But the eggs are warm. And the coffee is right. And three men are sitting at a table in my too-small apartment, eating a meal they made, in a morning that doesn’t belong to any of the versions of Hazel Martinez I’ve been performing for the last decade.
Just this once.
Just for this morning, in this light, at this table that wasn’t here yesterday and won’t mean the same thing tomorrow?—
I’ll allow myself to live in the moment.
Just this once…before reality settles in.
CHAPTER 11
What We Call It When It Happens To Us
~HAZEL~
I’m finishing my third plate.
Mythird.
The number registers with the slow, bewildered arithmetic of a woman who normally treats meals as a logistical inconvenience and is currently scraping the last remnants of scrambled egg from a ceramic plate that wasn’t here yesterday, in a kitchen that hasn’t produced food since before she moved in, at a table set by three Alpha men who are sitting across from her in silence that she hasn’t bothered to interpret because all of her cognitive resources have been allocated to a single, all-consuming task.
Eating.
Not the perfunctory, fuel-station eating that has defined my nutritional existence for the better part of a decade—the convenience-store protein shake consumed in four sips between case files, the gas-station sandwich eaten over a steering wheel,the bakery donut that the kind Omega wraps in a napkin and presses into my hands with an expression that suggests she knows it’s the only meal I’ll have before midnight.
This is different.
This is the kind of eating that happens when a body that has been running on emergency reserves suddenly encounters actual sustenance and responds with the single-minded, primal urgency of a system making up for lost time. My concentration has been solely on the plate—fork to eggs, eggs to mouth, fork to bacon, bacon to mouth, toast deployed as a vehicle for jam that Oakley had procured from somewhere I don’t want to question—the cycle repeating with a mechanical intensity that has left no bandwidth for conversation, observation, or the basic social awareness that suggests one should occasionally acknowledge the other humans at the table.
I have devoured this food like I’ve been fasting for three days and three nights.
And the thing that’s twisting something behind my sternum—the thing I don’t have the vocabulary for, or won’t allow myself to name—is how simple it is. Eggs, bacon, toast with jam. Coffee. The most basic combination a kitchen can produce, the kind of meal that exists in every culture’s catalogue of “things you make when you’re not trying to impress anyone, you’re just trying to feed them.”
When was the last time someone just tried to feed you, Martinez?
When was the last time a meal existed without a transaction attached—without a performance review or a networking obligation or the silent expectation that accepting food from someone meant owing them something you hadn’t agreed to pay?
I set my fork down on the empty plate.
And immediately begin the internal debate.
One more plate. The pan still has food. There’s more bacon. More toast. Oakley made enough for a small battalion, which is either a reflection of Alpha metabolism requirements or a deliberate overshoot designed to ensure I couldn’t eat my way to the bottom even if I tried.
But three plates. Three plates is a lot. Three plates is the kind of intake that generates commentary, the kind that makes people look at an Omega and think “she hasn’t been eating” and then the looks change from impressed to pitying and pity is the one thing I will not fucking tolerate?—
But the eggs were really good.
And there’s jam left.
One more won’t kill you, Martinez. Nobody’s keeping score.
Fourth plate. Yes or no. Make the call.
I look up from the plate.
All three of them are staring at me.
Not eating. Not talking. Not engaged in the low-grade bickering that has served as their communication default since I met them. Just…staring. Three sets of eyes—ice-blue, dark brown, green—fixed on me with an expression that I would catalogue as shock if shock didn’t imply something dramatic and this seems more like the quiet, stunned variety. The kind of expression people wear when they’ve witnessed something unexpected and are still in the processing phase.
