Chapter 17
First things first: food.
We help Teren break down his stall, which is its own education. Sunani takes her leave to deal with her own affairs, and the rest of us head to a late lunch.
Zan correctly recognizes that today I’ve spoken to more unique humans than I have ever spoken to in a single day in my life—or honestly possibly ever— and as well as I’ve managed this day has been a lot. And before I have to talk to more humans, I need a break.
So rather than trying out a new place for lunch, he takes me to the same one as before.
Quiet, and familiar.
As much as I like Teren, I do wish it were just me and Zan. If this is going to be our last day together...
Then again, maybe Teren’s presence will keep us from fighting over it again, even if I’m not sure that isn’t what I want.
I sit down on one side of the booth, and Zan pauses.
Across from me or next to me? The big decision.
Damn. I should have let him sit first so he couldn’t be a coward.
Before I have to say anything, though, Teren steps around Zan and physically pushes him to my side of the bench.
“No way. You two may want to gaze into each other’s eyes all lunch, but I don’t need to see it,” Teren says. Then looking at me adds, “Now you can elbow him as needed without having to punch across the table. You’re welcome.”
I snicker as Zan slides into my side without a word.
Gods bless Teren. He managed to make it not weird.
And now that I have the heat of Zan beside me, it’s all I can do not to lean into it.
Actually, you know what? Fuck it.
I lean into it, and him.
He slides his arm out of the way, and I freeze—
Until it comes back, around me.
Holding me to him.
I let out a breath, and an enormous amount of tension with it.
He does still want me.
And since for now, at least, I do have him here, I don’t even look at my menu, just push it toward him. “Can you pick for me, please?”
Teren raises his eyebrows. “He knows your tastes that well already?”
I shrug. “Better than I do. I barely know my own.”
“Not true,” Zan murmurs, even as he chooses two dishes. “I just know more words for dairy and sugar.”
I look at the one he’s pointing to for me, which is a salad with goat cheese (dairy!), blackberries (sugar!), candied nuts (more sugar!), and spinach (one of the vegetables I tried before, inoffensive), along with a sandwich with cream cheese (sounds relevant to my dairy interests, looking forward to it), smoked salmon (local), pickled cucumber (take that, Zan, I do like something besides dairy and sugar!), and avocado.
“What’s avocado?”
Zan pauses. “I’m not actually sure.” He looks at Teren. “Is it a fruit or a vegetable?”
Teren blinks. “Huh. You know, I don’t know either. Probably a fruit? It has that big seed in it, right?”
“Doesn’t really taste like a fruit though,” Zan points out.
“Doesn’t really taste like a vegetable either,” Teren counters.
“What in the world is going on here,” I mutter.
Zan says, “It has a lot of fat in it, which I assume is why you like dairy so much. When mashed it can be used as a spread, and it tastes good with both sweet and savory things. So it’s a way of getting a different kind of food besides milk and blackberries in your diet.”
“If it even is a different kind of food. Maybe it’s just a weird berry, for all we apparently know.”
“Well, then you’ll definitely like it, won’t you?”
I elbow him only lightly, because I’m smiling.
He uses the arm that’s wrapped around me to lightly elbow me on my other side in return, and my smile grows.
The waiter arrives to deposit tea and whisks away our slates.
Once he’s gone, Teren says dryly, “Who knew romance was all in the violence?”
“Mild violence,” I correct primly. “Have you not poked Sunani? Maybe that’s why she doesn’t know you’re into her,” I say sagely.
Teren chokes on his tea.
“She means poked with your elbows, of course,” Zan says with a perfectly straight face.
I blink and look at him. “Surely that’s a matter of more than poking.”
“Please stop,” Teren coughs.
Spoilsport. “Seriously, though, does Sunani really have her own stall?” I ask. “If she has trouble even with crowds...”
Teren shakes his head. “No way, she’d be cornered.
Even when people don’t mean anything by it, she’s too shy to handle the attention well.
It’s why she paints for other people’s crafts.
When she even comes to the market, she’s always at a different stall so that people can’t find her as easily, and there’s someone else to handle the brunt of talking to people. ”
Wow. Her beauty is almost as much of a curse as sage power.
I take a bolstering sip of my own tea as I ponder that, the liquid warming me from within as that revelation turns into another.
“Maybe she should share a table with me then,” I muse. “I can just punch anyone who bothers her.”
Next to me, Zan snorts.
Wryly, Teren says, “I don’t think she would be comfortable with that.”
