Beyond This Moment

27 Day Eleven- 8:24 P.M.

Brandy likes to cook a lot.

A small fact that would normally be incredibly irrelevant to me but tonight, it's pretty beneficial because it means that their house has a very large kitchen with clean marble counters and a nice stove and all the newest kitchen appliances stuffed into nooks and crannies on the counter.

All of this comes in handy because the counters are now covered in ingredients that we had picked up at the grocery store on our way home from our extraordinary day of adventuring. There's some macaroni noodles and cheese which makes me believe that we're making macaroni and cheese but then there's also things like tomatoes, onions, peppers, ground beef, and a bunch of herbs and spices. Apparently, Elias is going to be the first Finnish Iron Chef because he looks totally in the zone as he starts unpacking our groceries.

"Okay. What's first, Chef Elias?" I ask him teasingly, not knowing what I can do to help because I have no idea what I can do without fucking up whatever it is that he's making.

"I don't think being able to make about three things ever classifies me as a chef," He tells me, pulling a pan out of the cupboard and he starts filling it with water. "But this one will really blow your mind. I hope, at least. My mummo... my grandma used to cook it with me all the time so it's the one thing that I'm really awesome at."

"What can I do to help?" I ask.

He points to one of the plastic bags and says, "Can you preheat the oven to 400 and then start dicing the peppers?"

"Sure thing," I grab the peppers out of the bag and then spend five minutes searching around the entire humungous kitchen to find a knife from the knife block. Nobody else is home, they were all gone when we got here so I assume that they're probably out to dinner or went to a movie or something else to spend time together as a family.

So we start cooking whatever it is that Elias is making us for dinner. I'm not a big fan of peppers but he was so sure about it (probably because it's the only thing that he can make) so I went with it at the store and he seems pretty confident about it. After going to the park, we went shopping for a while, and then got lost in the city which was a great time because we got to see a lot of places that we wouldn't have seen if we stayed on our planned path. We created a lot of fake scenes throughout the day too.

I think that this has been an absolute perfect day and I'm afraid of thinking that because I don't want to jinx it but I can't help it. It's been a perfect day. And after dinner, we'll probably go upstairs and get in bed and we'll probably have sex tonight. The amazing thing is that although we both know that this is probably going to happen, there hasn't been any sexual tension at all throughout the day. We've been completely platonic. No hand holding or kissing or awkward glances or anything like that.

The amazing thing about Elias, I'm realizing, is that we're amazing friends and we're also an amazing couple romantically. Our relationship does not depend on the sex or the kissing because no matter what we're doing, we're having a good time. He always makes me laugh and he makes me forget about all of my problems in the world.

"What are you thinking about?" Elias catches me wandering off in my mind. I look over and see that he's starting to boil that water and he then starts cutting up the onions on the cutting board beside me so that we can share one large cutting board for the peppers and the onions.

"Just that I appreciate you," I tell him with a small smile and I return my attention to the pepper cutting so that I don't accidently cut my finger. I'm almost finished dicing the two red bell peppers so once I have enough of it piled on the cutting board, I leave it on the counter and sit the knife in the sink.