He couldn’t know of her gifts so he could pretend to have ones as well. Even Gregor and Yuri didn’t know. Sure, she’d often messed up around them. Still, they’d never cottoned on.
She’d found placemats and napkins and, by the time he was done in the bathroom, she was putting his plate on a mat on the bar that separated the kitchen from the living room.
He slid onto the stool and looked down at his plate.
As usual, Sonia stood at the kitchen counter across from him (the last part not as usual, obviously) and ate while contemplating how she was going to get out of this mess.
Would it take a million dollars?
Two?
Three?
What would he accept to give up his game?
“What’s this?” Callum asked, his voice tight in a way that sounded like he was restraining some impulse and, when she looked at him, his face was carefully blank.
“Eggs, bacon and toast,” she answered.
He looked back down at his plate.
Sonia continued eating.
“I recognize the toast,” he commented with forced politeness and she looked up again to see he was holding a piece of toast between a very attractive thumb and forefinger. “Is there butter?”
“Butter is fat,” Sonia replied and took a bite of her dry toast.
Callum watched her chew like it was fascinating in a watching the devastation of an earthquake in slow motion on TV kind of way.
“What’d you do to the bacon?” Callum enquired after she swallowed.
“I cut off the fat,” she informed him. “The meat is good. Protein. The fat is bad.”
His brows went up and he went on, his voice no longer polite but coated in disbelief, “You cut the fat off bacon?”
“Yep.”
He looked down at his plate. “The eggs are white.”
“That’s because I threw away the yolks. They’re filled with cholesterol.”
She trained her eyes on her plate and kept eating but she lifted her head when she heard him move.
Then she watched with surprise and not a small amount of annoyance as he rounded the counter, went straight to the trash bin and dumped everything on his plate inside it.
Then she watched with even sharper surprise and an ungodly amount of annoyance when he walked to her, grabbed her plate out from under her, pulled the remnants of toast right out of her fingers and dumped that in the bin too.
Sonia stood staring at him wordlessly as he opened the fridge, nabbed the bacon, dumped a huge lump of it into the skillet and turned on the burner. Then he gently moved her away from the range and grabbed the box of eggs she’d left on the counter.
Then, as he started cracking eggs into a bowl, she spluttered, “You just… you just… just, threw away my food.”
“That wasn’t food,” he replied.
“It was breakfast,” she shot back.
“It wasn’t that either.”
“Callum –”