Our feet touched under the table, but neither of us moved them.
It happened again thirty seconds later when I shifted my weight. My ankle brushed his shin. The contact didn’t last long. He didn’t pull back, and neither did I.
Savina returned with a bottle of red wine and two glasses. She set them on the table between us and poured without asking if we wanted any.
Tolrek didn’t object.
He nursed his glass. I had two. Not quickly, but enough that the edges of things went softer. Enough that I stopped editing myself the way I usually did.
“I found my apartment by accident,” I said. “I was looking at a different building and got off at the wrong subway stop. I walked past the building and there was a sign in the window. It felt like the kind of mistake that was supposed to happen.”
He watched me like people did when they were actually paying attention. I hoped he was and that I wasn’t boring him out of his mind.
“I furnished it with thrift shop finds,” I continued. “And this antique place near the university that has things piled everywhere and the owner doesn’t label anything. You have to dig. I like that. I don’t want new. I like things that were already loved by someone else.”
I stopped, catching myself. “Sorry. I’m rambling.”
“You’re not.”
“I am. I do this when I’m—” I cut myself off before I finished the sentence.
When I’m nervous. When I’m trying not to think about how close we’re sitting. I noticed every single time our feet touched under the table and he didn’t move away.
Savina appeared with bread and oil, setting them on the table between us with a flourish. She smiled at Tolrek, said something in Italian, and disappeared again before I could thank her.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“That you’re easy to feed.”
I laughed. “Is that a compliment?”
“From Savina, yes.”
“How did you learn Italian?”
“Duolingo.”
“Oh.” Lots of humans used the app. Why not orcs?
We ate bread. He tore his piece in half before dipping it, which seemed like the kind of detail I shouldn’t notice but couldn’t stop seeing. His hands were large enough that the bread looked small in them.
The words rushed out of me. “I didn’t tell you my name at the welcome dinner because you were talking to me like I was a regular person.” I said it to my wine glass, which felt safer than looking at him. “I didn’t want it to stop.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s alright. I don’t mind any longer.”
I looked up, finding him staring at me. He’d probably been watching me the entire time I’d been focused on my glass.
“My mom used to bake,” I said, because apparently I was just going to keep talking. “All the time. Cookies, cakes, bread. The whole house always smelled like butter and sugar. I barely remember how they tasted, though. Isn’t that sad? I had her in my life, and I know I loved her, and then she was gone. Ididn’t realize I’d started doing the same thing until my neighbor mentioned it. An older couple rents the place to the right of my apartment. They thanked me for bringing them cookies a lot, and I didn’t even remember deciding to make them.”
Tolrek leaned forward, and his easy expression made me keep going.
“There’s a single mom on my left. Her son is twelve, and he says my chocolate chip cookies are better than the bakery ones. I think he’s telling a tall tale, but it’s a nice story, so I keep making them for him.”
“What do you put in them that makes them special?” he asked.
I shrugged. “It’s my mom’s recipe. I have all her recipes now. But I don’t think it has anything the others don’t. Vanilla. Extra vanilla. More than the recipe called for. I didn’t notice until I tried making them from the recipe card she’d left, and they tasted wrong. Then I realized she’d been doing it the whole time but she just hadn’t written it down.”
He nodded and silence fell between us.
