42. The Painting Inside the Frame
Chapter forty-two
The Painting Inside the Frame
That evening, Canyon cooked. Jace sat at the kitchen counter and watched the three-hundred-year-old vampire attempt to make pasta from a recipe he’d found in one of Reed’s abandoned magazines, and the experience of watching an apex predator navigate a colander was, Jace decided, the most romantic thing he had ever witnessed.
“You’re doing it wrong,” Jace said.
“I have survived plagues, wars, and a maker who wanted to own the world. I can handle linguine.”
“You’re boiling it in cold water.”
Canyon looked at the pot. Looked at Jace. The silver-grey eyes held the vulnerable bewilderment of a creature that could crush stone but could not, it turned out, cook a simple meal.
“The water has to be boiling first,” Jace said gently.
“I knew that.”
“You didn’t know that.”
“I have eaten exactly four human meals in three centuries. Cut me some slack.”
Jace laughed. Stood. Crossed to the stove and took the colander from Canyon’s hands and their fingers overlapped on the metal and the bond hummed, not with urgency, not with hunger, but with the quiet, domestic frequency of two people standing in a kitchen and making dinner together because that’s what people do when they’re home.
“So,” Jace said, filling the pot with fresh water and setting it on the burner. “This is permanent.”
“Yes.”
A pause. The water began to heat.
“Good,” Jace said.
Canyon stood behind him. Arms around his waist. Chin on his shoulder. The ancient heartbeat pressed against Jace’s back, thirty beats per minute, each one a mountain, each one a promise that the next one would follow.
They made linguine. It was terrible. They ate it anyway, at the scarred wooden table, with Milo’s flour still faintly visible in the ceiling cracks and the wolves singing outside and the mountain humming beneath them with the deep, contented frequency of something that has waited four million years for exactly this.
An apex predator and a graphic designer, eating bad pasta in a lodge on a mountain in Oregon. The ordinary inside the extraordinary. The painting inside the frame.