"All right," she agrees, a little confused. He gets an affectionate peck as she takes off his coat to hang up. "It's not from work?"

"It is not from work," he agrees, making a beeline for the place he smells as the kitchen.

She trails after him, even more confused and off balance.

"Do... you not need help figuring out the kitchen?" she guesses, blinking. "Or instructions at all?"

"Oh, I did some research during my spare time," he explains, finding the nearest appropriate surface to lay the briefcase on.

Then he opens it to reveal an astounding number of tools that... are probably cooking tools, but the sort of cooking tools a French high chef might have. There are also a couple of small containers with condensing water around them suggesting they're very cold.

She leans around him to peer over his shoulder at the open briefcase, and raises her eyebrows.

"Oh. Did you, um. Do other things...?" she asks carefully, clearly desperately hoping that her vampire boyfriend did not obsess over learning how to cook since she last saw him just because she casually asked him to make dinner.

"How do you mean?" he asks, casually spreading out ingredients and apparatuses with practised ease. Apparently tonight she'll be having duck with... some... spices...? And maybe some dessert that involves vanilla and limes. Or maybe the limes go with the duck?

She looks confusedly at the cooking implements and dearly hopes that he knows what he's doing, because while she could probably make something resembling a dinner out of that, it probably wouldn't be great without pre-planning.

"I'm just wondering if you marathon read cooking books from when I mentioned this idea until now or not."

"Oh, no, nothing like that."

He starts zipping around the kitchen, pausing in places to do things extremely fast and in general too quick for the eye to follow.

"O...kay," she says, watching the zipping boyfriend with a raised eyebrow. "Well. Have fun, I suppose. Call me if you need help, but I'm guessing you really, really don't."

"Just lie down and rest, and I'll take care of this for you," he reassures her, his voice slightly staggered due to the multiple locations it seems to be coming from.

"Okay," she agrees again, a little bemused. She... can toe off her shoes and go lounge in the living room?? She was not actually expecting to be lazy today, she was kind of expecting to need to coach her vampire boyfriend on How To Food.

Her vampire boyfriend continues to make various noises in the kitchen.

Well. Okay then. She'll, uh. Keep... sitting here? How does one take a break, she doesn't actually know unless she schedules it out and has break activities planned.

After a while a rather delicious smell starts wafting from the kitchen. It's... similar to chicken but different, and the spices are definitely doing something there. Something good even.

It seems like it's going well? She's really hoping that he didn't marathon cooking books just for her benefit. While that would be kind of sweet, it'd also be a bit too unsettling for her to find it such.

She picks up a book from the shelf to reread, for lack of a better idea of what to do.

A couple of minutes after the nice smell starts he emerges from the kitchen again.

When he emerges from the kitchen she sits up and attempts to look like she really definitely planned for him to be competent at cooking, no really, she is not surprised at all.

"Did you already know how to cook?" she wonders, because actually figuring out the mystery of the mysterious cooking boyfriend is more interesting than this book she's already read before.

"Who, me? Whatever gave you that impression?"

Yvette squints at him.

"... Okay, you definitely knew how to cook beforehand. Where did you get the practice? You don't need to eat!"

James laughs and flops on the couch next to her. "I have had decades to do whatever I wanted. And one day I wanted to see what it was about food that interested humans." He shrugs. "Never did figure it out but I got good at trying."

"But. But. How would you know? If you don't eat? Did you have human house guests over for dinner regularly, or, or work at a restaurant or something??"

"Well, I could start practicing with my sense of smell. Just because I don't find it appealing does not mean that I could not recognize what kinds of smells were around the better restaurants. And then, yes, many human house guests to experiment on."

"Oh. Okay," she says, slowly. She eyes him, then carefully scoots over to lean on him. He is neither warm nor soft, but he loves her, which is more than she can say for the couch. "Did your guests, uh, tend to make it home safely, or do I. Super not want to know?"

"They... mostly made it home safely? I wanted guests more often than I wanted food and if they came to visit me at my place that was much more of a trail than was worth leaving."

"Huh. That makes sense, all right," she nods, leaning on him. She's still a little disturbed at him having killed house guests, but... morally it isn't actually any worse than killing random innocent people, just aesthetically distasteful, which is not the same thing. "Well, thank you for making dinner."