"Please don't."
"Too late. Fen!" She turned in her seat, raising her voice over the general din. "Fen, I made the captain almost laugh! Write it down for posterity!"
"On it!" The young orc's voice came from somewhere near the fireplace. "I'm putting it in the team newsletter!"
"There is no team newsletter," he growled.
"There is now!"
She turned back to him, grinning like she'd won a championship. In the warm light of the restaurant, with the fire casting golden shadows across her paint-freckled cheeks, she looked like something out of a fever dream. Chaotic and bright and entirely too present.
"You should smile more," she said. "It looks good on you."
He hadn't smiled. His face felt strange, but he was certain he hadn't smiled.
The server arrived with their entrees, providing a blessed distraction. He had ordered the elk medallions with juniper reduction, as he did every time the team came here, a dish optimized for protein intake and recovery. His plate arrived perfectly arranged, portion sizes exactly what he expected.
She had ordered something involving noodles and an alarming variety of vegetables and what appeared to be an entire garden of fresh herbs piled on top. It smelled good. Aggressively good. The kind of good that made neighboring diners crane their necks to see what she'd gotten.
She dug in with enthusiasm, making small sounds of appreciation that probably shouldn't be audible from across a table and definitely shouldn't be affecting his concentration the way they were.
He focused on his own meal and did his best not to think about other ways to get her to make those soft little moans.
And then her fork darted across the table and speared a piece of elk directly off his plate. He froze.
"Oh my god," she said around the stolen bite, eyes closing in pleasure. "That's incredible. Is that juniper? I can never tell the difference between juniper and rosemary. They both taste like pine trees to me, but in a good way. Like Christmas in your mouth."
She'd taken food off his plate. Without asking. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.
A sensation he didn't recognize, unfamiliar and ancient at the same time, stirred in his chest. His hands tightened on his utensils, but not from anger. There should be anger, shouldn't there? Someone had invaded his space, his meal, his territory?—
Feed her,whispered a voice from deep in his hindbrain instead.Mine.
The orc part of him, the part that ran on instincts older than civilization, was suddenly very, very awake.
She was still talking, fork gesturing as she compared the relative merits of various game meats, completely unaware that she'd just triggered something fundamental in his psyche. Around them, the team dinner continued in its usual chaotic fashion with laughter and arguments and the clatter of silverware.
He cut another piece of elk and set it deliberately on the edge of his plate on the side closest to her. He watched, holding his breath, as she noticed. Her gaze flicked from the meat to his face and back again, a question in her eyes.
"You like it," he said roughly. "Eat."
Something passed between them. Her cheeks flushed pink, and for once she seemed at a loss for words. Then she gave him a shy smile and took the offered bite.
The orc voice in his head purred.
Oh,he thought distantly,I'm in trouble.
Across the table, she started talking again, something about the history of juniper in European cuisine, but her eyes kept darting to his plate. And each time they did, he found himself adjusting his food. He cut the best pieces into small bites and moved them closer to the edge, offering them to her.
He'd read about this somewhere, in some dusty tome of cultural history that he'd never paid attention to because he was a modern orc living a modern life, there were traditions about food and courtship and the significance of sharing meals with potential mates. His mother had probably mentioned it at some point.
He'd dismissed it as an outdated superstition, an evolutionary holdover irrelevant to contemporary relationships. Now, watching her steal another bite of his elk and feeling the satisfaction welling up inside him, he realized he might have been dramatically wrong.
"You're staring," she said, pointing her fork at him. "Is there something on my face?"
You're beautiful,he thought.You're chaos incarnate and you've ruined my locker and my concentration and possibly my life, and I want to feed you until you're too full to move and then wrap you in blankets and keep you safe forever.
"No," he said.
