Chapter 6
She was annoyed by her fear of the wolf.
She’d just spent all night in bed with him, and she could still barely breathe.
They’d been wrapped in blankets and trying not to die of exposure, but he still felt like the bigger threat.
Logically, she was just about convinced he would not eat her or hurt her, but a primitive part of her brain wouldn’t lower her heart rate.
She was careful of him, and worse, she knew he knew it.
She wasn’t aware of the finer points of shifter relations, but it felt rude to act like you were about to get eaten.
Her hands closed on something soft in the pile of food they had available. So far, she had found oatmeal, rice, and a bunch of dried beans. They were only ingredients. There was not a granola bar or box of crackers to be seen.
She pulled out a bag of marshmallows with a shriek of triumph and started digging beneath them. “S’mores!”
She held them up for the wolf.
He frowned. “You want marshmallows for breakfast?”
She looked between the oatmeal and the marshmallows.
“Oh, hell yeah. Come on.”
“Oh, you need my help?”
He jumped up like an eager puppy, and she bit her lip. “I mean, it’s not a help thing? You have to roast your own marshmallow. It’s the rules.”
“The rules of what?”
“You’ve never had a s’more?” she asked, frozen halfway to the stove.
He snorted. “Yeah, no, they did not want to ruin their fancy fireplace at coding camp.”
“Well then, you’re going to have to eat a ton to find your perfect level of burnt.”
“There is a perfect level of, um, burnt?” He looked dubious.
“The perfect level is almost black,” she informed him.
“Right.”
He kneeled with her in front of the stove, and she opened the lid, relieved to find the fire growing. Even wrapped around a wolf, she had gotten so cold last night.
She looked around for skewers but didn’t find any, so she brought over a couple of forks, which was not the safest idea, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
This close to him, she could see tiny laugh lines at the edge of his eyes. They were kind eyes. His features were strong, and he looked dour from across the room, but here, she could see the humor.
Her brain shied away from that realization. Noticing things like that was a dangerous thing.
She stuck a gooey square on the fork and offered it to him as she laid out graham crackers and chocolate. The chocolate had a bloom on it, and the graham crackers were stale, but it was still going to be spectacular. There was no such thing as a bad s’more.
He examined the marshmallow on the end of the fork like it was some kind of unknown specimen. She grinned as she coaxed a log toward the entrance with the fire poker so they wouldn’t have to stick their hands in the stove and then put her marshmallow over the flame.
He did the same, and she watched hers brown just enough before quickly slamming it down on her chocolate.
He eyed her concoction as she took a gooey bite and then licked the marshmallow off her lips. A light shone in his eyes that disturbed her.
“That smells really good,” he said.
She grinned as she swallowed. She hadn’t had one in years, and the smoky campfire caramelized sugar with bitter chocolate and crumbly crackers was just about the most perfect food on earth.
He shouted, and she glanced at his marshmallow, which was now completely on fire and burning like a match.
“Shake it off!”
He tried to pull it back, freaked when it almost dropped on the floor, and then threw the entire fork in the stove. They both watched the marshmallow flame to nothing as the fork was buried in white coals.
“You really have not ever been around fire,” she said.
“It’s not a skill I’ve cultivated,” he said and shook his fingers.
She got up and grabbed him another fork. As she turned back, he stood up.
“You’re seriously giving up after one marshmallow?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “We only have so many forks.”
“You can do it,” she said as she thrust the fork into his hand.
This time, he didn’t take his eyes off the marshmallow, rotating it carefully over the flames.
“That’s probably good enough,” she said when it was brown. “Blackened is an advanced skill.”
He pulled it out, and she helped him stick it to the chocolate and then used the second graham cracker to scrape it off the fork.
She shut the door to the stove, so it didn’t get smoky as he took a deep bite and winced. He tried to blow on it and managed to get marshmallow all over his hand.
She knew he had better-than-normal senses. She’d heard nothing but the wind when he insisted there were chimes feet away. She hadn’t extrapolated that to the fact that every one of his senses was heightened. A deliciously hot marshmallow to her probably felt like a literal coal.
He swallowed, and she raised an eyebrow. “Well?”
“Who thought that up?” he asked and patted his hip. She realized he was probably looking for a phone. She watched in real time as he remembered that he didn’t have a phone, that he was wearing someone else’s clothes, and even if she got her phone, they weren’t going to have service.
