142.)

Blossom Brixley was not the world's best cook. In fact, if she had to rate herself, she might appear toward the bottom of that particular proficiency scale. However, Blossom was a very good little budding engineer, and that facet made her a pretty good judge of matching scope to ability. Ergo, the meal she tried to make wasn't something out of the realm of possibility. It wasn't a meal that she felt uncomfortable making; it was a meal fitted precisely to her talents.

Tonight, for her and Amy, for their at-home-dinner-date, Blossom made steak Diane, with mashed potato and honey glazed carrots. She'd made both side dishes before, and so she wasn't worried about those. She'd cooked a steak or two in her lifetime, and so she wasn't even too worried about that. Developing the pan sauce, though? That worried her a little bit. It wasn't a complicated process; it had a few moving pieces that required some precise timing.

And Blossom Brixley was nothing if not precise.

Once she got started cooking - humming as she bounced from the ball of one foot to the ball of the other - Blossom would occasionally look over at Mia on the sofa, just to make sure she was keeping out of trouble.

I got bored fast. I decided to get out my laptop and check on some stuff online. I got new comments on Academy A, which was nice. I also planned to post the final chapter sometime this weekend. I had to do a dozen editing passes to be confident, and my editor had sent me a few notes.

I wound up down a rabbit hole on Reddit about the construction of the Eiffel Tower, and before I knew it Blossom was calling me over to the counter for dinner. Oddly enough, there wasn't a dining table at the beach house. I never really noticed that until Blossom started setting up a fancy little dinner on the far side of the kitchen island.

Blossom had tied her blonde hair up in a whale spout at the top of her head - a trick she used to do when she was a cheerleader and practice was on a particularly hot day - and Blossom Brixley looked every bit the part of a slightly frazzled but very domestic housewife. She set the plates both down and pushed one across to where Amy would be sitting, and then lit a single red candle on a single brass candlestick to be the centerpiece of the kitchen counter/ersatz dining table.

"Okay! This is steak Diane, I did it medium because I realized halfway through that I've only ever cooked steak medium. These are mashed potatoes, and this is honey glazed carrots."

She motioned to each food item as she spoke, with more than a touch of pride to her tone. And she was very proud of her presentation! The mushrooms in the sauce over the steaks looked picture-perfect!

"It's like dining at a restaurant," I said with a little laugh. But it really did look great. Or maybe I was just really hungry. Or probably both. I waited for Blossom to sit next to me before picking up my knife and fork. It tasted as good as it looked.

"Wow, this is... pretty good. Like, maybe you should cook dinner more often."

"Blossom Brixley," Blossom said her own name. Then added the title: "Housewife."

"Mm, no. If we lived together, you'd be the bread-winner." Engineers made a ton of money. On the other hand, I didn't even know what I was doing for my degree, let alone the rest of my life.

"If I'm the breadwinner, then I'm pretty sure that means we'll be having cupcakes for dinner every night, Lil' Miss Bakerpants. And you know what?"

She paused with a little cheeky grin.

"I think I am A-Okay with that."

Blossom wasn't the domestic type. She wasn't the cook-for-others type. She wasn't the make-something-to-impress-someone type. She was Blossom Brixley; the girl who didn't chase, the girl who did whatever the heck she wanted and if people didn't like her for it? Tough titties. And yet here she was, with this girl, wanting so desperately to impress her.

"Is it okay? The steak?"

"It's great," I said honestly, taking another bite. The potatoes were good too. I wasn't big on carrots in general, but I didn't hate these ones.

"Do you usually do home-cooked meals?" Blossom asked.

"Sometimes. When I was younger, for sure. My mom likes those sit-down dinners." If I remembered correctly, Blossom's dad was usually busy in the evenings. I wondered how long it had been for her since she had something like this.

"Well, we should definitely make it something we do more often, I think. And I could do with learning more kitchen stuff, anyway. You'd be amazed by how many bad meals I have to endure because some boy wants to impress me by cooking for me, hoping it'll get me in bed. Half the time I feel like saying that I'm more likely to sleep with them if they don't make me eat their food."

She laughed, and was pretty pleased that she'd managed to not put it in the more crass way that she would have with Becky: something-something-would-rather-eat-your-cock or something like that.

"Yeah, alright." A weekly cooking tradition with Blossom... that sounded nice.

After we ate, we changed into pajamas. And with pajamas came diapers. Our weekends were becoming so routine that it wasn't even a question of "if". I hoped to get some writing time, but the night was spent instead watching Bluey. I didn't complain.

That night, when we got into bed together, we kissed twice on the lips. Then she kissed my forehead and I fell asleep in her arms.