He slides his arm out of the way, and I freeze—
Until it comes back, around me.
Holding me to him.
I let out a breath, and an enormous amount of tension with it.
He does still want me.
And since for now, at least, I do have him here, I don’t even look at my menu, just push it toward him. “Can you pick for me, please?”
Teren raises his eyebrows. “He knows your tastes that well already?”
I shrug. “Better than I do. I barely know my own.”
“Not true,” Zan murmurs, even as he chooses two dishes. “I just know more words for dairy and sugar.”
I look at the one he’s pointing to for me, which is a salad with goat cheese (dairy!), blackberries (sugar!), candied nuts (moresugar!), and spinach (one of the vegetables I tried before, inoffensive), along with a sandwich with cream cheese (sounds relevant to my dairy interests, looking forward to it), smoked salmon (local), pickled cucumber (take that, Zan, I do like something besides dairy and sugar!), and avocado.
“What’s avocado?”
Zan pauses. “I’m not actually sure.” He looks at Teren. “Is it a fruit or a vegetable?”
Teren blinks. “Huh. You know, I don’t know either. Probably a fruit? It has that big seed in it, right?”
“Doesn’t really taste like a fruit though,” Zan points out.
“Doesn’t really taste like a vegetable either,” Teren counters.
“What in the world is going on here,” I mutter.
Zan says, “It has a lot of fat in it, which I assume is why you like dairy so much. When mashed it can be used as a spread, and it tastes good with both sweet and savory things. So it’s a way of getting a different kind of food besides milk and blackberries in your diet.”
“If it even is a different kind of food. Maybe it’s just a weird berry, for all we apparently know.”
“Well, then you’ll definitely like it, won’t you?”
I elbow him only lightly, because I’m smiling.
He uses the arm that’s wrapped around me to lightly elbow me on my other side in return, and my smile grows.
The waiter arrives to deposit tea and whisks away our slates.
Once he’s gone, Teren says dryly, “Who knew romance was all in the violence?”
“Mildviolence,” I correct primly. “Have you not poked Sunani? Maybe that’s why she doesn’t know you’re into her,” I say sagely.
Teren chokes on his tea.
“She means poked with your elbows, of course,” Zan says with a perfectly straight face.
I blink and look at him. “Surely that’s a matter of more than poking.”
“Please stop,” Teren coughs.
Spoilsport. “Seriously, though, does Sunani really have her own stall?” I ask. “If she has trouble even with crowds...”
Teren shakes his head. “No way, she’d be cornered. Even when people don’t mean anything by it, she’s too shy to handle the attention well. It’s why she paints for other people’s crafts. When she even comes to the market, she’s always at a different stall so that people can’t find her as easily, and there’s someone else to handle the brunt of talking to people.”
