You Have a Match(3)
“Careful, they’re—hot,” Leo says with a sigh, seeing I’ve already blatantly ignored his warning by popping it into my mouth.
The roof of my mouth instantly burns, but not enough that I don’t appreciate how absurdly delicious it is—the legendary lasagna balls, one of Leo’s many workarounds to actually cook in his house. He’s become something of an oven snob and doesn’t trust his to stay at a steady temperature, so he got himself a high-end toaster oven—hence, a lot of bite-size, dollhouse recipes, so I always feel like I’m in some fancy culinary pop-up when I’m just as stuck as I always am in the depths of Seattle suburbia.
“Are you okay?” he asks, with his usual mingling of exasperation and concern.
“You could’ve come over,” I say, the ricotta legitimately steaming out of my mouth.
This is part of the reason Leo has been essentially absorbed by the Day family—our kitchen is humungous. And while we appreciate all that extra counter space for laying out several boxes of Domino’s pizza during a feeding frenzy, nobody in our family actually cooks. Leo, on the other hand, is basically the Ina Garten of our high school and needs the space to fully manifest his Food Network dreams (plus, if we’re being real, the ego boost of the Day brothers hollering about his six-cheese pizza at the top of their tiny lungs).
Not that Leo comes over much these days. We’re not so great at being alone like this anymore. And as supportive as I want to be, I can’t help the way my eyes keep skirting to the door, the way I keep waiting in the beat of silence that Connie usually fills.
“Is that Kitty?” Leo asks, looking at my camera case.
There it is again—that squeezing cycle of panic and relief. The teetering line between are we okay? and we’re okay enough.
“And all nine of her lives.”
“She’s probably down to about six by now,” says Leo. He would know—he’s the one who gave the camera her name, after she survived more than a few harrowing drops, near plunges into bodies of water, and that time I thought it’d be cool to hang upside down from a jungle gym to get the sunset through the metal bars and ended up with a mouthful of playground rubber.
“You mind?” he asks.
I tuck my chin to my chest, hiding my smile as I pull Kitty out of her carrier. Leo reaches over my head into the cabinet to grab his mom’s nice white plates, and I start arranging the lasagna balls on them. For a bit we’re so locked into the easy quiet of this old pattern that I almost forget to wish Connie were here: I take a few shots of Leo’s creations with Kitty, he uploads and posts them on his Instagram, and I promptly eat all the spoils.
He has a habit of uploading all my other photos, too. I’m not expecting him to today, though, until he surprises me by holding a hand out for Kitty. I try not to watch him as he clicks through views from the top of my mom’s office building in Seattle, a sweeping, pre-dusk skyline punctured by the Space Needle, the clouds stark and heavy in the air.
I stand on my tiptoes, peering at the screen. My head barely clears his shoulder, forcing me close enough to him that the heady smell of cinnamon is thick in the air, warm in my lungs. That’s Leo’s calling card—sneaking cinnamon into everything. Muffins, burritos, pudding, grilled cheese. Even when it’s not supposed to work, he’ll find a way to do it. Ever since we were kids he’s always smelled like he was rolling around in the display case of a Cinnabon.
He stops on an image, tilting the camera so I get a better view. Leo claims not to know jack about photography, but of the dozen or so pictures I took, he still chose my favorite—the one where the shadows are a little harsher, right as the sun was gearing up to poke out from behind a cloud.
I glance up to nod my approval, but he’s already watching me. Our eyes meet and there’s something soft in his that holds me there—and without warning, the warmth of his knuckles skims under my jaw. My breath hovers somewhere unhelpfully in my chest, suspending me in the moment, into something brewing in Leo’s eyes.
“You, uh—there was some cheese,” he says. “On your…”
I touch the spot where his hand met my face. It feels like it has its own pulse.
“Oh.”
“So, um, post it?”
I try to meet his eyes again, and when I do all I see is that familiar honey brown. You’d think I would have enough experience with my camera to know when something is only a trick of the light, but I can’t ignore the tug of disappointment I know better than to feel.
“Yeah, if you wanna,” I say, shrugging myself away from him and his autumnal smell and over to the table.
Leo clears his throat. “Sweet.”
For a while he’s been uploading these photos on a separate Instagram he made for me, even though the idea makes me feel a little topsy-turvy. He keeps saying it will be good to get a following, to have some kind of portfolio and a way to connect with other photographers, like he and some friend of his from summer camp have been doing with their own Instagram accounts. But the truth is, I viscerally dread the idea of sharing my photos with anyone. The thought of people out there seeing my work makes me feel so weirdly naked that I don’t even look at the account.
Plus, if anyone’s actually following it, I’m sure they’re bored out of their skull—most of my pictures from the last year are the same places over and over, since the academic leash I’m kept on gets tighter by the day. And even if it weren’t, I haven’t been out as much lately. Photography was my thing with Poppy. It’s been harder to go anywhere outside my element without my partner in crime.