Page 11 of The Stuffing Situation
They didn’t speak on the way out, not until they reached the car. The walk felt unreal: her feet moved, but she wasn’t sure they touched the ground. Every breath tasted like static.
Maya slammed the door and stared at the dashboard as though it might contain the meaning of life, or at the very least,a warning label. The grocery bag rustled in her lap, the cans clinking, punctuation marks to a story she hadn’t meant to write.
Felix buckled his seatbelt with the care of a man preparing for a rocket launch.
“Was that acceptable?” he asked, tone neutral, as if confirming a reservation. Or a hit.
Maya turned to him slowly, heart pounding with the relentless thump of a bassline caught in her throat. His face was composed, but his knuckles were white where he gripped the seatbelt buckle, as if even he wasn’t immune to the rush of adrenaline.
“Felix,” she said softly.
Then, before she could think, before her brain could calculate the thousand ways this was wrong, she launched herself across the console and kissed him.
It wasn’t gentle. It was heat and chaos and years of unmet longing, short-circuiting every reason she’d ever told herself not to want this.
Felix didn’t hesitate. He kissed her with the certainty of a program written for this precise moment, a line of code buried deep in his memory. One hand on her jaw, the other at her waist. Anchoring her.
He moved with quiet intention, no rush, no misstep, as though time bent to him, as though his sole function was to get this right.
Maybe he was.
But it feltreal.
When they finally pulled apart, flushed, breathless, Maya stared at him like she was seeing a glitch in the matrix and couldn’t bear to close the window. The air between them crackled. The windshield fogged slightly, their breath the only proof the world hadn’t stopped turning.
“You’re perfect.”
Felix blinked once. “I was designed to be.”
Her smile twitched, faded slightly. Reality threatened to reassert itself. But then he reached out, touched her cheek, soft this time, reverent as if he were trying to memorize her for permanence.
“But I want to be perfect for you, and not because I’m told to, but because I choose to.”
Maya didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
It should’ve felt like a red flag, a programmable promise wrapped in romantic logic.
But her heart, traitorous, stubborn, human, leapt anyway.
And if Blair had been there?
She’d be yelling:That’s the feature test, bitch. He PASSED.
6
Stuffing, Staring, & System Malfunctions
Dinner was pure chaos, like every thanksgiving dinner was. This was the kind that required hazard tape, and a licensed mediator, the moment politics was brought up.
The kids sat at the wrong table. Someone dropped a spoon into the mashed potatoes and called it “gravy adjacent.” Uncle Rob was two whiskeys deep and mid-sermon on the pump and dump crypto he’d invested in inevitable comeback, now aiming his monologue directly at the cranberry sauce as if it personally crashed the market.
The house buzzed with the low, rhythmic hum of too many voices overlapping, someone shouting for more ice, someone else swearing the stuffing was missing sage, the dog circling like a heat-seeking missile under the table.
Maya barely noticed.
Because at the calm, horrifyingly competent eye of the storm sat Felix.
Unbothered and radiant, he was acting as though Thanksgiving were a black-tie gala and he the guest of honor.