A platter with a very large portion of some kind of casserole, covered in a blue sauce.
Adryel’s stomach started to growl.
“Your maid left you blue grass pasta?”
He smiled. “With kotair mushrooms and poultry.” He grabbed two bowls and started to separate the large portion into two.
Her stomach growled again.
Or maybe that was his. It was deep.
He grinned as he handed her the eating sticks. “This is one of my favorites. I needed this today.”
Adryel accepted the sticks and the bowl, smelling it. Stars, it smelled like pure joy.
“Ahh,” she said, smelling the aroma again. “I think I did too.”
They both took their first bites at the same time. And it was just as divine as it smelled. They ate in silence for a few minutes, Adryel not realizing how hungry she really had been.
Finally Stron spoke between bites. “Nothing like a home-cooked meal. What about you? What’s your favorite meal from home?”
She shook her head. And what could she tell him, really? “My home was not like this.”
“Not many people can say their home is like this,” he said reaching up and touching a tree branch that arched over the ceiling.
She picked another bite out of her bowl. “One that feels like a place to belong.” Even the pasta felt comforting. One of those things she’d heard stories about, when coming home to a real family, and they had food and drink for you.
Something she didn’t really know much about.
Hence why it was only stories.
He paused, his cup still part way to his mouth, and raised his eyebrow. “Did you not have a home?”
“Not really. I grew up on the streets alone, and wound up running with the wrong crowd.”
“How wrong?”
She shrugged. No use in denying it. “Gangsters, mostly. The type who moved money, paid off officials, and got away with a lot of stuff that most people would go to prison for.”
“And how did you wind up here?”
“Accident. I might have creatively borrowed a small citricite stone.”
“‘Creatively borrowed’?”
“A nice way to say stole.” That’s what she typically referred to her more illegal-but-necessary-for-survival activities.
“You stole citricite? Why?”
She blinked, annoyed with his question and lack of understanding. “Unlike you all, who have it so abundant you carve statues out of it,” she gestured to the citricite figures, tucked into little nooks all around, “some of us need it to survive, and it’s expensive when you get on Trinity Alpha Prime.” Her voice got louder with each word.
“Theft should have put you in jail.”
“It should have,” she fired back. “But I was smarter than they were.”
“I doubt that,” Stron said.
“Oh, so now I’m stupid because I had to survive?” She fired back. “I’d like to see you, on the streets, without your precious credits and lifestyle and family home, and see how you survive with nothing, and don’t know when your next meal is coming!”
