Chapter 11 #2
A pang hits my stomach—then it grumbles, again.
In the Before, it would have embarrassed me. A loud, rumbling stomach.
Now, it’s just a part of life. I’m not at all fazed by it.
Samick has heard my hunger so many times now, he doesn’t even look over at me. He just says, “I did not lead you to this room for you to observe me. Eat.”
My face crumples.
Eat, yes, I want to do that.
Scavenge and cook, not so much.
Something no one warned me about with the apocalypse is that ‘end of the day’ exhaustion in life.
Like, when I get home after a long day, and just the thought of putting together a meal is hell.
That is amplified in the apocalypse. So much worse now than ever.
And there’s no fucking takeaway or food delivery or even microwaves.
I have to cook.
It’s such a chore.
With a groan that undeniably says, ‘I so can’t be bothered with this’, I follow both Samick’s command—and my stomach’s.
I drag myself over to the pantry, as though slower steps mean a higher likelihood that edible food will be in there, not things like teabags I have little use for, or stale crackers that need a lot of water to force down.
But I’m just so fucking tired that I can’t even be bothered to hold the torch anymore. My arm hurts. My legs hurt. My back, my feet, my shoulders—
Everything hurts.
I wrangle the strap off my wrist.
There’s a book left on the counter.
I scan the front page—and from it, I learn that at least one room in this old house was converted into an office for a psychologist.
Setting the torch down on the book, I angle the light to aim at the corner of the kitchen.
The pantry door is already hanging off its hinges, but not from a raid. It’s wear and tear. One of those cheap fake-wood pieces of furniture that come in flat packs.
Reminds me of my first houseshare. I swear, most of that house was filled with Ikea.
Bee would’ve had it the same way in our flat if I’d let her. But for months, weekend after weekend, I dragged her out thrifting in the waking hours between her club promoter shifts.
I hauled her along to every car boot sale and charity store and vintage shop in London.
It’s probably all gone now.
Not only the thrifting, the charity shops, the car boot sales—but our flat, too.
Our home.
Every vinyl I ever found, like treasure buried beneath rubbish, gone; our stained oak coffee table that had bite marks on the legs, and I always wondered if it was from a child or a dog; the fridge that sounded louder than a rocket ready to take off in our kitchen, but I couldn’t part with it, because it was retro.
That’s all gone now.
If it isn’t, it will be soon.
I’ll never step foot in that flat again.
It’s a weird thought. Like it isn’t real.
I’ll never set eyes on my bugs again, the collection of framed insects hung on the walls. I’ll never fall over my bed, running my hands over the records strewn about the floor, or cuddle up in my favourite armchair by the heater with a book and a tea or even a wine.
A weight settles in my chest.
Sadness.
Sorrow.
Grief.
It’s uncomfortable and I drag in a deep breath through my nostrils, as though that’ll steady the swell in me.
I loosen a ribboning breath, then tug open the pantry door.
The clinking of armour draws closer.
I look over my shoulder as Samick advances on me.
The chain-link shifts with his steps, slinking over his shoulders and glittering in the flimsy torchlight.
The soft light catches on the strong cut of his jawline, the natural shadow slashing down his cheek.
But it’s the softness of his pale green eyes and the gentle pink of his mouth that holds my attention.
And that swell in me grows.
Clearing my throat, I turn my back to him and eye the shelves in front of me.
It’s packed full of long-life milks, teas and coffees, open packets of biscuits and a few condiments.
But on the bottom shelf, light cascades over some flimsy plastic packaging.
I crouch down to be eye-level with the shelf. Disappointment greets me.
I’m ungrateful.
Pasta is food. There is a fire in the hearth. I can cook it. But it’s a pain. And while there are sachets of seasoning, that’s a whole other chore to tackle.
I miss takeaway.
I miss deliveries to my door.
I miss Bee cooking when she’s home.
The hunger and fatigue and overall mental exhaustion of survival is getting to me—and I just can’t be bothered cooking.
I pluck out a sachet of seasoning.
Turning it over in my hand, I aim the instructions printed on the back to the faint beams of torchlight.
It’s hard to read with Samick standing over me.
He flattens his hand on the edge of the pantry and considers the sparse shelves.
I toss aside the seasoning. It skitters over the pasta packets before I snare out the spaghetti.
Still crouched, I lift it above my head. “I’ll make this.”
Plain spaghetti.
Above me, there’s a scoff. A faint sound catching in the back of Samick’s throat.
Then the side of his boot nudges into me.
My knees creak as I get to my feet.
The withering glance Samick spares me doesn’t go unnoticed, and I don’t know if it’s because I chose plain old pasta, or because my knees creaked from just standing up.
Either way, he’s quick to return his attention to the pantry—and for a long moment, he considers the items sprinkled through it.
He reaches into the shelves and plucks out a few things, starting with an open tin of gravy granules, left exposed to the air too long, so I’m sure it’s just a stale rock now.
“You cannot cook,” he says, and he says it so plainly that I can’t tell if it’s a question or a statement.
