“What?”
“You thinking vigilance is a substitute for rest.”
“It often is.”
“It absolutely is not.”
Her hair brushes my chin. The apartment glows pale gray around us, rainlight slipping through thin curtains. Beneath us, the bakery is quiet for once. No ovens yet. No customers. No Darlene yelling. Just us.
For several days after that, danger does not disappear, but something between Evie and me changes shape. The brush with losing her strips away another layer of pretense. She touches me more openly. I stop stepping away each time she does. At thebakery, she rests her hand on my back when passing behind me, and I learn not to freeze as if struck. At night, I stay upstairs more often than I return to the tunnels, though I still bring food and check on Al, Maren, Doreen, and the others.
“You’re nesting,” Al tells me one evening when I deliver soup.
“I am not.”
“You smell like clean sheets and woman.”
Doreen coughs into her cup to hide a laugh.
I stare at him. “That is an intrusive statement.”
“That’s how you know it’s true.”
Evie and I begin cooking together after closing. She teaches me dishes from her grandmother’s recipe notes. I teach her a Vakutan stew adapted poorly for human ingredients because actual Vakutan spice would, according to Darlene, “strip paint and cleanse sin.” Evie insists on trying a tiny amount anyway and spends five minutes with her eyes watering while declaring she is “fine, brave, and possibly hallucinating.”
At night, she sleeps tangled against me as if my size is not inconvenience but refuge. Sometimes she wakes from nightmares of Ron’s hand on her arm, and I hold her while she curses herself for shaking. Sometimes I wake from Horus IV, gasping smoke that is not there, and she presses her palm to my chest until I remember the bakery, the apartment, her voice.
We do not say love.
The word stands everywhere around us anyway.
One rainy evening, two weeks after the kidnapping, Evie asks me to stay for dinner as if I have not stayed for dinner six nights in a row. The apartment smells of garlic, tomatoes, hot bread, and the little lemon candle she burns when the rain makes everything damp. The windows are fogged at the edges. Halo glows below, rough and wet and stubborn.
She is nervous.
I know before she speaks because she talks too much about the sauce.
“I might have over-salted it,” she says.
“You did not.”
“You didn’t taste it.”
“I watched you make it.”
“That is not how salt works.”
“I measured.”
“With your eyes?”
“Yes.”
She points the spoon at me. “That’s terrifying.”
“You are nervous.”
Her spoon lowers.
