“Okay,” he murmured against her.
Vax reached out to me and stroked my nape. “Well done. He needed to release that.”
I smiled out at him.
And then he went about shifting the tone by asking, “Well, then, are we going to discuss our dragon princess’ incredible decimation of an abhorrent detractor in the middle of class earlier?”
Evira shook her head in dismay as she stroked Winter’s hair. “Really? You want to relive that? You, of all people, Vaxan? The mediator? With your approach that you hold so true to—diplomacy over might and rash actions?”
“I did tell you that I take action when it’s called for. There are exceptions to my preferred approach.”
I rubbed my hands together. “My favorite thing about that awesome takedown was… hmm… it’s a tossup. I can’t choose between the kick in the junk, or the way you sat back down after like nothing had happened, all cool and collected and—”
“Warrior queen-like,” Win finished for me, lifting his head off her and standing back to admire her.
“Mine was the face slam down on the desk,” Vax announced, surprising us all. “It was decidedly primal and appropriately vicious,” he explained.
We all burst out laughing, until Evira waved us off, and insisted we got down to the actual cooking part of the evening.
Your wish is our command, baby.
Damn, she was fucking incredible.
All three of them were.
We were as a unit.
Through even the more challenging and darker times, that didn’t waver.
And I just knew… it never would.
So,it turned out Vax was ace with a knife.
Like, beyond even next-level.
I had kind of figured after I’d seen those daggers he kept in that chest under his bed.
Although, I hadn’t known for sure whether the skills it took to wield those would transfer over into this.
He’d been at the Feast Plate station dicing and chopping rapid-fire using his supernatural speed like a king, and really getting into it. Not just that aspect either, it had opened up the way to him being excited about the actual food too, where he’d asked me about mixing this and that, how it might taste and go together. He’d even made a cool suggestion about the cheesecake dessert that had led to us adding enchanted salt flakes into the mix as well.
Now, Evira had been a different story.
When she’d tried to emulate Vax’s knife tricks, thinking she could easily because she possessed that same supernatural speed like him, it hadn’t exactly panned out well. She’d gotten super frustrated with the cheese. And then with beating the eggs to make the Savory Hand Pies. She’d ended up blasting the mix with her ice until it had erupted in a mini-bomb of icicles and snow that had rained down all over that station. Good thing I’d brought extra. Teaching cooking to newbies, you kind of had to be prepared for that sort of thing.
From that, it had made sense to me why she’d only stuck with the quiche up until now. She didn’t like not being great at something right off the bat, or at least displaying an immediate talent for it.
Vax had told her that he’d spent years learning how to wield his daggers effectively, where he’d had loads of accidents and mishaps along the way, even once apparently driving them through a load-bearing wall in the Basilisk Dominion and causing a mini cave-in as a kid.
She’d then admitted that she’d buried herself beneath her own ice when she was younger because she’d tried to do too much, and that whole incident was why she was claustrophobic.
After she’d told us that, I’d sent Win away from the desserts—because he was a disaster with anything extra sticky—well, at least when it came to food. Sexually, that was a whole other matter where sticky things were concerned. But, anyway, I’d sent him over to Evira and his gentle, patient nature with others had really worked out well. Within a few minutes, Evira had been making a new go of it with the Savory Hand Pies, and even bouncing off Winter’s lack of culinary skills really well.
Win, for his part, didn’t care at all about being unskilled in this area. Although, he had been excited about the food, asking me questions, taste testing everything. He’d even made a note to add a bunch of the things we’d made to his list of go-to meals. He thought he was a“mood eater”but he was just discerning. All right, particular.
And now, here we were sitting around the ugly beige breakfast nook that didn’t even seem so ugly now with the three of them surrounding it. We were sitting back all satiated after digging into the products of our cooking adventures.
“Thank you, Zayn,” Vax said. “You’ve shown me that food need not be only fuel, but actually something to enjoy and savor.”
