Page 57 of Orc'd & Loaded
Then his hand, the one that had been hovering, finally lands. Light as gauze on my shoulder.
The front door of the town hall kitchen slams open a second time. Gerard echoes from the parking lot, a stream of profanity that gets swallowed by the wind. Then a metallic crash. The industrial trash can outside the entrance, the heavy galvanized steel one bolted to a concrete base, tips sideways and vomits coffee cups and crumpled napkins across the asphalt.
Through the kitchen's narrow window, Gerard's silhouette kicks the rolling can a second time. His Italian loafer connects with the rim and he stumbles, catches himself on the hood of his black Audi, and stands there breathing like a man who has just discovered that leather soles offer zero traction on wet pavement. His driver's side door opens. Closes. The engine starts. Tires squeal.
Gone.
The trash can rolls in a slow half-circle and settles against the curb.
Boris's hand hasn't moved from my shoulder.
I gaze at the scattered garbage through the window glass. A paper cup tumbles across the lot in the breeze, bouncing end over end like a small, pathetic tumbleweed. Somewhere in the distance, Gerard's Audi takes the corner too fast and the tires bark again.
"He kicked a trash can. A grown man in a nine-hundred-dollar suit just kicked a municipal trash can in a parking lot."
Boris's fingers tighten. Just a fraction. The warmth of his palm seeps through my chef coat, through the cotton undershirt, into the muscle that has been locked in a rigid knot between my neck and collarbone for the better part of three years.
"That trash can did nothing to him," Boris says.
A laugh punches out of me. Ugly. Wet. Not a real laugh, more like the sound a pressure cooker makes when you crack the valve. I put my uninjured hand over my mouth and the laugh turns into something else, something with teeth, and I bite down on the inside of my cheek until the copper taste brings me back.
Behind me, Boris doesn't crowd. Doesn't pull. His hand stays exactly where it is, one point of contact, warm and enormous and completely still. Like he understands that if he wraps both arms around me right now I will shatter into something we can’t reassemble before service.
"You just detonated your own funding. For me."
I turn. His face is closer than expected. The green-gray skin across his cheekbones is darker than usual , flushed deep. His amber eyes are wide. Not the wide of surprise. The wide of a man who has just saw something he didn't believe was possible.
"Not for you." I poke him. The leather apron doesn't give. "For me. I did that for me. You just happened to be standing there."
His lower lip twitches. The scar that runs through it, the one he got wrestling a wild boar away from his first smoker, goes pale when he presses his mouth into a line. He is trying extremely hard not to smile.
"She calls the man athing. She tells him she will destroy his reputation. She points at the door like a general ordering a retreat. And then she says it was not for me."
"It wasn't."
"Solene."
"What."
He reaches for my hand. Lifts it between us. His fingers dwarf my wrist. The white gauze glows against his dark skin, and he holds my palm like it's a document he's reading, tilting it toward the overhead fluorescents.
"This hand grabbed burning iron so a pan would not fall on my foot."
"Reflexes. Any chef would have done the same."
"This mouth told a man with forty percent of her business to leave, because that man called me a thing."
"He was being unprofessional."
"This woman." He places my hand flat against him Through the leather, through the heavy cotton shirt beneath, his heartbeat slams into my palm at a pace that has nothing to do with calm. "This woman is the most terrifying creature I have ever met, and I have fought a cave troll over a barrel of aged whiskey."
My throat closes. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead. The fennel is still scattered across the floor in pale green ribbons, and the scorch mark on the ceiling looks like a black starburst, and the cast iron skillet that started all of this sits overturned by the sink where he dropped it to run my hand under cold water.
His heart hammers against my fingers. Fast. Steady. Enormous.
"Stop looking at me like that," I say.
"Like what."
