Pies

She asked him one morning as they lay tangled under sheets made warm by the heat of their bodies whether he thought pies tasted better right off the pan or served on ceramic plates. He traced lazy circles on her thigh as he thought. Straight from the pan, maybe. But pie does taste better with cream and you always take a slice of pie and put it on a plate before pouring on the cream. She considered that for a moment and said that if it was about the cream then maybe they ought to pour cream right into the pan to have an even comparison. She furrowed her eyebrows as she spoke and he laughed and leaned in and kissed her, right in between her brows as if to get her to stop worrying. She grinned and pulled him on top of her, showering his face with kisses.

He bought apples that evening and dumped them on the kitchen counter. She looked up from her laptop where she was typing up some important letter and grinned. It was going to be a good day.

The shared stories of their days at work as they sat cross-legged on the floor chopping and peeling apples. There was that guy she always saw on the subway, the one that drew buildings and skylines on scraps of paper and on the backs of flyers. There was that lady he met on his way to work who burst out of an office and yelled that she was engaged. He chopped the apples into lazy pieces while she fiddled with the peel. He laughed at the way she held her knife and although she reached out and hit him with the back of her hand, she felt like she wanted to grab hold of that laugh and hug it to sleep every night. Never let go of it, essentially.

Then they realized that they hadn't made the dough and all the apples they had cut would darken and ‘become icky’ by the time they got the dough to rise. She read somewhere that squeezing a lemon over the apples would prevent them from darkening, she said. And he thought that they had nothing to lose (except maybe twenty apples) and went along with it. She kept the lemony, cinnamon-y apples in the fridge and joined him in the kitchen where he’d already begun mixing the dough.

Unlike in all those sappy movies they managed to get the dough ready without breaking into a flour-fight. A fight of pots and pans seemed imminent however, with threats hurled back and forth every time someone opened the fridge to steal a piece of lemony apple. See, it’s a good thing there were so many apples he said. She hit him with a spoon. He chased her around with a cutting board.

She cried when they were all done, with the bowls all washed and the timer set, thinking of all the things they had lost along the way. And how it might just be another month before they got to spend time together like this again. He hugged her until the pain went away and as always she concluded that the long waits were worth it just because they got to do things together once in a while.

She felt better but still refused to let go of him. He made to move to the living room couch but she clung on to him like those little monkey babies you see on Animal Planet. He wanted to watch the news in ten minutes so he thought, oh well, and picked her up and carried her over to the couch where they settled down, him with the remote and her on his lap.

She fell asleep by the time the timer rang so he coaxed her awake, he knew the kind of monster she could become if woken up the wrong way. She woke up and blinked, focusing on the careful expression on his face and smiled and kissed him harder than he expected her to. He looked a little dazed as she leapt off his lap and skipped to the kitchen and his expression made her even happier. He followed and wrapped his arms around her waist as she cut the pie carefully into two halves and then divided one part into slices. She moved the slices to another bowl, and took one in a ceramic plate. The special plates, the ones they bought on her first raise, the ones they only took when they ate together. He let go of her and poured cream all over the slice of pie on the plate.

They argued over which pie they should try first and decided it didn't matter really. They finished the slice and decided that this was definitely better than the strawberry pie they made a few months ago. Apple was more pie-able she said. He tapped her on the nose with the back of his spoon.

He settled into the blankets while she went to get the pie in the pan that they’d left in the oven so it’d stay warm. She poured all the remaining cream over it and crawled into the blanket with him. She said she was too lazy to feed herself and he took turns, scooping up bits of cream and apple and pie crust for her and then some for him.

About two hours later when they had a real dinner and put away all the dishes and crawled into bed, hugging each other so tight that they could barely differentiate whose head was resting on whose arm, they had arrived at a conclusion. Pie tasted better off the pan. No doubt about it. Scraping up all the bits of crust from the pan, with a tiny bit of cream and some of the apple leftovers made making pies worthwhile.

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