“Well, then why haven’t you invited her to share with you? I realize she can’t exactly paint your knitwork, but your sage power is perfectly suited to keeping her safe. You can keep her comfortable and deflect other people with your social skill.”
Teren’s cheeks flame. “Inviting her to share with just me when we don’t have common business interests would be a different kind of declaration.”
Huh, noted. “Is it not the kind you want?”
“Are you sure you’re not the Sage of Awkwardness?” Teren grumps.
I grin sharply. “Pretty sure.”
The waiter returns with our food, which was faster than I expected, but soon I realize why: most of it didn’t need cooking. Teren has a sandwich of some kind, and Zan... I peer over.
He picked out more foods I wouldn’t have tried deliberately. Still trying to help me, even while he’s planning to leave me.
Zan has a big salad—more than I’d want to eat at once, but I guess I did feed him a lot of ice cream yesterday—with a different leaf, a different yellow fruit, cucumber not pickled, red onions, teeny tomatoes, big globs of cheese, and chunks of some kind of glazed white fish.
I try to imagine what that must taste like all together and can’t. The food of my youth was... simpler, generally. Perfectly nutritious, but not fancy or complicated.
I was a tool, not a guest to please.
“Try yours first,” Zan murmurs to me. “We can scrape the avocado off if you don’t like it.”
Good point. I have to know what this mystery food is.
I take a bite; consider.
Hmm.
Teren is watching me expectedly, and I point at him. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten that you haven’t answered me.”
He sighs as I take a bigger bite.
I think I do like whatever this is.
“I don’t want to risk ruining what friendship we have,” Teren says seriously. “Right now, she knows I’m safe to talk to because I won’t try to pressure her into a romantic relationship like every other person in this town who’s attracted to women and only cares about her looks.”
I frown. “They don’t appreciate her art too?”
Teren shakes his head. “Did you know she’s self-taught?
Nomi taught me how to knit. The amount of time and effort it takes to figure everything out on your own.
.. And yet people treat it like it’s some cute hobby she has.
Like she’ll give it up once she has a baby.
Or like it’s a quirk they’re willing to indulge because she’s beautiful and it’s inoffensive.
Or they go so overboard with the flattery that it’s clear they’re just trying to get in her pants, you know?
They want a trophy, not a person. They don’t see her. ”
Like Zan sees me.
I swallow the last bite of my sandwich over a suddenly tight throat. Okay, avocado goes firmly in the like column.
“You do see her, though,” Zan says quietly.
“And what do I have to offer her?” Teren shoots back. “A target on her back?”
I ask, “How about blankets?”
Teren just looks at me.
“You made me a blanket,” I point out, “and we’re just friends. Does she have any? Friends, I mean. I assume she probably has a blanket.”
Teren blinks at me.
It takes me a second to realize he’s not wondering about her wealth in blankets.
“Oh,” I say awkwardly. Maybe I have a secondary sage power after all. “Are we... not friends?”
What a great time to shove a bite of salad in my mouth.
“No, we are,” Teren says hastily. “I just wasn’t sure you’d realized. Since I assume you haven’t had any before either. But no, she doesn’t. Women tend to be jealous of her; it... colors their interactions.”
“Sunani already sees you as more than a friend,” Zan tells him. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
“I don’t,” Teren says immediately. His fingers unconsciously go to the talisman around his neck. “And I want her to see me as a friend. That’s all it’s fair for me to be for her—especially if I can’t be honest about who I am.”
A chill passes through me, and I lower my fork.
I didn’t think it through.
Being with a person who might one day be kidnapped, as sages in this era are always at risk of... I can’t imagine how I’d cope if Zan was taken from me.
Well, no, I’d fucking burn everything in my path to get him.
And if he died?
I’d... probably also burn everything, but less discriminately.
Even ice cream, tied in my memories to him, wouldn’t fill that void.
I haven’t really known Zan that long. It’s not reasonable to feel this emotionally attached.
But sages are who we are because of our capacity for big, powerful emotions, and following the intuition they guide us on.
So I’m still sure that without him, there would be a void inside me; an emptiness that I’m not sure I could ever fill.
That’s what Teren meant when he talked about what he had to offer her.
Mechanically, I take another bite of my salad. It tastes good, but that’s incongruous with the direction of my thoughts.
For Teren to tell Sunani that he’s a sage is a risk. Even if she can keep a secret, it puts her in more danger from the Order, and how they might pressure her, or criminalize her for not turning him in.
And even ice cream is complicated for a sage.