“Keeping track of me, Shir?”
“Shira. And it’s not ‘keeping track’ to possess ears. They accumulate knowledge whether I want them to or not.”
He crumpled up several sheets of newsprint and placed them strategically around a tent of twigs over the logs. “The lady doth protest too much.”
I rolled my eyes. “Anyway. Being a Boy Scout seems sowholesome.”
“You don’t think I’m wholesome?” He struck a match; blue flame appeared on the end, and he held it toward a sheet of newsprint.
Half a dozen images of him played through my mind, ending with the time I’d walked in on him half naked two summers ago. “It’s not your brand.”
“Brands are created, not born.” The fire took hold. “Aha!”
I let out a laugh of sheer pleasure at the success, then bit it back. Had I had too much to drink? I felt loose and happy as I watched the fire grow, as we sat on the floor and assembled our peanut-butter-and-jelly dinners on a low coffee table between us.
Tyler picked up one of the dreidels we’d placed on the table earlier. “How do you play?”
“It’s easy.” I took the dreidel, a classic of my childhood: wooden, with each letter slightly engraved and painted in a different color. “Each player puts in a penny at the beginning of a turn, then spins. The side you land on determines what you do.” I gave the post a quick twist and smiled, pleased with the length of time it took to topple.
When it did, gimel lay on top. My smile widened. “This is gimel, the best. It means you get all the coins in the pot.” I turned the dreidel to the side. “This is hey. You get half the pot.” Another two turns. “Nun, so you get none; and shin, when you have to put a coin in. The worst.”
“Do you speak Hebrew?”
“Not really. Not like my grandparents or Isaac.” Shoot. No reason for me to mention Isaac. I hurried on. “But I can read it phonetically, and I know one or two phrases.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. The first line of a lot of the prayers is the same—blessed are you, lord god, ruler of the universe, et cetera, et cetera.”
“Quite the sobriquet.”
“Have you heard what they used to call the Pharaohs? Peoplelivedfor these names back in the day.”
He grinned. “Okay, let’s play.”
“We’d need gelt or pennies.”
He cocked his head, firelight flickering over his face. “I’m sure there’s drinking games without either.”
For some reason I flushed. “Probably. But none I know.”
A smile danced at the corners of his mouth. “I bet there’s some kind of strip dreidel, too.”
I took a quick sip of Godiva. The alcohol burned in my belly, low and warm. “Would be a pretty quick game if you landed on gimel.”
He laughed. “Well, what would it mean? What’s the pot—the other person’s clothes or your own?” He gave the dreidel a whirl. It spun haltingly, then toppled over.
Of course he’d get gimel. He raised his brows at me, and I gave him my stoniest expression. No stripping for me.
He looked down with a small, private smile. “What’s the story?”
“The Hanukkah story?” He nodded. I regarded the burning candles, low now in the menorah, wax spilling over the sides. “There was a lamp. With only enough oil for one night—but it burned for eight instead. A miracle.”
“Then why don’t you burn oil instead of candles?”
I looked at him sharply, then let out a brief laugh. “I don’t know.”
He smiled, his expression soft in the candlelight. I was struck by the moment’s intimacy, like we were the only two people in the world, like we’d been this close a hundred times before and would be a hundred times again. Delusions from the alcohol, probably.
