Wyn arrived home and immediately began preparing dinner. She told Raif it would be served at seven so she didn’t have much time.

She didn’t know why exactly, but it seemed like everything he said was made of gold since their conversation with the kittens.

She hummed to herself as she cooked and told herself that he deserved to have a little fuss made over him. He’d brought her kittens, vacuumed the couch, and for the first time in her adult life, someone else had put ice in the freezer. He’d also given up his player ways, however temporarily, because he wanted something more. She was inspired.

She was also a very good cook, so the meal went off without a hitch. Except that it was five minutes to seven and Raif was not back yet.

Tapping her toe and looking around, she wondered if there was anything else she needed to do. The appetizers were warm in the oven. The salad was chilling in the fridge. There was no dessert that night, but she had fizzy drinks getting a quick cool-down in the freezer. Dinner was in the warming drawer and the table was set.

Suddenly, she thought of the jar. It wasn’t in the kitchen anymore. Doubtless, Raif had taken it into his room. An impish thought occurred to her. If he wasn’t home, maybe she could snatch it back from him. He no longer needed to jump through hoops to talk to her, so she felt a little silly with him having it. Some of the requests in the jar were pretty embarrassing.

He wasn’t home, so she quietly slipped into his room and kept her ear open for his key in the front door.

The first thing she noticed was that his bed wasn’t made. There was a blob of bedding in the middle of the mattress. She looked around for the jar, but it wasn’t on his nightstand, his desk, or his dresser. She looked inside his closet and didn’t see it. Then she crouched on the floor to see under the bed.

It was there.

Before she could reach for it, Raif popped out from under the covers. “What are you doing?”

Wyn grabbed at her heart and jumped to her feet. “Nothing. Dinner’s ready. Hungry?”

Raif knew it was a quick evasion. He also knew exactly what she had come in for. She was looking for the jar and it was under his bed, but she didn’t really want the jar. She wanted the notes that had been inside, and they weren’t there anymore.

“Yeah, I’m hungry,” he said, moving the blanket aside. He had been enjoying the aroma of her cooking for the last half an hour.

He followed her back to the kitchen and saw the table she’d set. Raif hesitated. He had had girls cook for him before and they had tried to make it special. There had been candles lit on the table and proper place settings, and the flavor of romance had been in the air. With the other girls, the food had been dressed-up take-out or her best attempt at cooking. He always felt obligated to eat those best attempts and he tried to see other things about her that were pleasing. It usually wasn’t too hard if her neckline plunged at all.

However, the table Wyn set was not organized to romance him. There were flowers on the table, but they were the same ones that had been there the day he moved in even if they were holding up beautifully. Instead, the table was set in a practical, beautiful way, without even the slightest trace of seduction to it.

“Do you need any help?” he asked, tentatively.

“Nah,” she said, fetching the appetizers from the oven. She served wings with a side of salad.

“This is dinner?”

“No. These are the first and second courses. I just serve them at the same time because I think they complement each other. There’s less walking back and forth for me, fewer dishes… it’s just a better way to present the meal as far as I’m concerned. We’re having chicken mozzarella pasta with sundried tomatoes.”

She set his plate down and he smelled perfectly cooked food, saw a perfectly prepared plate, and looked across at Wyn. She wasn’t wearing a dress and her neckline did not plunge. She wore a white shirt with buttons up the front, and most of those buttons were done up. It was the sort of thing your server wore at the restaurant, not the sort of thing your date wore.

He suddenly realized he may never have had an interaction with a woman that wasn’t doused in pretense. For a moment, he felt small and like the world might not be his oyster.

“When was the first time you were in love?” he suddenly asked, curious if her experiences had been similar to his.

She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not convinced I’ve ever been in love. I’ve had little crushes, been curious about men, been kissed all night.. since you made that sound so appealing… I must have chosen the wrong guy for it though because it wasn’t very much fun. I don’t know. I’ve never been in a relationship where I was willing to let my whole world get turned upside down, which is why I’m so annoyed with Muriel. Couldn’t she have kept it together until the end of the term?”

Raif signaled that he agreed that it was strange she and Trevor hadn’t been able to wait, though it didn’t annoy him.

Wyn took a drink from her glass. “What about you? Ever had your heart knocked out of the park?”

“A couple of times. I wouldn’t exactly call what I felt love, but more like the seeds of love… if I wanted to plant them.”

“And how did planting them go?”

Raif hesitated. “I didn’t do it.”

“No?”

He shook his head. He was thinking of the time he drove Wyn home after grad. When he held her hand in his, he was going to write his phone number and then he reined himself in and wrote the other line instead. “The first time,” he said slowly. “I thought of doing it and then I didn’t. It wasn’t that I was scared. It was that I thought I would feel differently later. I had to stick to the system I’d made for myself. I couldn’t go off track.”

“Are you sure you weren’t scared?”

