance, she’s barefoot. I don’t think those boots are really right for yoga.”
“Yoga?”
“Yeah, she teaches yoga. She actually does otter yoga down at the otter enclosure twice a week.”
“I’m assuming it’s people doing yoga with otters around them