“How was your day?” he asks as we head toward the kitchen.
“Headache inducing. Yours?”
“Good. You’ve got a headache? Where?”
We stop just in front of the oven, and I pick up an oven mitt. “My temples, mostly.”
Owen gently cradles my head in his hands and then places a long, soft kiss on one temple and then repeats it on my other temple. I close myeyes and sink into the sweet touch, like I’m letting it enter right into me. And I swear my headache is gone.
My eyes go wide. “How did you do that? How did you make it go away?”
A smile slowly spreads across his face. “You know, I thought our kisses were magical. I’m pretty sure this is confirmation.”
I grin at him, and then pull dinner from the oven as Owen gets dishes—actual, non-disposable dishes—from my cupboard, and then we dish up and go to the table—an actual table—to eat. Now that I’m seeing the food, I’m even more ravenous than I was. My stomach is growling, and the food is tasty, but I force myself to eat at a normal human pace as we talk about our days. With me being vague, of course, and telling about it as if mine were all related to computer network issues I was trying to fix, instead of telling the truth. That the issues I was running into were all related to predictive risk modeling of future high-risk antiquities targets.
After we finish eating, Owen takes our dishes to the sink to start washing them. How sweet is that? I grab a towel and dry as he finishes washing and rinsing each one.
He glances over at me. “Can I ask you something personal?”
“Sure.”
“At the wedding, when you were introducing me to Abraham, you mentioned your dad’s passing. Ididn’t know that he’d died. Is that something you don’t want to talk about?”
“Although it is hard, I don’t mind talking about him at all. He was a great guy and a wonderful dad. It’s just something that’s awkward to bring up if it doesn’t come up naturally in a conversation.”
“Oh, I understand, especially since I just brought it up in a way that wasn’t natural to the conversation.”
I chuckle. “So you understand.” I take a breath. “He passed away almost five years ago. I had just turned twenty.”
“What happened?”
The truth is, he died during a mission that he wasn’t supposed to be on. He’d been trying to recover a drive from a rogue agent that contained information on operatives and assets that would threaten them and their families. When it first happened, I got fairly used to telling the cover story about it. I’m a little rusty now.
“My dad worked with a lot of our clients who needed computer security consulting, including clients overseas. While he was on site out of the country, there was an incident with a couple of warring crime families that spilled over to where he was working. He was trying to protect someone else and was caught in the crossfire.”
Owen gasps. “That’s awful.”
I nod. “Itreally was.”
As he’s letting the water out of the sink and I’m putting away the last dish, he asks,
“What was he like?”
“Super brave. Loyal. Deeply protective of us and his team. He was someone who couldn’t walk away from danger if it left others at risk.” I smile. “And he was really good at flag football, cooking pancakes shaped like our initials, making up the best bedtime stories, acting like my pet goldfish had a personality, and convincing us that folding laundry was a competition we all wanted to win.”
“He sounds like a great dad.”
“He really was.”
Owen wraps his arms around me, kisses my head, and says, “I’m really sorry you lost him.” I let him hold me for a long moment.
Then I take his hand and pull him over to my couch. He sits, and I sit turned sideways with one leg bent on the couch so I can look at him. “Okay, now your turn.”
“What do you want to know?”
“You seem like a really happy guy.”
He nods. “I am.”
