He finally took another bite and did not act like it was burning his mouth, nor like it was the best taste in the world. “But…” he prompted.
“But I think the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.”
His mouth dropped open. “You’re serious.”
“It’s destroyed our communities. It’s destroyed our attention span and our ability to agree on objective reality. We spend all day burning time on nothing and fights.”
He opened and closed his mouth three times, apparently making and abandoning different arguments in his head before he just shook his head. “Okay, Patchouli.”
“I don’t wear patchouli! And that is not how you win an argument.”
He smiled. It was a dangerous smile. “Was that an argument?”
She cleared her throat, and he rose to his feet in a jumble of limbs.
“Thank you for the s’more.” He didn’t look at her as he said it.
She suddenly felt cold, though she was sitting a foot from piping hot cast-iron. She looked around the tiny room. There wasn’t anywhere to go between the bed, stove, and kitchen shelves.
He wandered to the kitchen, picked up a couple of spices, and sniffed them before squinting at the labels.
“What’s this one?” he asked, and she got up to see what spice it was,notto be near him.
“Saffron. Wait, can’t you read that?”
“It’s tiny font!”
She examined the canister. It was small, but it wasn’t impossible to read. “Aren’t you a shifter? Don’t you have magic eyes?”
He cleared his throat. “It turns out that if you look at a screen long enough, even a shifter can damage their eyes.”
“How long is long enough?” she asked as she put the saffron back on the shelf.
“Twelve hours a day.”
“What?”
“For a decade.”
She blinked. “You spent twelve hours a day on a computer for a decade?”
“Well, now it’s closer to two decades, but I have glasses.”
She wished he had brought the glasses.
On his desperate run through a blizzard?
She had to find something to do.
She examined her options and started to poke around the other tubs on the floor of the kitchen.
“I miss it,” he said absently as he sat on the bed and started sorting the bars into piles after examining each of their labels.
“You miss spending twelve hours a day on a computer.”
“Oh no. I still do that, but it’s more about organizing things and managing things now. I’m not doing the actual work.”
She kept digging, finding even more random ingredients. She hadn’t known curry was an actual plant with leaves, but they had a bag of them. She tried the next tub. It had a lot of old-school science fiction, and she kept digging until she pulled out a deck of cards with a shout of triumph.
