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“Cream cheese is a condiment posing as a dairy group!” He shook his head and looked at Lucy. “I’m lodging a formal protest against your nutritional math.”

I held up a hand. “Do not try to drag the staff into my culinary choices.”

“We agreed on a balanced strategy!”

“We agreed to eat the platter. I didn’t sign a contract regarding intake sequence.”

Determined to show me what real efficiency looked like, Hudson picked up an entire chicken skewer, took a massive, authoritative bite, and immediately tried to give me a stern, victorious glare while chewing.

His eyes watered instantly. He froze mid-chew, his mouth completely stuffed, realizing too late that he’d jammed far too much food into his mouth at once. He couldn’t swallow, couldn’t speak, and looked like a chipmunk trying to assert dominance.

I nearly inhaled a piece of spring roll.

He held up one panic-stricken finger, trying desperately to chew through the sheer volume of meat without losing his dignity. The contrast between his deadly serious strategy speech two seconds ago and his current, helpless chipmunk state caught me so off guard that I snorted.

Then I was laughing.

I couldn’t stop. Hudson looked deeply mortified for about three seconds before his mouth twitched around the massive bite, his shoulders started shaking, and he collapsed back against the booth, fighting for his life to chew.

Lucy stepped a little closer to the table, arms crossed, watching us with dry amusement. “Do I need to call an emergency time-out? Is anyone choking?”

“No,” I coughed out, wiping a tear from the corner of my eye.

Hudson held up a hand, took a slow drink of water, and finally managed to swallow. “We’re fine,” he said, his voice an octave higher than usual. “Perfectly focused.”

“Right,” Lucy said, glancing at the digital timer running beside the platter.

We pulled ourselves together, though my stomach was already aching from laughing so hard. It was a deeply inconvenient problem in the middle of a timed eating challenge.

I took a sip of water and pointed a finger across the table at him. “That was a pathetic attempt to teach me a lesson.”

“I overestimated my mouth’s capacity,” he admitted, rubbing his throat with a rueful grin.

“You are officially banned from trying to look intimidating while eating a skewer.”

“Fair,” Hudson said, picking up his fork again, much more carefully this time.

As the timer ticked past fifteen minutes, the challenge became significantly harder. My initial hunger had faded, but I was nowhere near the uncomfortable limit I had reached during our first attempt.

That surprised me.

My appetite had changed since I began strength training. So had my awareness of my body. I knew when I needed to stop, when I could continue, and what foods would make me regret eating them the next morning.

Months earlier, exercise had represented another area where I failed to meet an imaginary standard. I’d compared myself to people who had trained for years, then treated my starting point as proof that I was incapable.

Hudson never did. He celebrated each improvement without pretending it was larger than it was. A longer run. More weight. Better recovery. A body that could carry Caldwell out of a house contaminated with wolfsbane.

The thought quieted me.

Hudson noticed immediately. “What?”

“I was thinking about the attack.” I looked down at my hands. “I keep thinking about what would have happened if I hadn’t started training.”

Hudson did not answer right away.

I continued. “I couldn’t have pulled you out before. I might have gotten Caldwell because adrenaline can do a lot, but the adults? Going back that many times?” My throat tightened. “I would have failed.”

“I’m really proud of you,” he said before taking a sip of water.