The way her face looked, if they had been in candlelight, Raif would have been completely undone, but as it was, there was a fluorescent light above them that offered no romance. Instead, what he saw was not seduction, it was sympathy.

Players never got sympathy.

And she was right. He was scared, but he put his feelings away and picked up one of the wings she’d cooked. It was perfection.

“Did you buy these somewhere and then just heat them up here?”

“You want to know my secrets?” she asked as she licked her fingers.

“Do you not tell how you make things?”

She giggled. “I guess I don’t care. I bought some seasoning at the grocery store, so I didn’t blend the spices myself, so I guess I’m not hardcore.”

“If you seasoned them yourself, you are hardcore compared to the ladies who usually cook for me.”

Conversation ebbed as they finished their appetizers and she brought out the pasta bake she’d put together.

When Raif tasted it, he knew he was going to be a mess. He was not used to defending against sincerity and wholesome food.

“You’re not telling me much about your love life,” he ventured. “What was your last boyfriend like?”

“I don’t like to talk about it. I broke up with him and he was pretty upset. The thing that was the most disappointing about it was that there was nothing wrong with him, I just didn’t want to go any further down the path of life, or love, with him. I want a different kind of man.”

“What do you want?”’

“An adult.”

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Raif wrinkled his nose. It seemed like an incredibly low bar. “He wasn’t?”

“He was very reliant on his parents, which I didn’t like. They gave him so much money, I knew that if I continued to be with him, eventually marrying him, I’d have to do everything the way his parents wanted because they held the purse strings. I don’t want to do what people expect of me. I want to do my own thing. I also like to read advice columns and parents who pay for everything are worse than parents who pay for nothing.”

“What are your parents like?”

“Oh… they’re gone. It’s just me and my two siblings.”

Raif looked down. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t mean my parents are dead. I mean they’re living abroad in Singapore. Dad’s doing business and mom goes with him. Regardless, they don’t have much say in what I do or where I go. I claimed my adulthood ages ago, so I couldn’t approve of Winston and the sappy way he went to his parents when he had problems.”

“Do you approve of me taking that crazy job on Banks Island?” Raif asked with a satisfied smile.

“Of course I approve,” she replied heartily.

“Would you go somewhere like that? I mean, if you were offered a job like mine with good pay, a cabin, and the lot?”

She looked down. “I’d have to think about it. The darkness and the temperatures there are really something to consider, but would I go somewhere crazy to exert my independence? Yes.”

Raif smiled. “I have to thank you. I haven’t eaten that well in… I don’t remember.”

Wyn started gathering up the dishes.

He put out a hand to stop her. “Don’t do that. I’ll do them.”

She gawked at him. “You’ll do the dishes?”

He didn’t want to make much of his offer. “Yeah. You told me that that was how it worked with your other roommates. You cook and they do the dishes. I’ll do them… but not yet.”

“Why ‘not yet’?”

“Because I have a surprise for you.”

“What?”

“Come on,” he said, easing the dishes out of her hands and leading her into the living room.

Wyn was very aware that he was touching her hands. Friends did not lead her into rooms by her hands like they had to guide her because they were afraid she’d run.

“What are we doing?”

“All the things you wanted,” he replied.

She looked around. “What do you mean ‘all the things’? I put one hundred things in that jar. It was very kind of you to do any of them.”

“Yeah… I did some more.”

Wyn allowed Raif to lead her to the couch. She sat down and stayed put while he retrieved something from his bedroom. When he came back, he had a scrapbook with him, which he laid out on the floor.

Inside were all the papers she’d written her wishes on. They’d been organized according to category and glued down. Wyn was astounded. She had enough stamina to crazily write down each of those wishes, but she didn’t think anyone else would have the stamina to think about them, categorize them, glue them down, and make an action plan. She suddenly remembered that he had offered to help her with them that first night and she thought he was just being friendly, but what if he was the type of guy who made action plans the way she did? Her blood started humming.

Raif began talking. “The first category is housekeeping. Naturally, you’d want a clean roommate. Sweep and mop the kitchen floor? Done. Scrub the toilet inside and out? Done. Dust the lighting fixture in the living room? Done.”

Wyn’s eyes raced upwards. Had he really taken apart the light and washed the inside of it?

He kept listing the cleaning items. Wyn didn’t know it, but there were eighteen of them and he had finished them all.

In her stomach, she felt fluttering.

“Then we move on to things you asked me to buy. Rubber gloves? Tea lights? Matches? Lysol wipes? Wet Swiffer cloths?” He went on to list twenty-four things she’d asked him to buy for the sake of keeping their apartment clean. He’d purchased all of them and arranged them on an empty shelf in the linen closet.

Wyn felt a little bad hearing the list. Had she asked for so much? “What’s the next section?” she asked shyly.

“The next section lists repairs and improvements you want me to make around the apartment. There are six.”

She remembered. She wanted mountings put in the walls for pictures and she wanted two shelves hung.

“We can do that tonight if you want. I have a toolkit in my room.”

