Chapter 3 #2
"A few times a year. It's good for visibility. Most of my business is word of mouth, but you can't build word of mouth if you never leave your territory."
"Territory," I said. "That's a very wolf way to think about it."
She looked surprised and then quietly amused. "I've never thought about it that way."
"It's what the old wolves call it. Your range. The area your scent knows."
"And your range is Ironridge?"
"Ironridge and the mountains above it. Three years now."
"Do you like it?"
I thought about it. About the morning rides on the switchbacks with the firs throwing their shadows across the road.
About the clubhouse in winter when Fang built fires in the common room hearth and the brothers sat around them arguing about things that didn't matter and things that did.
About the way the mountain smelled after rain — clean and green and absolutely nothing like anywhere I'd been before.
"It's the first place that felt like staying," I said.
She looked at me for a long moment. "I know what you mean," she said quietly. "Mercier is like that for me."
"What made you choose it?"
"The light," she said, and it came out soft, like something she hadn't planned to say.
"The light off the water in the mornings does something particular to the way fragrance develops.
Everything I create there has a quality I can't reproduce anywhere else.
I tried, before I found Mercier. The lab always gives back what the environment has. "
I filed that. The way she talked about her work was the way Grim talked about the road — as a living thing, not a mechanism. Something you participated in rather than operated.
"Have dinner with me," I said.
"You said that this morning."
"You didn't answer."
She tucked her pen into the notebook and set it under the table. "I'm driving back tonight."
"You said that. And you're still here."
"The drive is only two hours."
"Celeste." I looked at her. "I know this is fast. I know we met twelve hours ago and I know I have a road name that is not exactly reassuring.
But I'm going to be completely transparent with you because I don't know how to do anything else.
" I paused. "My wolf went still for the first time in months when I found you this morning.
That means something. I don't know what it means for you, I can't tell you what's happening on your side of this, I just know that on mine, sitting across a dinner table from you for an hour sounds like the best thing I've heard all year. "
She looked at me.
I held still.
"I need to pack up the booth first," she said.
Something warm exploded in the middle of my chest.
"I can help," I said.
"You'll break something."
"Probably not. I've been working on—"
"You literally left claw marks in a wooden booth this morning."
I had no answer to that.
She looked at the marks on the edge of her display table — not claw marks, mine had been on Grim's booth, but I realized with a start that I'd been gripping the edge of her table while we talked and the wood carried the faint impression of my fingers.
She picked up a glass bottle. Set it at the back of the table, out of my reach.
"You can carry the folding chair," she said. "That seems wolf-proof."
I picked up the folding chair.
My wolf ran a warm, satisfied circuit through my chest.
Outside, the sun was dropping toward the mountain ridgeline and turning the festival gold in the way of good October days, and somewhere across town was a restaurant that didn't know yet that it was going to be the location of the best conversation I'd had in my life.
I watched Celeste close her displays with the focused efficiency she brought to everything — bottles wrapped and cased in a specific order, the sign detached from the canopy frame at its two bolts, the whole setup reduced in under eight minutes to a compact set of bags and cases that she'd clearly packed and unpacked enough times to have the system memorized.
She noticed me watching.
"You could help," she said.
"I have the chair."
"The chair required two seconds. You've been holding it for six minutes."
I picked up one of the cases with my free hand.
She watched me carry it like she expected it to go wrong, and when it didn't — I was capable of being careful with things I understood were breakable, I just required the information first — something in her expression relaxed toward something that looked like the beginning of being charmed.
I was going to be completely myself at dinner.
That had never worked out well before.
I had a feeling this time was different.
My wolf had been certain of that since morning. The thing about certainty at the level my wolf operated was that it didn't argue — it simply existed, like the mountains existed, like the cold of the air at elevation existed. Not because I'd decided to be certain. Because the thing was true.
She found her car keys and looked at me over the last case.
"The restaurant," she said.
"The Ridgeline. Three blocks north."
She picked up the case. "You've been planning this since this morning."
"Since last night," I said. "I found the listing while you were setting up the booth."
She paused.
"That's very prepared for someone with a road name like Rabid."
"My wolf plans carefully when it cares about something," I said.
She looked at me for one measured moment.
Then she started walking toward her car and I fell into step beside her, and the October evening settled around us, cool and amber and entirely satisfied with itself.