He shook his head. “How do you live?”
“You mean with or without a constant connection to…” she trailed off.
“The font of complete human knowledge?”
“The complete font of misinformation, addiction, and conflict.”
“That’s how you would describe the internet?”
“Don’t get me wrong, I use it to do my job. There have been advantages.”
He finally took another bite and did not act like it was burning his mouth, nor like it was the best taste in the world. “But…” he prompted.
“But I think the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.”
His mouth dropped open. “You’re serious.”
“It’s destroyed our communities. It’s destroyed our attention span and our ability to agree on objective reality. We spend all day burning time on nothing and fights.”
He opened and closed his mouth three times, apparently making and abandoning different arguments in his head before he just shook his head. “Okay, Patchouli.”
“I don’t wear patchouli! And that is not how you win an argument.”
He smiled. It was a dangerous smile. “Was that an argument?”
She cleared her throat, and he rose to his feet in a jumble of limbs.
“Thank you for the s’more.” He didn’t look at her as he said it.
She suddenly felt cold, though she was sitting a foot from piping hot cast-iron. She looked around the tiny room. There wasn’t anywhere to go between the bed, stove, and kitchen shelves.
He wandered to the kitchen, picked up a couple of spices, and sniffed them before squinting at the labels.
“What’s this one?” he asked, and she got up to see what spice it was, not to be near him.
“Saffron. Wait, can’t you read that?”
“It’s tiny font!”
She examined the canister. It was small, but it wasn’t impossible to read. “Aren’t you a shifter? Don’t you have magic eyes?”
He cleared his throat. “It turns out that if you look at a screen long enough, even a shifter can damage their eyes.”
“How long is long enough?” she asked as she put the saffron back on the shelf.
“Twelve hours a day.”
“What?”
“For a decade.”
She blinked. “You spent twelve hours a day on a computer for a decade?”
“Well, now it’s closer to two decades, but I have glasses.”
She wished he had brought the glasses.
On his desperate run through a blizzard?
She had to find something to do.
She examined her options and started to poke around the other tubs on the floor of the kitchen.
“I miss it,” he said absently as he sat on the bed and started sorting the bars into piles after examining each of their labels.
“You miss spending twelve hours a day on a computer.”
“Oh no. I still do that, but it’s more about organizing things and managing things now. I’m not doing the actual work.”
She kept digging, finding even more random ingredients. She hadn’t known curry was an actual plant with leaves, but they had a bag of them. She tried the next tub. It had a lot of old-school science fiction, and she kept digging until she pulled out a deck of cards with a shout of triumph.
He was half off the bed, braced for defense, and she froze; she hadn’t realized that her fear had quieted with the s’mores until it came roaring back. They stood like that across the cabin from one another, and then he sat back down as if nothing had happened, and she took a deep breath.
She swiped the marshmallows off the ground and brandished the bag and the cards. “Fancy a game?”
He looked between her hands. “A game of what?”
She shrugged. “Five-car draw? Texas hold ‘em? I’m not picky.”
“We’re going to play poker?”
“I know you missed an enormous chunk of life stuck behind a computer, but please tell me you have at least played cards before in your life.”
He shrugged. “You don’t have to leave a computer to play cards. Until they banned it, I played a ton of online poker.”
“You’re telling me you’ve never held a deck of cards?”
“Who has cards lying around? Aside from the owner of this cabin and your family, obviously, who I am sure are wonderful.”
She snorted. “So at least I don’t have to teach you the rules.”
“There’s not a chess set in there, is there?” he asked hopefully as she sat down across from him and smoothed the quilt between them.
“Of course, you play chess. Online?”
He grinned. “Of course.”
“No, there’s no chess set hiding around. Sorry.” She wouldn’t have told him if there was.
She slid the cards out of the deck and shuffled them. He pivoted to face her and crossed his legs.
As she shuffled, she noticed the energy bars were arranged neatly into piles, but not by flavor. A chocolate was mixed with peanut butter. She put down the cards and leaned over.
“Why did you sort them like that?”
“Expiration date.”
“Expiration date?”
“It just seemed to me that with preserved food, we should eat the oldest first?” He picked up a coconut bar. “This one is only good for another month.”