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Kia spent the morning after kissing Sullivan trying to focus on her menu and supply order and failing to pay attention to anything except her memories of Sullivan’s kiss.

She had felt passion in Sullivan’s kiss.

She had seen desire and affection in Sullivan’s eyes, but Sullivan didn’t want that even if she felt it.

By ten a.m., Kia had wasted four hours pretending to calculate costs and answer DMs at Sullivan’s kitchen island.

She straightened. Her shoulders were stiff.

Her hands were stiff. She slid off the stool.

She should do a live stream. There were a dozen filters that would make her look fresh and relaxed.

“Fuck it.” She shoved her phone in her back pocket.

It must be nice to be Sullivan and do everything by hand or by mind. No social media. No pictures on the Mirepoix website. She wasn’t just a legacy owner; she was a slice of life before smartphones.

And Sullivan was at work. She wouldn’t be back until after midnight.

Kia went upstairs and retrieved her old digital camera from a duffel bag under the bed.

She checked the memory card. Still room for about a hundred photos.

There’d been a time before cloud storage when you had to choose which photos to keep.

You had to know what mattered. Her father rhapsodized about that time almost as much as he rhapsodized about the serendipity of life.

She wandered back downstairs and took several pictures of Sullivan’s kitchen, trying to capture the details that made it real.

Then she wandered over to the two large nudes hung beside the fireplace.

She studied them. Slightly larger than a real person.

The paint strokes angular and rough and yet the whole picture was rounded, the rough edges somehow creating a smooth whole.

She popped in her earbuds. Sibelius poured into her ears.

Then she set the digital camera on a bookshelf across the room from the paintings and pulled off her Kia Gourmazing T-shirt.

She unbuttoned her jeans. Sullivan’s hands would be steady and certain as they unbuttoned her jeans, but Kia did not get to think about Sullivan’s hands, which she would never feel unclasping her bra, never feel smoothing over her breasts or dipping inside—she didn’t get to think that way.

She stripped naked, set the timer for thirty-second bursts, and walked in front of the painting. Then she moved the camera and sat in the curve of the love seat, the velveteen fabric caressing her body. She tried not to pose, just to exist without reference to the camera.

Kullervo crescendoed in her earbuds.

Had Sullivan walked around the house naked before Kia moved in? Had she felt the soft upholstery against her bare thighs? Had a person gone down on her as she gripped the arm of the love seat?

Kia had told herself that she didn’t care that she and Gretchen only ever had sex a few times a year, and it was always disappointing.

Lots of things were disappointing: broken timing belts and rain at a fair.

She had been busy working on her art and her brand.

But what would it be like to be naked on this couch with Sullivan on top of her, their legs intertwined, the constraints of the sofa teasing them with what they couldn’t quite have? What would it be like if—

“Kia!” Sullivan’s voice broke through the fifth movement.

Kia’s earbuds jumped out of her ears as her brain exploded with What, why, how?

“You’re supposed to be at work.” Kia leapt up, which only made her feel more naked.

“I forgot the sage for the butternut squash risotto.” Sullivan wore her chef’s coat and clutched a bunch of sage.

“And you’re supposed to be clothed in the house, although we didn’t explicitly say that because…

” Sullivan looked around as though she’d seen something more distressing. “Are you with someone?”

“Of course not.”

Sullivan stood right next to the chair on which Kia had thrown her inside-out clothing.

“ Why are you naked in my living room?”

“It’s our living room, and how could you forget sage in the butternut squash risotto?”

Sullivan stared at Kia’s face with the intensity of someone trying not to look down, and then she did, and she blushed a lovely pink, like rose petals on a wedding cake. She glued her eyes to the floor. She shook her head as if to say, How did I get myself into this?

“I was taking pictures.”

“For Kia Gourmazing?” Sullivan looked up.

“No, for me. So when I’m ninety I can look at how hot I was.” And to remember I was real.

This time when Sullivan’s eyes found Kia’s body, they lingered.

Did Sullivan want her to feel her gaze like a touch?

If they were lovers, Sullivan would touch her there and there and there.

She could not be turned on in Sullivan’s living room.

She should tell Sullivan to look away. She should cover her breasts and pubes with her hands and make a grab at her clothing.

But she was already naked, and already turned on, and Sullivan looked more amused than distraught, so Kia pulled her shoulders back to accentuate her breasts and sashayed across the room.

Sullivan didn’t like her like that, but that didn’t mean Kia wasn’t hot.

She’d eaten enough tursnickens to give her curves she hadn’t had when they were in school.

What queer woman wouldn’t want to look? She brushed past Sullivan and picked up her clothing.

“You’ve seen naked women before.” Kia gave Sullivan an innocent look. “Pretend we’re in the locker room.”

“I’ve never changed in a locker room.”

Sullivan had never changed in a locker room?

“Even I’ve changed in a locker room.”

“I like exercising outdoors. Locker rooms smell funny, and it’s weird that you can’t even show your nipples through your shirt, but then you’re going to get naked with a bunch of people you don’t know.”

“Is it better if you know them?”

They were actually having this conversation. With Kia naked and Sullivan clutching sage. Then they were both laughing.

“So you’re not sending these selfies to someone?”

“No. And they’re on a memory card, not in the cloud.

” Kia stepped into her pants and tucked her underwear in her pocket.

“I love being an influencer. It’s fun. I meet great people.

And everything I put online is at least half-true.

But it’s a job, and it means all the pictures I have of myself are half-staged.

