Samtember Comfort Food prompt
Borrowing the Comfort Food prompt from the Samtember list. I know I'm two days late, but I've been busy with… gestures vaguely around
"You don't need me to help with anything?"
"I do not."
"You sure?"
"Nah. You're fine, Rogers. You just sit there and look pretty. Take a load off. Keep me company. Actually, while you're still up, grab us both a beer," Sam suggested. He was pleased that he'd earned himself Steve's self-concious, crooked little smirk and that funny thing that he always did with his brows. Sam continued to sweat the vegetables in his big aluminum stock pot, stirring them with a wooden spoon. He paused a moment to glance over his shoulder as Steve opened the fridge and bent down to reach for the cardboard sleeve of beer bottles on the bottom shelf, and Sam gave silent thanks that he'd placed them there. Any opportunity to make Steve bend over to give him an unhindered view of that backside was precious.
Because <i>dayum</i>.
Sam turned back to his pot and mouthed a silent <i>Whoo</i>, then shook his head. <i>Boy, calm down</i>, he chided himself.
"Bottle opener?"
"In that little junk drawer to your left."
"We could've just gone out tonight, if it would've saved you cooking tonight, Wilson. I didn't want you to have to heat up your house."
"If we'd have gone out, you wouldn't have had the chance to try my jambalaya, which you will <i>absolutely</i> thank me for once you try it, and don't you worry about my house." D.C. summers were famously humid, and Sam ignored the sticker shock when he purchased solar panels for his townhouse. The central air conditioning was running at a comfortable seventy-nine degrees, Sam had the range top fan turned on to sweep out the steam, and he was fresh from a shower, scalp still cool from his mildly damp hair. He listened to the crack of the bottlecaps, and he yelped as Steve tapped his bare shoulder with the chilly glass bottle. "You ain't right," Sam told him, but he took the bottle gratefully and took a generous pull from it. "Hits the spot, though."
Steve nodded as he gulped from his, and he sat on one of Sam's barstools at the kitchen island, his firm body making a stately letter 'L' when he rested his heels on the lower run, comfortably bending those lanky legs. "When did you learn to make this?"
"Eh. I used to try to help in the kitchen when Gram-Gran would visit, so I picked up a few things, like basic knife work, but I think… I don't know. Y'know what, I think one of my ex-girlfriends from FAMU taught me how to make this. I just remember that it was amazing this one time that she brought some leftovers back to the dorm, and we all fought over it." Then Sam's tone grew teasing again. "Hope a little spicy food isn't too much for you to handle, Steve."
"I can handle spicy," Steve insisted.
"Mmmmm. I don't know. Someone grew up in the forties, when y'all were eating Cream of Wheat and Jell-O casseroles and you just boiled everything."
"Someone also traveled throughout Europe during their earliest tours with the Army. I had some bouillabaise in Paris that still makes my nose run just thinking about it."
"Ah. Well, la-dee-dah," Sam sang, giving his shoulders an uppity little wiggle as he added the chopped slices of andouille sausage to the pot. The kitchen automatically filled with mouthwatering aromas, and Steve groaned aloud.
"Okay, now I'm starving, and this is torture," he pronounced.
"That's why I also made cornbread," Sam said. "Because I'm not good at waiting, either."
<i>Not good at waiting</i>. Well. Actually.
That was patently false.
Sam was very, very good at waiting for Rogers to make a move. Just. Just any move at all.