They drank, their eyes lingering upon each other. The champagnewas bubbly. She could feel it tickling her nostrils and dampening her cheeks.
“Is that what ours is?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“And it lies dormant for years at a time. Why?” he asked.
They both set down their glasses.
“Sometimes one of the friends is way up high in the mountains north of India learning to shoot arrows,” she said.
“And sometimes one of them is married to someone else for twenty years and more,” he said.
“Sometimes one has all the grandeur and burden of being a dowager countess,” she said, “while the other chooses to live as a humble workingman.”
“And all too often each of them worries about what will happen to the other’s reputation if there is gossip or even scandal,” he said.
“Even when they do not worry about their own reputation,” she said.
“And sometimes,” he said, “the friendship threatens to turn into something else.”
“And they both end up terrified and running a mile in opposite directions,” she said.
They had gone far enough. They stopped talking in order to take another sip of their champagne and look over the sampling of sweets they had brought with them.
“It would be a sin not to try everything that has been so lovingly prepared for us,” he said.
“But would it be more of a sin actually to eat it?” she asked.
They looked at each other.
“No,” they said simultaneously.
And so she ate a biscuit and a tart and a slice of both cakes, andthoroughly enjoyed every mouthful. She had brought three of everything, and he ate what she did not. Which meant that he ate twice as much as she did.
“Did I bring enough for you?” she asked.
“Far more than enough,” he said. “But how could I burden you with having to carry any of it back?”
“Ah,” she said. “And I thought you were eating the food because you really wanted it.”
They finished their champagne and he poured them another glass each. They drank that too. She took the cloth to the doorway and shook out the crumbs before folding it and sitting back down at the table.
“Is this not the loveliest place on earth?” she asked.
He looked about him and inhaled the scents of all the flowers. Then he looked at her with laughing eyes. He set his hands palms up halfway across the table on either side of their glasses, and she set hers palms down upon them and felt his strong, callused fingers close around hers.
“At least the loveliest place,” he said, “until you are somewhere else. Then that will be the loveliest.”
“You have become adept with flattering words,” she said.
“Ah, but the wordflatteryimplies insincerity,” he said. “I never speak insincerely. Not to you or about you, at least.”
He was rubbing his work-roughened thumbs lightly over the backs of her hands, and she was thinking she had been quite right about this grotto. It was surely the most romantic place on earth, as well as the loveliest.
“Why did you not go home to the house you inherited from your grandmother after you returned from your travels?” she asked him. “Why here instead?”
She had not meant to ask.
