Day 50

Pokes around the gathering of little bowls lined on the counters. Tiny little bowls used for housing spices until they're added to the meal, a meal that already smells delicious with cut onions, garlic, and potatoes. Never knows how Tau'ri men are so good at cooking, on most of the planets she's taken residence on it's purely the woman's job to procure and prepare the meals.

It's a welcome exchange.

When she tips the lid of a metal pot on the stove, he smacks at her fingers with the plush cotton of an oven mitten. "No peeking, you'll ruin your appetite."

"Sorry, Sir." She swallows a little off put by the action, perhaps the normalcy of it, the suddenness of it, the implication that she was somehow disobeying when she was just curious.

She's always curious.

"Carolyn used to do the same thing when she was a kid."

He takes the oven mitten in his hand, not with his hand inside, and fully lifts the frail, tin lid from the pot. Steam explodes into the air, sizzling onto the red stovetop element. With a big wooden spoon, he stirs the pot, first counter clockwise, then as a eight, then clockwise, before adding in the teensy bowls of herbs.

"She'd come home from school and run into the kitchen, her hands turning over any potlid she could."

She leans back into the counter, watching the stack of bowls grow and teeter until it threatens to fall over. Wants to volunteer to rid them at the sink, but her fingers still sting from the whack of cotton. "Do you miss her?"

The smile washes from his face and he gets very invested in the type of shapes he's stirring. His throat bobs when he swallows and shares, "I try not to think about her. I've missed so much of her life already. But I think you know how that is."