After the storm

January, 2026

The chef came over for dinner on Sunday night, in the middle of a snowstorm. I spent the day reading my book on the couch, expecting a cancellation text because of the weather. I told him this later, to which he replied: “It never occurred to me.”

Thick white wind pulsed at the kitchen window as I did the dishes, waiting. When he came in, he shook off his snow-crusted jacket and passed me a bouquet of baby’s breath and a Tupperware container of homemade coffee cake. The cake was cut into neat, vertical slices. A boy has never baked me a cake before.

I cut through the floral wrapping paper and trimmed the stems methodically, pleased to have a task to occupy me while he settled in. He brought his own Japanese kitchen knife and immediately said: “Let’s get cooking.”

He had asked me what I was craving the day before and I texted back, steak. As I poured us two shallow glasses of red wine, he unwrapped the fatty strip from its pale pink parchment paper and heated up the cast iron. We said things with long pauses in between while the pan started smoking. I don’t have kitchen tongs, like how I don’t have art hung up on my walls, so he placed the steak down, flipping it back and forth with his bare hands. I watched his sinewy forearms as he cooked.

I put on the mixtape that my friend Petra made me for my birthday when he came in, and we changed the CD several times throughout the night. The Arctic Monkeys, the Beatles. When 505 came on, with the heavy beat drop, we paused eating, sitting in silence, nodding along.

After dinner, we sat side by side on the couch. I was curled up, cradling my glass of wine, and his legs were outstretched, his hand on my knee. He looked over at the bouquet of tulips I had arranged on the coffee table the day before, to spruce up my apartment.

“Tulips are so dramatic,” he said. “When they’re done, they’re done.”

Tulips are dramatic, I thought the next day, sweeping the kitchen alone, is a great line.

In the morning, after the storm. The streets were white and bare, thick, fluffy snow piled high along the tops of cars. We walked to get coffee, trudging through the unshovelled mounds. I was wearing a grey hoodie and low waisted jeans, no makeup, my hair brushed back. I felt pretty. At the coffeeshop, he laughed to himself after we placed our order.

“What?” I asked, smirking.

“Nothing,” he replied.

When we stepped outside I asked again.

“She’s just so done, the way she said cortado,” he laughed. The barista had loudly told the customer before us that she refused to work a double and that she wished she was at home, placing a cortado on the counter with mirthy resentment. I liked that he found that funny.