Wyn was flustered. “I don’t know if tonight’s a good night for that. It’s enough to know that you’re willing to help me with that sort of stuff.”

“I am,” he said confidently. “Let’s move onto the next section.”

“What’s this one?”

“It’s all ridiculous stuff no one would do. There are thirteen items, basically intended to humiliate me. It starts off with me wearing a clown nose--”

Wyn interrupted by putting her hands up. “You don’t have to do any of that stuff. I was being very immature when I wrote that. You certainly do not have to wear a clown nose.”

He pulled one out of his pocket and put it on his face. “Very little embarrasses me. I already owned one.”

Wyn’s blood had been thrumming, her stomach flipping, but when he put the clown nose on his outrageously pointed nose, it all came out of her mouth. She laughed. “You already had that?”

“I have more than one,” he said, splitting open a second one and putting it on her face.

She leaned into it.

Looking back at the book, he continued. “I’m also supposed to wear suspenders with no shirt?”

“Don’t do that!” she spazzed.

“I own a clown nose, but I don’t own suspenders,” he confessed. “Do you have a pair?”

Wyn looked at the floor and tried to make her face blank. She did have suspenders. She shook her head no, but it wasn’t his first rodeo and in the next second, he was on his feet, moving toward her room.

“They’re in your closet?”

They were. They were in her belt box, but she couldn’t let him take them. What had she been thinking when she asked for that? She didn’t believe he’d do any of the stuff she’d put on the papers, let alone study them and catalog them. She thought he’d read a few and move out.

She hurled herself ahead of him and threw herself between him and the door.

He smiled at her, still wearing the clown nose.

She smiled back at him, with her hand on the doorknob.

He didn’t ask her to get out of his way. Instead, his hand came out on the opposite side of the doorknob and he grabbed her ribs. She convulsed to the tickle so completely that she let go of the knob and he side-stepped her.

He had found her belt box before she had recovered enough to follow him. “How did you find that?” she gaped, staring at him as he selected the suspenders that were most likely to fit him.

“Your room is so well organized. I don’t know how you expect to hide anything,” he said pleasantly as he adjusted the straps to their maximum length.

“I should not have asked you to do that!” she bit.

“This isn’t different from cleaning the toilet,” he said, attaching the back strap to his pants. “We’re roommates. We’re supposed to have fun together.”

She dropped her smile. “Maybe you shouldn’t do it because it was a joke of mine, because I didn’t think there was any way in hell you’d take your shirt off for me.”

He clipped the front of the suspenders to his pants but left them hanging around his hips. “It’s too late to stop it now,” he laughed. “The jar has spoken!”

He whipped off his shirt and pulled the suspenders over his shoulders. He turned to look at himself in her full-length mirror. “Looks pretty good. If I went to a cowboy club like this…”

Wyn was covering her face, hoping to cover her embarrassment.

“Don’t be like that. I’m giving you what you asked for,” he said warmly, putting his arm around her shoulder.

Her hands were still over her face, but his laughter quieted.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he said softly, his lips almost touching her ear and another set of suspenders brushing her arm. “If you put these on, I’ll toss the rest of the requests on that page.”

That sounded quite appealing to Wyn, who remembered some of the other requests she’d made. She’d asked him to dress in drag and post a love letter to a sandwich on social media. There were more and she couldn’t let him do them!

She took the suspenders he offered. “I won’t go topless.”

“Of course not, but I do hope you have something embarrassing enough to match this challenge and satisfy me that I’m not the only one being humiliated for someone else’s amusement. A red bra? A spotted bikini top. Surprise me.”

He closed the door behind him and left her alone to change.

Only then did Wyn take her other hand away from her face. Why had she asked for something so outrageous? What had she been thinking? And what right did he have to look so good with no shirt on? No wonder he wasn’t embarrassed. In two minutes, she’d be in her living room with her male roommate wearing a clown nose, a bra, and suspenders? She thought she’d die.

Whatever.

He wouldn’t have done any of this if she hadn’t suggested it herself. Ultimately, she was getting what she deserved.

She found a horizontally striped tube top and put it on under the suspenders.

When she hesitantly came out of the bedroom, he was reclining on the couch with his phone in his hand.

Click!

He’d taken a picture of her.

“Hey!” she protested. “I didn’t take a picture of you.”

“You can take a picture of me if you want to,” he offered, getting up and posing for her.

She took her phone out and took shot after shot of him until he got bored.

“Let’s take a selfie,” he said, getting behind her and pointing his camera at them both. Her face was very red with his bare chest pressed up against her back, his breath in her ear, and the wide smile on his face.

And it was at that very moment that there was a knock on the door.

“Get a shirt on!” Wyn hissed when she heard it.

“No. Half the fun of dressing like this is getting caught,” he said, dragging her to the door with him.

He opened it and Muriel was on the other side with tears streaming down her face. “Can I come in?” she mouthed timidly.

Raif and Wyn took their clown noses off in unison and stepped aside to make room for her.