Except these. I want a way to remember my life without a filter. ”

Sullivan looked pensive. “I think I get it.” She turned around. “And now I’m going to go, and we’re going to pretend this didn’t happen. I never saw you. I was never here.” She headed for the door.

That was the most intimate moment she’d ever have with Sullivan, naked, talking about locker rooms.

“Hey, Sullivan,” Kia called after her. “You could just sub in marjoram.”

Sullivan waved a bunch of sage over her shoulder without turning around.

“I have standards, Jackson.”

Sullivan was so cute and so untouchable. Kia felt a pang of sadness.

Sullivan stopped before she opened the front door.

“Just for the record,” she said with her back to Kia, “your ninety-year-old self will be impressed.”

“Blake, wash and chiffonade that sage from Chef Sullivan,” Opal said as Sullivan burst through the back door of Mirepoix. To Sullivan she added, “Don’t act like Mirepoix was going to fall apart because you left for thirty minutes.”

Blake was in the corner, earbuds in, surreptitiously looking at his phone.

“Blake!” Sullivan yelled.

She never yelled in the kitchen. She raised her voice over the sound of cooking, but she didn’t yell in frustration. Opal raised an eyebrow. Blake hurried over.

“Sorry, Chef. Sorry. It wasn’t for me. It was for Mickey.”

“Do not tell me you were updating your pit bull’s social media page,” Sullivan said. “We need a mountain of Parmigiano-Reggiano grated, garlic minced, and mushrooms sliced.”

“Why are you rushing in like there’s some kind of situation?” Opal asked.

Sullivan dropped her voice. “She was naked! In my living room taking pictures in front of my Janice Domingos.”

“How did she know you’d be coming home?” Opal asked.

“She didn’t.”

“Oh.” Opal sounded disappointed.

Sullivan knew it was good that Kia hadn’t stripped in the living room to surprise her. Kia was just doing her weird thing.

“She was taking pictures.”

Sullivan needed to marinade the Osceola wild turkey, or it’d be tough, and start fermenting the cabbage.

All she could think about was Kia’s look of shock at Sullivan’s presence, Kia’s embarrassment, and then the moment when Kia seemed to think, Ah fuck it.

I’m here now , and strolled over looking like a goddess.

Like the kind of woman one of Sullivan’s legacy relatives—a woman maybe—would have fallen in love with and painted and hidden the paintings because the world wouldn’t let her love that body.

So beautiful. A port-wine stain birthmark on her hip and the requisite chef’s scars on her forearms. A spattering of faded tattoos decorated her body like stickers applied by someone who thought it was fun to stick them on but didn’t care about the overall effect.

A fried egg on her thigh. A rose on her breast. The interlaced women’s symbols above her short, dark pubic hair.

Her neck and arms were tanned a beautiful, toasted coconut brown, and her belly was almost as pale as Sullivan’s.

Some worthless AI filter would have erased her birthmark, made her skin a uniform color, lengthened her waist and slimmed her hips.

It’d be terrible to erase so much beauty.

Kia walked with the grace of a river, and she glowed like sunrise.

And Sullivan had wanted to take in every detail.

“Not for her social media?” Opal drew closer, a look of concern crossing her face.

“No. She had an old digital camera. She said she saves the pictures on a memory card. She wants to have something to look back on when she’s ninety. Pictures that weren’t staged. It was kind of sweet really.”

“She gets that that social media stuff is fake,” Opal said. “That’s way better than Aubrey. I swear she always thought she was making her life, not living it.”

“Kia is smart as hell. But she can be smart with clothes on.”

“Was she pretty?” Opal said conspiratorially.

“No.” Sullivan couldn’t let the lie stand for a minute. She could see the look of hurt that would cross Kia’s face if she heard Sullivan say it. Kia had been brash and young in school. She’d never shown Sullivan the human side, the side that stress cooked and slipped in the rain.

“Yes. Very.”

“Was she upset that you saw her?”

“I think she liked messing with me.”

“How was she messing with you? She didn’t think you’d be home.”

“She was… flirting.”

“Mmm.” Opal’s eyebrows raised in interest.

“Not for real. To mess with me.”

“And it messed with you?”

“I came home to find my fake wife–roommate naked and posing with my Janice Domingos!” Sullivan hissed.

“Were the Domingos the issue?” Opal said, opening her eyes wide in mock curiosity.

“Yes. No. Obviously not.”

“If you saw her, and you’re attracted to her, maybe that’s a good thing. You get to be attracted to people again. It’s good to notice a beautiful woman. It means you’re over Aubrey. And if you didn’t make her uncomfortable. If you worked it out, and it wasn’t too weird, well…”

Sullivan’s mind raced to Kia’s body and imagined tracing every curve, tattoo, and tan line. Every bone. Every scar. She closed her eyes to push the thought away, but that only brought it into focus.

“I’m not in love with Kia Jackson,” Sullivan said.

“Oh.” Opal’s eyes widened behind her glasses. “In love. I thought we were just talking about her supple, young body.”

“She’s only six years younger than me.”

“And you’re in love. Wait till I tell Nina.”

“I am not. You should not. I’m just—”

Opal ambled a few steps away. That was as much ambling as the small kitchen allowed.

Nonetheless, Sullivan knew her protests would be lost in the sound of searing scallops unless she projected her voice like she did during service.

Blake did not need to know her business. Sullivan threw up her hands.

After that, Sullivan poured every ounce of focus into her prep work for the butternut squash risotto, trying to replace the memory of Kia’s body with thoughts about seared ahi and arugula. It didn’t work.