Moving Forward (Completed)

Chapter Thirty Seven

"He's never brought it up and I'm almost afraid to."

"You're going to have to at some point." Karla smiled as she backed into her room to finish her work so she could leave at a decent hour.

Katherine did the same, her work taking longer as her mind drifted back to MJ.

The apartment was quiet when she finally made it home. It was late, but not that late, and she assumed Rafael was stuck at work. She pulled her phone from her bag and texted him.

"I just got home. If you're not going to be too late I'll make something for dinner."

She smiled when her phone vibrated in her hand before she even reached the kitchen to see what they had as dinner options.

"I'm leaving in thirty minutes and I'm starved."

Katherine searched through the cabinets, settling on pesto pasta that she had wanted to make since she saw the heirloom tomatoes on sale at the little grocery store they visited entirely too frequently.

She gathered the spinach, kale, basil, pine nuts, garlic, lemon, olive oil, and salt, choosing Asiago over Parmesan since she liked the flavor better with the heirloom tomatoes, and started the water boiling as she prepped the ingredients for the pesto sauce. Once the water was boiling she dumped the rigatoni noodles in, placed a wooden spoon over the pot so it wouldn't boil over, and combined the pesto ingredients in the food processor. She then washed the heirloom tomatoes and cut them into chunks, tossing them in a large mixing bowl, and poured herself a glass of wine as she waited on the noodles to finish.

The rigatoni was dumped in with the heirloom tomatoes, then the pesto sauce had been added with just a touch of the pasta water. Katherine mixed it so the pesto coated everything and then transferred the pasta to a casserole dish, covered it with more Asiago cheese and slipped it in the preheated oven. The oven timer was set for twenty minutes and Katherine poured herself a second glass of wine. She knew she'd have at least one more glass, possibly two with dinner, but it was Friday so she wasn't that concerned.

Barely ten minutes had passed on the timer when she finished cleaning the dishes she was no longer using. The counter was wiped down, and the kitchen looked as though it hand't been used when she awkwardly missed her footing causing the full glass of wine she had just picked back up to slip from her hands and shatter against the tile floor.

"Shit." She grumbled, panic setting in when she heard the lock on the front door click. "Shit. Shit. Shit."

Katherine scrambled to grab paper towels in an effort to clean up the mess before he saw it. He'd never notice they were down a wine glass, but she didn't want to listen to his degrading comments about not being able to hold her liquor. It was one of the reasons she rarely drank anymore. She'd only had one glass and hadn't even drank it that quickly. This had been an accident. His feet shuffled across the floor, her body tensing as they got closer. The invisible weight pressing against her neck and shoulders before he even noticed her. If she could just get the wine soaked up it would be less noticeable, then maybe she could somehow secretly clean the rest of it. She would be extra nice and offer to get anything he needed from the kitchen until she ensured the floor was free of glass shards. Things were going well until she quickly ran her palm over one of the larger broken pieces that was hidden under a section of paper towel. The gasp that escaped her alerted him of her location on the kitchen floor.

"What the fuck Kate?"

"It was an accident. I didn't have a good hold on the glass and I tripped." It was the truth, not that it would matter.