I made a note to ask Kee-un if he had any black pepper, but assumed he didn’t and added a few dashes of hot sauce.
The roots were half-done when Kee-un came back through the door. His teeth rattled loud enough to hear over the boiling soup. His hair was wet and dripped all over him. His jeans were wet in places, as were his Offroaders.
He rushed to the stove and smacked the handle of the door to open it, not bothering with a hot pad.
“What did you do?”
He shuddered instead of answering.
“Where did you go?”
He nodded toward the side window. “’Tis a b…b…burn?—”
“You were burned?” I searched his chest, then forced him to turn around. His skin was ice cold, but at least the water hadn’t frozen. There was no ice in his hair like the night before. But I saw no burns, no red patches.
“A burn is a…wee stream…fresh water. Not burned. Just b…b…bathed.”
I stopped looking for injuries and reluctantly pulled my hands away and stepped back so the heat could reach him. But suddenly, he grabbed my arms and pulled me against his chest, while aiming his back at the stove.
“Give me but a minute, Matty. I beg ye.”
I laughed. I thought he’d get a lot warmer a lot faster if he wrapped up in a blanket, but I decided to keep my opinions to myself. If he needed a warm body, who was I to deny him when he might literally be freezing to death?
I wrapped my arms around him and started rubbing his back until his skin had warmed to room temperature. Then I let go of him and told him to turn around so I could hug him from behind—you know, just to hold the heat in. The fact that I enjoyed it had nothing to do with it.
I didn’t know what I was doing, but he seemed to think I did. After a few minutes, he took a deep breath and his chest expanded and broke my hold. When I retreated, he turned and caught my hand, then pressed a brief kiss to my knuckles.
“Ever sae grateful.”
“No problem.” I sidled around him and got a cloth out of the trunk. “You’d better dry your hair before you catch your death. I’m sorry I haven’t scrubbed your shirt yet. It’s still soaking.”
He took the cloth and rubbed his plethora of hair that reached a good foot below his shoulders. When he bent over to rub it closer to the open stove door, his butt was higher than my elbow, and I was a tall girl.
He turned his head and caught me staring.
“Sorry. Just noticing…how tall you really are.”
He smiled, then pulled out of his Offroaders and set them to the side of the stove. “Not sae tall noo, aye?”
“Yep,” I lied. I could hardly tell a difference. “Soup’s about ready. You wanna grab the bowls?”
He dug in the trunk first and pulled out a large yellow cloth I thought might be a sheet. I took one last taste of the soup and watched him from the corner of my eye. He pulled the sheet over his head and pushed that mane of dark hair through a hole. His arms found two more.
It was a shirt made for a giant bigger than he, and the end of it reached nearly to his knees.
“’Tis called a lay-nuh, Matty. Spelt léine. A longshirt. Ye may look yer fill. Nothing scandalous about it.”
I jumped when he set two bowls on the ledge. “No problem,” I said, embarrassed that I’d been caught watching him for the hundredth time. “I was just worried you were forced to wear a dress, that’s all.”
He pretended to be outraged, and I laughed and dished up the soup, filling his to the brim. He had to be as starved as I was, and he’d need at least double.
He moved the big log close to the table, then pulled the chair out for me. As he sat, he offered to say grace, then held out his hands and waited for me to take them. I pretended it was perfectly normal and sat my hands on his. He wrapped his warm fingers around mine and held tight.
I felt his voice rumbling in my bones as he prayed. I didn’t understand a word of it, and after the amens, I asked if the prayer was Gaelic.
He grimaced. “Ye’ve none of the Gaelic, then?”
“Uh, no.”
