Boris #2
The rat behind the recycling bin skitters away. From the square, the fiddle hits a high, bright note. Solene's grip on the knife never wavers.
The kiss in the alley is a declaration of war against oxygen.
She bites my split lip and I taste copper and ginger and the promise of thirty years of fighting over stovetop temperatures.
The knife stays in her hand. She holds it angled away from my jugular with the casual precision of a woman who could debone a lamb shoulder blindfolded.
"Upstairs," she says against my mouth.
"Upstairs where?"
"Your apartment. Above the tavern. I've seen the windows."
"The bed isn't made."
"Boris."
"There are dirty dishes in the sink. Possibly from Tuesday."
She bites my lip again. Harder.
"Upstairs. Now."
I set her down. Her feet hit concrete and she is already moving, the knife still locked in her fist as she rounds the corner of the building toward the tavern's side entrance.
I follow. Of course I follow. She could walk into traffic and I would follow.
She could walk into a volcano and I would follow, and I would bring tongs because the heat would be useful for searing.
The side door is unlocked because I never lock it because I am six foot five and green-gray and nobody in this town is stupid enough to rob an orc.
She takes the narrow staircase two steps at a time, her chef's coat flaring behind her like a battle flag.
The stairs groan under my weight. The walls are close. My shoulders brush both sides.
She reaches the landing and turns. The single hallway bulb paints her from above, washing out the soot on her face, catching the copper glow of spice at her collar. She is breathing hard. Not from the stairs.
I reach her in two strides.
My hands find her waist and lift. Her spine hits the door to my apartment and the latch gives because I also never lock this and the door swings inward and we stumble through together, a mess of limbs and momentum.
The knife clatters onto the kitchen counter as she finally, finally releases it, both hands coming to the front of my shirt and fisting the fabric and pulling.
The apartment is small. The kitchen is a disaster. The bed is across one room that serves as everything. She doesn't look at any of it.
"Apron," she says. "Off."
The leather strap goes over my head. The apron hits the floor with a heavy slap.
Her fingers find the buttons of my shirt and she works them with the speed and dexterity of someone who juliennes carrots in four-second intervals.
The fabric parts. Her bandaged palm presses flat against my sternum and the gauze is rough and warm and her fingers spread wide and still don't span the distance between my collarbones.
I gather the pins from her hair. The French twist collapses.
Dark hair spills over her shoulders and down her back and she looks like someone I've never met, someone who exists only here, only now, only for this.
My hands slide into that hair and cup the back of her skull and I kiss her so thoroughly that she makes a sound against my teeth that I will hear in my sleep for the rest of my life.
Her chef's coat. Stained beyond salvation.
I unbutton it with hands that are too large for fine work, she said so herself, and two buttons scatter across the floor and ping against the baseboard.
She laughs into my mouth. The coat drops.
Underneath: a thin cotton undershirt damp with sweat from two hours of combat cooking and the sprint up the stairs.
I lift her again. She wraps her legs around my waist and the height difference vanishes and we are face to face and her eyes are dark and wet and ferocious.
Three steps to the bed. The mattress groans when I lay her down. Springs protest. The iron frame scrapes against the hardwood and leaves marks I will never sand out and never want to.
Her hands map the scrapes on my forearms from the cliff face.
She traces each cut, each gravel burn, each place where the rock tore skin away because I was climbing too fast, desperate to bring back the one ingredient that would save the dish that saved us both.
She presses her lips to the worst of them, a jagged line across my left wrist, and the sting dissolves into something bright and boundless.
"You're hurt everywhere," she whispers.
"Don't care."
"Some of these really do need-"
I kiss her collarbone and she forgets the end of the sentence.
We are not quiet. The tavern below is empty, the staff still celebrating in the square, and the freedom of that emptiness turns us reckless.
The bed frame hammers a rhythm against the wall.
She arches beneath me and the bandaged hand grips my shoulder and her nails on the other hand rake lines down my back that mirror the hawk's talons and I wear both sets of marks with equal pride.
She says my name. Not Boris the tavern owner. Not Boris the competitor. Just Boris. Small and broken and repeated like a spell she is casting, like if she says it enough times the magic will hold and morning won't change anything.
It won't. Nothing changes this.
The celebration is its own language. Every touch says we built something. Every gasp says we won. The day, the soot sprites, the cliff, the sabotage, the critic's silence before his verdict, all of it compresses into the space between her ribs and mine until there is no space at all.
When she shatters, her whole body bows off the mattress and the iron frame screams against the floor and somewhere downstairs a glass falls off a shelf and breaks.
I follow. The world narrows to a white point behind my eyes and the grip of her legs around me and the smell of woodsmoke and ginger and the faintest trace of buttercream still lingering in her hair from a cellar that feels like a lifetime ago.
Stillness.
The sheets are tangled at the foot of the bed. The pillow is on the floor. The iron frame has migrated fourteen inches from the wall, leaving twin scratches in the hardwood like railroad tracks.
She lies on her side, tucked into the curve of my body, her spine against me. My arm drapes over her waist. Her bandaged hand rests on my forearm, thumb moving in slow circles over the worst of the cliff scrapes.
The window is open. Night air carries the fading fiddle music from the square and the smell of dying bonfire embers. Her breathing is slow and measured. Mine rumbles deep enough to vibrate the mattress springs.
Her fingertip traces a line from my collarbone down my body. Circles the thick muscle there. Follows the ridge of an old scar from a kitchen burn I got at sixteen, my first week working the hearth line in my father's cookhouse.
"Your building and mine share a wall," she says.
"Brick. Load-bearing on my side. Decorative on yours."
"You know the structural specs of my cafe?"
"I know everything about your cafe. I looked at the blueprints when I signed my lease."
Her finger continues its slow circuit. Down the sternum. Across a rib. Back up.
"If someone were to remove that wall," she says. "Hypothetically."
"Hypothetically."
"The two kitchens would connect. One shared prep space. Double the counter footage. Your hearth on one end, my plating station on the other."
"You'd need a permit."
"I know a woman who can cite municipal bylaws from memory. She's very persuasive with inspectors."
"What are you saying?"
She rolls in my arms until she faces me. The hallway light leaking under the door catches her jaw, her mouth, the sharp angles of her face that I once found intimidating and now find essential.
"I'm saying we buy a sledgehammer tomorrow morning." Her bandaged palm presses flat over my heart. "And we knock that wall down."