The sauce only came out on nights like this one, with no hurry anywhere in the house, and it wanted an hour on the lowest blue flame the stove had, stirred down slow until it turned from thin and bright to something dark and close to gone.
Twenty-three years married, and she still made it exactly the way she always had, sleeves pushed past her elbows, one apron strap slipped loose off her bare shoulder an hour ago and left that way since.
"Just a taste," he said from the doorway, the way he always said it, and crossed the kitchen toward her before she'd finished deciding whether to believe him.
She held the wooden spoon back over her shoulder without turning around, certain by now exactly how far his reach was and exactly how little that certainty had ever stopped either of them.
His hand came around her wrist instead of the spoon, steadying it, steadying her, his thumb resting where her pulse had already picked up before she'd let herself notice why.
Then his chest was at her back, his shirt open one button past reasonable for a kitchen, and the sauce kept its slow furious simmer three inches away, entirely on its own now.
"That's not tasting," she said, when his mouth found the curve of her neck instead of the spoon at all.
"I'm getting to it," he said, unhurried, and she believed him the way she'd believed him on nights like this for twenty-three years, that he would, eventually, and that eventually was the whole point of a reduction anyway.
She let her head fall back against him, spoon still lifted, the sauce going dark and thick and forgotten in its pan, and for a while neither of them moved to save it from itself.
It had reduced to almost nothing by the time she remembered it was there, gone past what the recipe called for into something richer than either of them had planned on for a Tuesday.
Neither of them minded. They ate it standing at the counter, her apron strap still off her shoulder, his shirt still open, agreeing without saying so that some things were better for having been left too long over a low flame.