Chapter 5
For a heartbeat, alarm had spiked in Shanti as Peter said he was moving their conversation on to important topics. That alarm turned to a giggle, and she clapped her hand over her mouth to silence it. Through her fingers, she said, "We did just order a huge brownie dessert."
"But chocolate might not be your preference," Peter said very solemnly. "You might be indulging my weakness."
A little shiver went through her. She had no idea what Peter Baranov's weaknesses might really be, but the idea of indulging them seemed appealing, somehow.
Which wasn't the kind of thought she usually had at all, and truthfully, her imagination mostly failed her on the topic.
But still, it made her shiver happily, and she bit her lower lip before shaking her head.
"No, I like chocolate. Better than lemon? Maybe not better than it. You?"
"I just admitted it was my weakness." Peter smiled at her, and Shanti felt herself…melt.
Melting was not a familiar sensation for her.
She hadn't had time to melt over anybody in years, and even then, she wasn't really sure melting had ever been part of the limited dating she'd done.
She'd had some nice dates, but nothing that made her shiver or melt or really even want to curl up against a guy's side.
Peter made her do all of those things, which was ridiculous.
They'd just met. But still, the feelings persisted, and Shanti thought they might be…
nice. She would have to think about it some more, but… yeah. Nice.
"Right," she managed to say aloud. "Chocolate weakness. What else? Sunny days or rainy ones?"
"Snow," he said with a sparkle that suggested he was deliberately being just a little difficult. "Snow or sun. Rain's not my favorite, which is too bad when you grew up in a rainforest."
"A rainforest? I thought you were from Alaska!"
"Believe it or not, a huge chunk of the Alaska Panhandle—where Juneau is—is a temperate rainforest."
Shanti sat back, goggling at Peter. "My entire worldview has been disrupted. I know there are rainforests in Nepal, but it's so much farther south than Alaska! You know! It's where it's warm and there are rainforests!"
"Yeah," Peter said, visibly trying not to laugh. "Nepal, where the famously tropical Mount Everest—Sagamathra?—is."
"Sagarmatha, but good try. And, well, yes, but…Alaskan rainforests?" Shanti raised her hands and made an indignant throw-away gesture, which broke Peter's attempts not to laugh. He guffawed, and she spluttered.
The truth was, she couldn't remember ever being quite so noisily huffy before.
It was kind of fun. The idea that Peter Baranov, railroad worker from a rainforest in Alaska, might be good for her passed through Shanti's mind, but she put it away again.
He was only in Virtue for a couple of weeks, and she…
…well, she was still pretending that when she got on that train out of town, she wouldn't be coming back.
He wouldn't be here when she did, anyway, so she could pretend that he would be left with an impression of a woman who knew what she wanted and was brave enough to go get it.
That was a much better image than of the person she really was.
"Pie or cake?" Peter asked, still smiling, still playing the game even if she'd been distracted by Alaskan rainforests.
"…brownies? I don't know. Cake, I guess? You?"
"I'm a pie man."
"Snow, pie, lemon… it's starting to sound like we're incompatible."
Peter leaned forward and folded his hands on the table in front of him, his dark brown eyes intent and smiling. "What if I said none of that mattered? That I've got a feeling we are compatible?"
Warmth flushed through Shanti and she dropped her eyes. She felt the same way, but she couldn't imagine saying it aloud. After a moment, with effort, she looked up again and as seriously as she could, said, "Beaches or mountains?"
Peter said, "Mountains," instantly and sat back, his gentle smile still in place.
"There we go, then," Shanti almost whispered. "The rest is details, right? But mountains, those are important."
"A woman after my own heart," Peter said lightly, but the rumble in his deep voice made it feel warm and comforting and promising. "Of course, the best thing about Shkalnik is it's got both. Water and mountains."
Shanti's eyebrows did a little dance of interest, all by themselves. "I actually can't quite imagine that. Nepal is only mountains, and Virtue…well, there's a river. And some…hills…"
Peter threw his head back and laughed out loud, bringing his big hands together in a delighted clap before righting himself to grin hugely at her. "You are a woman after my own heart. I know that when in Rome, but the mountains here are the foothills we put in front of the mountains in Alaska."
"It's not that they're not mountains," Shanti said earnestly.
"It's that when you're used to eight-thousand-plus foot peaks, three and a half looks cute!"
"Eight thousand feet," Shanti said dismissively. "Try eight thousand meters."
Peter laughed again, a big round sound that Shanti could hardly imagine ever indulging in. "Be fair now, there aren't that many of those."
Shanti found herself actually grinning at the man across from her. "No. And also to be fair, the Adirondacks are pretty nice mountains. It's one of the things I like about Virtue, the way it's kind of settled in among them. It doesn't feel really mountainous, but…"
Peter glanced out a dark window, as if he could see the surrounding landscape.
"But there's enough. I've been working my way through them, on this job.
The thing is we're at about, what, two thousand feet above sea level here?
So the mountains are only a couple thousand feet higher, so they don't feel as impressive as the ones that run straight up from the water. Which is what happens in Shkalnik."
"Nothing comes straight up from the water in Nepal," Shanti said wryly. "The closest ocean is about three hundred miles away. I've really only seen oceans flying over them."
"See, I can hardly imagine that. Shkalnik's right on the water.
There are millions of mountains around so it's not like you can see to the edge of the world, but it's always there.
Oh my God." That last was to the waitress and the giant, platter-sized brownie sundae she was carrying toward them.
Peter fell silent with awe, and Shanti watched speechlessly as the young woman skillfully planted the enormous dessert between them on the table.
Peter, after a long, incredulous moment, whispered, "What have we done?"
Both Shanti and the waitress laughed. The waitress said, "Good luck," and went away while Shanti shook her head.
