"There is no menu."
"Exactly my point. So glad you agree." I point things out with my knife. "There's venison, and then there's beans, and then there's venisonwithbeans, which you seem to believe constitutes a third dish."
"It does."
"Actually, it does not." I gesture at the shelf with the knife, which makes him reach over without comment and angle my wrist away from my own femoral artery. "Are you, like, some kind of alien who only eats beans? Are you on a bean diet? Do you owe beans a debt and this is how you repay them?"
"Beans keep. They provide protein and calories and they don't spoil." He shakes the pan, as if that proves his point.
"Flavor is important, too, you know! Ask any military historian! Napoleon lost Russia over morale because the food sucked!"
"Napoleon lost Russia over winter," he retorts, "and if he'd had beans, things might've gone differently."
I stare at him. "Did you just defend beans with the Napoleonic Wars?"
"You're the one who brought him up."
"I want it on the record that you're impossible."
"Noted," he says, which is becoming like a little running joke of his.
But even though he's making fun of me, at least a little bit, part of me still feels warm and pleasantly tickled, enough so that I'm smiling as I mangle this innocent deer into rhomboids. He'stalking.
Yesterday, he told me about Gervasii and the swallow tattoo and a man named Viktor Reznik whose name made my skin crawl on a cellular level.
And guess what? The sky didn't fall, and Afon didn't walk into the snow and stay there. Instead, he's stayedhere.Next to me.He's standing at a stove bantering about legume philosophy, and there's an ease in the set of his shoulders that wasn't there three days ago.
I wouldn't go so far as to call him "relaxed." Afon Satyrin will be "relaxed" in his casket and possibly not even then. But he's… lighter. Like a man who put down one bag out of the fifty he's carrying and was surprised at how good it felt to let go.
I sneak the venison scraps to Wolf when Afon's back is turned. Wolf accepts them happily.
"I can see you in the window reflection," Afon says, not turning around.
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Fine. But if he gets fat,youcan carry him down the mountain."
The lifting incident happens around noon.
In my defense, the stove is the only warm object in this entire stone shoebox, and I have spent twenty-eight years as a person whose default body temperature is "office air conditioning victim." So when the venison-and-beans (one dish, he insists; two, I maintain; the litigation continues) reaches a critical stage that requires stove access, I find myself standing directly in front of it with my palms out like I'm warming myself over a trash fire in a Dickens novel.
"Move," Afon says.
"Can't. I'm photosynthesizing."
"Caroline."
"There's room," I insist. "You can reach around me. You have arms like a cargo crane."
We square off, scowling at each other. We both know exactly where this is going, because we have been here before, in another kitchen, in another life, when he picked me up off the floor like a misplaced chair and set me on the counter and I sputtered about assault and he told me to sue him.
"Don't you dare," I warn. "Afon, don't you?—!"
His hands close around my waist.
Here's what's different. Last time, it was logistics. A man relocating an obstruction. His hands were impersonal as a forklift and he went back to his fishing reel without a flicker, while I sat on that counter feeling like a sack of flour with a law degree.
This time, his hands settle on my waist over his own flannel and theystaythere for a beat before he lifts. This time, when he raises me—effortless, infuriating, the floor just abandoning my feet like we were never that close anyway—he doesn't deposit me at a distance. He turns and sets me down maybe eighteen inches to the left, on the edge of the table, and his hands don't leap away like they touched a hot pan afterward. They linger. One thumb is resting just above my hip bone and I can feel its exact circumference through the fabric, like my nervous system has dispatched its entire staff to that one square inch.
