I only love pickles

“I only love pickles” is Dylan Buchanan’s explanation for calling Kate MacKenna “Pickle,” a teasing nickname that becomes the vehicle for his declaration of love. The phrase turns a private joke about taste into a confession: Dylan had mistaken his attraction for irritation, while Kate had not recognized that her feelings matched his.

The nickname in use

Dylan addresses Kate as “Pickle” when he joins her in bed after midnight. She has been tossing and turning, and tells him she is too nervous about tomorrow to sleep. His answer, “Good,” leads into a physical gesture: he lifts her hair and nibbles the back of her neck. The brief exchange establishes the nickname as part of their intimate, teasing familiarity, rather than as a formal declaration or a name Kate has chosen for herself.

The address recurs in a more troubling conversation. Dylan has been thinking about Kate inside a house with a bomb and a cold-blooded killer, and admits that he was frightened for her. When he asks if she is awake, he again calls her “Pickle.” Kate says she trusted someone; Dylan assumes she means Nate, but she corrects him: she means The Florist. She explains that she followed the instructions of a man who had admitted to liking explosions. The nickname remains present while the conversation turns from their intimacy to the danger and uncertainty surrounding Kate’s choices. Its familiarity contrasts with the risk she describes.

From food preference to confession

Dylan’s explanation comes as Kate braces for what she expects to be a goodbye. Instead, he leans against the door and talks about disliking pickles as a child before acquiring a taste for them. He then makes the connection explicit: “And I call you pickle.” Kate recognizes the reference but objects that he likes many other foods, naming black olives, pretzels, sweet corn, pizza, and hot peppers. Dylan distinguishes liking those foods from loving them: “I only love pickles.” The line gives the title its literal meaning and makes the nickname a compact, deliberately playful expression of preference.

The conversation then changes the joke’s stakes. Dylan says he is not saying goodbye; he is saying he loves her. Kate reacts with disbelief, waving a cereal box as she protests, and Cheerios fly everywhere. Her startled response breaks the poised expectation of a smooth farewell: the confession does not arrive as a polished speech but as an interruption to an ordinary, slightly chaotic exchange. Dylan’s food comparison gives him a way to explain the name, but the name has been carrying a feeling he had not yet admitted aloud.

The history behind “Pickle”

Dylan traces that feeling to their encounters on Nathan’s Bay. Kate repeatedly interfered with his love life, he says, and he was angry with her; yet he kept returning. The decisive detail is not simply that they argued or crossed paths, but that Dylan made a point of finding out when Kate would be there for the weekend and arranged to show up too. In retrospect, the behavior he had understood as irritation also contained deliberate pursuit. His account recasts their repeated encounters as evidence of attachment he had been slow to recognize.

The nickname itself began after that realization. Dylan says he started calling her “pickle” to make her crazy, although he knew she disliked it. The teasing therefore carries two meanings at once: it provokes Kate on the surface, while giving Dylan a private way to address the person he was drawn to. Kate’s objection that he knew she disliked the name prevents the confession from turning the joke into uncomplicated romance; his answer acknowledges that he had not enjoyed being in love with her either. He had believed she was ignoring him, and that belief unnerved him.

Recognition and significance

Dylan does not limit his confession to his own feelings. He tells Kate that she loves him too, and that she has probably loved him for a long time without realizing it. Kate answers, “No.” He insists, steps toward her, and repeats that he loves her. The expression’s meaning thus expands beyond Dylan’s chosen name for Kate: it becomes the point from which he claims a shared feeling, even as Kate initially resists that interpretation.

The phrase works through the gap between its small, comic surface and its emotional consequence. Pickles are the one food Dylan says he loves, while the nickname began as a means of provoking Kate; by the time he explains it, that teasing history has become a record of attention, return, and unacknowledged love. Its recurrence in bed and in a conversation about The Florist also shows that “Pickle” belongs to the couple’s language across both affectionate and dangerous circumstances. The final explanation does not erase the irritation built into the name. Instead, it makes that irritation part of the history Dylan recounts as he finally says what the nickname had concealed.