I answer as though it was a question, “Not really.”
He brushes past me, but as he does, he drops a look of blatant judgement down at me.
My face hardens.
I chase him to the island counter, where the beams of my torchlight emerge from. “What, and you can?”
He drops everything onto the counter.
Without a glance at me, he answers, “Yes.”
I make a face at him—but I learn that he’s not lying.
For the next while, I watch him prepare a meal I wouldn’t have ever come up with from those ingredients in the pantry.
He picked out some small tuna tins, cans of chickpeas, penne pasta, seasoning, a can of peas and carrots, and a packet of instant mash I didn’t see behind the old boxes of stale cereal.
It takes a while, and every so often, he’ll speak a simple word, like spoon, and I’ll find it in the kitchen somewhere.
That’s my contribution to what he makes.
I don’t quite know what it is that he makes, because it looks like nothing I’ve had before, yet sort of looks like both a Shepard’s pie and a Lancashire hotpot.
The only hotpot I’ve ever had was lamb and rosemary, the one my granny used to make back in Wales every winter, like it was her favourite meal and no one would ever get sick of it.
But this one is tuna and chickpeas.
And unlike granny’s hotpot, this is uncooked.
Samick places the lid on the pot then gestures for me to follow him.
I do.
He has my unwavering attention all the way back to the fireplace.
I don’t spare Mika and Arwyn more than a fleeting glance, both asleep, one on the floor, the other still on the hard sofa.
I’m more interested in how Samick is going to cook this in a fireplace.
I sling the straps of my backpack off my shoulders, then drop with it to the floor.
The relief is instant.
I roll back my shoulders, over and over, as Samick fixes a grate (pulled from his satchel) over the flames.
As he sets the pot on the grate, I linger a frown over the satchel—because there’s no way a fucking grate should fit in there, and especially not with all the other stuff he pulls out here and there, like an entire new outfit for me, spare leathers for himself, a sewing kit, sketchbook, and all the magical medicines he has packed away.
I shift onto my side, hand flat on the coarse rug. “Is your bag magical?”
Samick’s knee presses into the hardwood floor as he sets down a second smaller pot and fills it with crystal clear water from the plastic bottles he grabbed from the cooler.
He doesn’t answer.
“It fits more than it should,” I add, and that lures in his gaze—narrowed and flooded with an icy warning.
Be quiet.
I roll my eyes before I flop down onto the rug.
It’s not comfortable.
Maybe I would take the hard sofa after all.
Samick places the small pot of water on the grate, tucking it next to the bigger one, then—still kneeling on the floor—turns his chin to his shoulder.
He considers me.
I blink back at him, unfazed, and letting the fatigue slump me more and more into the rug.
He loosens a breath not unlike a soft sigh before he reaches for my torch—and switches it off.
I let my eyes shut.
And I must’ve drifted off, because when I open my eyes again, Arwyn has moved to sit against the sofa, and gone back to sleep, closer to Mika, and Samick is taking the water pot off the grate.
He fills it with the instant mash and stirs.
I close my eyes again—but only for what feels like a second before Samick grips my shoulder and gives me a gentle shake.
The look I aim up at him is moody.
His expression is unchanging.
He jerks his chin down to the rug—to the ribbons of steam dancing up from the bowl.
I scramble to sit up fast, threads of sleep slowly peeling away from me.
But I don’t give a fuck about sleep right now.
Not with the mouth-watering fragrance wafting over to me. I tug the bowl onto my lap, and my stomach gurgles with awoken hunger.
This doesn’t look like some over-the-campfire meal.
This is art.
It’s homemade.
I mean, duh, obviously, but like homemade in a way that comes from craft and talent, not like when I would throw a bunch of stuff into a pan and hope for the best and yet always end up with tasteless mush.
There’s nothing tasteless about this.
I expected the tuna to ruin it.
It doesn’t.
I can’t taste it, can’t taste anything beyond the rich sauce that he created from sachets of seasoning and stale gravy granules.
With each spoonful I shovel into my mouth, my appetite grows more and more.
I haven’t had food like this in a long time—even counting before the world ended.
Bee worked nights a lot, and I relied on her to cook.
Then, in that campervan, the meals were mostly from truck stops and diners and drive-thru fast-food joints.
If we cooked in the van, it was noodles and canned shit, or anything we could fit in the air fryer.
But this…
This is a real dinner, a meal that nourishes me—and even when the bowl is empty, and I’m licking the sauce off the edges, I want more.
The pot is simmering on the low flames.
And it’s not empty.
But that’s for the two sleeping fae across the room.
The clatter of a ceramic and metal draws in my hungry gaze.
Samick digs a spoon into his filled bowl, untouched, then rises to stand.
My neck cranes as I look up at him.
His stare is on me already, that pale lettuce hue, and the faint jerk of his chin tells me we’re moving again.
Lethargy slows me down.
I blunder to my feet and drag my backpack to sling over my shoulder.
Silent, he leads the way to the staircase.