"I think I've gotten full just looking at that. Oh my God. It's…"
It was genuinely the biggest sundae she'd ever seen.
She'd had skillet brownies at restaurants before, with the brownies being round and maybe six inches across.
This looked like it was a whole 9×9 pan, overturned onto the platter and soaked through with a hot fudge sauce, and there was another brownie on top of it, held up by dark chocolate ice cream and strawberries.
On top of that was vanilla ice cream surrounded by more dark chocolate scoops, all drowned in hot fudge, berries, whipped cream, praline pecans and enough maraschino cherries to satisfy even Shanti, who thought three was the absolute minimum a sundae should be topped with.
"No one could possibly eat that," Shanti breathed. "Not all of it. Could they? No. No…?"
Peter lifted his spoon in a solemn salute. "I don't know, but I'm willing to try."
"You go first," Shanti said faintly. "I don't think I'm brave enough."
He nodded and went to take a bite, although it took him two or three tries to decide where to begin.
Shanti honestly couldn't blame him. It was a work of art, and the first bite would reduce it to mere food.
After considerable examination, Pete finally just went for a corner of the base brownie, with ice cream and a berry piled on top.
He popped the bite into his mouth, froze, and after several long seconds, said, "Oh my God," around it.
"Really?" Shanti poked at her side of the sundae a little, too, trying to find a good place to start, and then, like Peter, just went for it with a bite of fudge-soaked brownie.
She heard herself give a little, high giggle as the taste melted onto her tongue, and covered her mouth, trying not to laugh harder. "Oh my God."
It took them well over an hour to eat the entire concoction, interrupted by phrases like I can't possibly eat any more and take it away NO I DIDN'T MEAN IT!
when the waitress offered to do just that.
The ice and whipped creams had long since melted before they finished, leaving the brownies heavy and crumbling from the liquid they'd absorbed.
Peter ate the lion's share, but Shanti ate more than she'd thought was physically possible, and when they'd finally cleared the plate, they were both snickering and bleary with exhausted effort.
Even Peter said, "I live here now. I can't possibly move after that," while Shanti giggled and nodded and slumped in her seat.
The waitress came back to clear the table, but this time she had a chef, a pleased-looking fat woman about Shanti's height, with her. "You'd be surprised how many people don't finish that," the chef said, which reduced both Peter and Shanti to chocolate-drunk laughter again.
"No. No, I don't think we would. It took us ages and there were two of us!" Shanti protested. "Are you Chef Charlee? I'd heard good things about you, but this—"
"Takes the cake?" Peter asked, and fell deeper into the booth, laughing at his own cleverness.
It took everything Shanti had not to completely dissolve into helpless laughter along with him.
It wasn't that funny, but she was very, very high on sugar, and was having the best evening she could remember in many years.
Even Charlee laughed and offered a round of applause.
"I am Charlee, yes. Did you come in from somewhere just to eat at Hold My Bear? We're flattered, if so."
"No, I'm from Virtue. Peter here is from Alaska, though."
Charlee's eyes widened. She was a pretty woman, with very soft light brown curls and green eyes, and she looked happy in a way that Shanti envied. "Alaska, huh? I've always wanted to go there. And I could have sworn I knew everybody in Virtue by now, but goes to show what I know!"
"I don't get out much," Shanti admitted softly as Peter pushed himself up in the booth like he was trying to pretend he wasn't sugar-drunk.
"If you ever get the chance, go," he told Charlee. "It's beautiful. Bring this," he said with a gesture at the empty brownie platter. "Everybody will love you. Or don't, because they might mob you. That was incredible."
"I invented it for a friend," Charlee said with a smile. "Hardly anybody orders it because it takes so long and it's so huge, but it's always fun to make when they do, and I always like to come out and see how it was received. Glad it passed muster."
"It wasn't just the sundae," Shanti promised. "Dinner was also really good."
"Then my job here is done." Charlee whipped her apron and chef's hat off dramatically and stalked down the aisle, leaving the waitress to gape after her and Peter and Shanti in gales of laughter again.
From where she was sitting, Shanti could see Charlee wink over her shoulder at the waitress and pull her chef's hat back on as she headed toward the kitchen again, but that had been a ten out of ten for theatricality.
"Can I bring you anything else?" the waitress asked, now grinning.
They both shook their heads. "The bill, please," Peter said. "But don't expect us to head out immediately. I don't think I can move."
"Sugar coma," Shanti agreed, although she didn't feel comatose yet, just jazzed up on chocolate.
"I know it'll be late-ish once we roll out of here, but do you want to try to walk it off?" Peter asked her as the waitress left. "You could show me around Virtue?"
"I'm not sure there's much to see in the middle of the night, but if you'd like, sure.
A walk sounds like a good idea." More to the point, for some reason, Shanti didn't want to leave Peter Baranov's side.
She had genuinely never felt that way about anyone, and wanted to cling to it for as long as it lasted, even if that was only a few more minutes.
"Where is the construction crew staying?
I can take you there the long way, maybe, so you can see some of the town. "
"We're being put up in bunks on site, actually. Some of that storage area is dedicated to storing us overnight."
"Oh. Well, I guess I can take you the long way back to the train station, then." Shanti pursed her lips, trying to think how she would do that, exactly, then shook her head and said, "It's a small enough town that taking anybody the long way still isn't very far," wryly.
"Shkalnik's like that too," Peter said with a grin. "'Well, now, we've got Main Street and…the other street…'"
Shanti laughed. "Yes. Virtue does have Main Street, Church Street, and School Street, though."
Peter gave a mock-solemn shake of his head. "Airs, I tell you. You East Coast small towns have got big-city airs."
"We do," Shanti murmured happily. "Come on, and I'll show you around Virtue's airs."