She grinned, her teeth flashing in the low light, and took another slow, deliberate bite of her hand pie.
He glared at her and turned back to his task, knocking the pits into the dustpan and setting it to the side. He was too spent to make more pies tonight, as evidenced by his automatic stowing of the dough in the muddled aftermath of his senses.
He took up the box of glass jars he’d been using to jar the sweeter variation of his sauce, wondering if he could somehow label them to know them from the first batch.
“Why couldn’t you sleep, though?” she pressed, obviously taking joy in antagonizing him. “Do the games make you restless?”
“I couldn’t sleep because I am cross with you,” he said, a little more snippily than he had intended. “Or I was, I suppose.”
He paused, the pot tilted in his hand over the jar he’d arranged under it, his brow furrowing as that image of the gossip sheet rose in his mind again, that picture of him with big, sharp teeth. He bared his own, starting to pour. “No,” he added, “I still am.”
“Are you really?” she asked with something that sounded suspiciously like fascination. “Because of what just happened?”
“No,” he said immediately, using the spoon to scrape off the gooey pour from one jar to the next. “Not that. Certainly not.”
“Certainly not,” she agreed, and he could hear the smile in her voice. “Never that. What, then?”
He clenched his teeth, finishing his pour and setting the steaming jars aside. The lids were stacked neatly in the box he’d taken them from, and he leaned over to start pulling them out, each with a flat tab that went down before the metal halo that would hold them in place.
“Dot shared some of her reading material on the trip over,” he said, weighing each word carefully. “I was not as entertained as I had hoped.”
There was a pause, a long, stretching beat of silence in the kitchen that allowed in some of the noise from outside. The revelry had started to wind down, it seemed, with far less human voices coming in through the thin glass on the windows. They could hear insects now. They could hear the scream of a fox.
After it had stretched to an unbearable thinness, the silence cracked. Just a small crack, as Claire said, “Oh.”
“Oh,” he repeated, a little soothed by knocking her off her mischief. He took up a handful of lids and crossed behind her to the windowsill to start sealing up the jars that had cooled there. He did not look at her or otherwise touch her, no matter how badly he wanted to.
“What exactly did you read?” she asked after a moment. “The fairy tale?”
“Oh, I haven’t gotten to that yet,” he said briskly, pressing the flat lids down over each jar in the row. “I started with the source material first. Dot implied that one informed the other.”
“Did she?” Claire answered weakly. “The gossip circular, then? The first one?”
“Both of them,” he answered, starting on the haloes. “I read them several times over. They were very …”
“Factual?” she suggested with a little sniff. He could hear the legs on the chair dragging as she turned it to face him and climbed back into its embrace. “Accurate?”
“One-sided,” he decided, lifting his head without turning it back toward her. “Conveniently curated, in fact.”
“O-ho,” she said with a humorless chuckle. “That’s what this is? You’re offended that I told everyone what you did without skewering myself in the process?”
“No, actually.” He tightened the lids, one after the other, the muscles above his wrist singing with the unnecessary force he put into the motion. “No, I never expected you to villainize yourself. I actually imagined those blasted sheets were a lot harsher and more critical of me, in fact. I went in expecting far worse.”
“Then whyever are you cross?” she demanded, that little strain of shrillness that had always made her hopeless at bluffing finding its way into her throat. “Especially if it is not as bad as you imagined.”
“Because, Claire, it reminded me of the whole cursed business,” he said, turning with the final jar still warm and gripped in his hand. “It reminded me of waking up that morning withoutso much as a single farewell written on a scrap of paper, still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes as I found that you’d cleaned us out. I gotdraggedout of there, you know. They handled me quite roughly until they realized I was a peer.”
“They did?” she asked, her lips gone white from being pressed together.
“And that’s not even what’s got me twisted up,” he continued, slapping the jar down on the kitchen table between them. “Because, whether you intended to or not, you saved my life by abandoning me like that. Every barbed little choice you made that year saved me, Claire. It cut out the parts of me that were rotting.”
She stared, squeezing the little tip of what was left of her pie so hard that some of the sauce dribbled over her fingers. “Oh?”
He stared at her fingers. He felt the heat warring in him with the rest of it. He wanted to snatch her wrist up and lick her fingers clean as much as he wanted to shout at her and send her away. It was truly very confusing.
“It’s only made me wonder,” he made himself say, dragging his eyes from her fingers up to her face. “It’s made me think that you remember all of that exactly as you wrote it, that you think I was deliberately malevolent. That I harmed you and the others on purpose. That I somehow … I don’t know.”
“That you enjoyed it?” she finished, guessing correctly, like she had a piece of his soul within hers, magnified and clearer than it had any right to be.
