“Oh!”said Rosemary, after swallowing.“Shame on me.I have no manners whatsoever.”Her graceful hands fluttered over the silk jumpsuit.One hand disappeared into a hidden pocket, then reappeared, holding a small, folded object.
Corinthia’s wallet.
It lay on Rosemary’s upturned palm, the worn leather shiny and smooth against the lines of her skin.
Beaufort strained toward the wallet, his twitching nose leading the way.
“I found it,” Rosemary said.“In the Refuge.”
Corinthia took the wallet, unable to avoid brushing her fingertips against the skin of Rosemary’s palm, which was dry but firm, and lightly textured in the way of hands above a certain age.She held the wallet and tried to picture Rosemary, billowing silk and all, in the tangled maze of the Refuge, and could only imagine her floating, goddess-like, above it—as she herself, startled by a snake, blundered through in a panic until her wallet wiggled free and landed on the white sand, abandoned to its fate.
“I found your address on the card inside.”
Corinthia looked up.“Card?”
Rosemary hesitated so briefly that the pause could have been an errant heartbeat and not a pause at all.“Your driver’s license.”
“Well,” Corinthia said, returning the wallet to her pocket, unable to think of anything more scintillating.Bringing the wallet to her house was very like something she herself would have done, if she had found a driver’s license.She often surprised others with her ways, so it was oddly pleasing that Rosemary had acted in a similar fashion.“Well!”Even Beaufort seemed to be waiting for her to say something more substantial.She set him down on the floor with a warning glance:Behave.
He sat as if he’d been behaving his whole life, tongue still lolling, gaze switching back and forth between Corinthia and Rosemary.
“Please, have all the candy you like,” Corinthia said, feeling that it was a small price to pay for a returned valuable.Then, realizing this might be a childish thing to offer: “Or something to drink?”
“Oh, yes, please!”Rosemary picked up the candy bucket from the entryway table, and, with it tucked in the crook of one arm, swanned past Corinthia into the kitchen.She began opening all the cabinets without re-closing them.
And then Rosemary stumbled upon Corinthia’s very special cabinet.“You have a whole cabinet,” she said, her voice hushed with awe, “for chocolate?”
Corinthia did not drink, did not play the lottery, did not compulsively shop.When she had a little money she bought books, and if there was any left, she bought chocolate.
Corinthia did not consider the Cabinet of Chocolate a vice.It was more like a medicine cabinet full of healthful cocoa products.At its most recent inventory it contained two tins of Guittard Cocoa Rouge; eight different flavors of chocolate bars including milk chocolate, white chocolate, dark chocolate, 90% chocolate, and a handful of flavored bars; an unopened bottle of the all-natural version of Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup (the opened one was in the fridge); a box of truffles, lined with gold tissue; and, for those late-night sweet-and-salty insomnia cravings, a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels.
Corinthia, who had been about to reassert control over the situation, relented.She joined Rosemary at the Cabinet of Chocolate, too proud of it to close it up and stop the admiration.
Rosemary had pulled down a tin of Cocoa Rouge.She opened the lid and stuck her nose inside, inhaling with little sniffs.“I’ve read you should do this,” she said, still nose-deep in the cocoa tin, “rather than take really big sniffs.That it works better for smelling something lovely and delicate.”Her dark and shining gaze lifted to Corinthia’s.
Corinthia swallowed.“Definitely,” she said, helplessly pleased by the attention to her fine selection of chocolate and also unnerved by the intrusion.When she took the tin away their fingers touched again and Corinthia’s brain short-circuited like a misbehaving laser printer.“Do you spend a lot of time in the Refuge?”
“Positively ages,” Rosemary said, taking down the chocolate bars one by one and examining them up close.
“In that dress you were wearing earlier?”
“Why not?”Rosemary tore open the milk chocolate and took a bite.
Not knowing what else to say, Corinthia asked if she liked it.
“Mmm,” Rosemary said, with so much relish her eyes closed and she swayed on her feet.
Corinthia opened the dark chocolate bar and wordlessly handed it over, watching as Rosemary bit into it eagerly, as if she’d been marooned on a desert island for years, without chocolate.Perhaps she had been on a low-carb diet and couldn’t help herself.
Indeed she did help herself, to the truffles and the chocolate-covered pretzels, all the while making exclamations of pleasure and satisfaction.
Beaufort, who seemed to have determined that the stranger was unusual but not a threat, retreated to his dog bed, turned around three times, and then settled with his head on his paws, watching Rosemary and Corinthia do the strange, inexplicable things humans did.
“How about some hot cocoa?”Corinthia finally said, hoping to slow down the sugar rampage Rosemary was committing upon the Cabinet of Chocolate.“I make my own bedtime blend.”
Rosemary stopped just as she was about to rip the seal off the chocolate syrup, seeming to catch herself in mid-tear.She set down the bottle and covered her mouth briefly, her eyes wide.“I am so sorry,” she said.“I don’t know what came over me.It’s all so good I couldn’t stop myself.”
Corinthia’s pride in her chocolate selections overcame her initial shock at having her cabinet ransacked.“It’s all right,” she said.“Sometimes I do the same thing.”She offered Rosemary the rest of the truffles to nibble while the milk heated in the saucepot, then added her own blend of dried herbs and flowers—chamomile, spearmint, lemongrass, tilia flowers, hawthorn, and rosebuds—to steep.
