Page 41 of The Turning of the Tables

We were in charge of the ham, the pea salad, and the fruit-and-cheese plate that was going out for people to snack on while they tried to coordinate dinner. Because Noah didn’t just want to hostdinner, he wanted to host the whole preparation process, as well. The kind of holiday meal that families were supposed to have.

That we’d never had, because gluttony was a sin and feasts were the heretics’ excuse to corrupt piety with greed.

Which should give you a pretty good sense of the kind of upbringing Noah and I had. We didn’tcelebrateholidays in our house. We marked them, but not in the kind of way that involved Easter bunnies or Santa Claus.

So Noah wanted to create it. He and I had celebrated holidays together once we’d left home, the two of us making disastrous Christmas puddings or dozens of cookies, whipping up pumpkin pie and more turkey than either of us knew what to do with, gorging ourselves on Halloween candy… You get the idea.

This would be the first time we’d decided to include other people. Well. Noah decided. Which… it was his apartment. He was the one who had lots of friends. I had… Hart. And Quincy, but she wasn’t coming. And Hart would probably have come anyway.

I made a pot of coffee and put out a plate of store-bought minimuffins I’d gotten on a whim from the grocery store theday before. As I was arranging the baked goods, Noah shuffled out of his room—wearing his robe and literal bunny slippers for the occasion. With a wide yawn that cracked his jaw, he made himself a cup of coffee with sugar and a dollop of cream.

“Where’s the ham?” He asked me.

“Fridge,” I replied. “Where else would it be?”

Noah blinked at me blearily. “Shut up.” Noah, as I might have mentioned, is not a morning person, and clearly the coffee had not made its way into his brain yet.

We had a crock pot that was going to cook the ham slowly over the whole day—that was the theory, anyway. A lot of what was getting made today was at least quasi-experimental. At least for us. I’d certainly never made a ham—and now I couldn’t even eat it.

I helped Noah rub the ham with brown sugar and stud it with cloves, then put it into the crock pot and set everything according to the directions on some random mommy blog that Noah had pulled up. I was dubious that the ham was going to end up looking anything like what the blog’s photos showed, but I also figured it probably wouldn’t make anybody sick, assuming it got up to temperature. And even then, shifter stomachs have a lot more tolerance for raw meat than a human’s—and I was pretty sure that only five of usweren’tshifters, and of those five, Hart and I couldn’t eat the ham, anyway.

I tried not to feel like a completely friendless loser as I got to work cutting up fruit and cheeses, even though I couldn’t eat any of the latter. I also had a collection of nuts and dried fruits, as well as some bowls of frosting for dipping—made with almond milk, of course.

I’d worked my way through pineapple, kiwi, apples, bananas, strawberries, and was pulling some mandarinsapart when the buzzer went off telling us someone was here. It wasn’t Lulu, because Lulu had a key. There were fourteen other options, and I found myself weirdly nervous. I don’t really like new people.

“Oooh!” Noah was much more awake now, dressed and excited, because Noahisa people person. He ran downstairs to see who was here.

I went back to arranging my fruit.

“Fucking store muffins? Your oven broken, Mays?” At least the first people to get here were Hart and Taavi, and Hart was beginning in true Hart fashion by swearing about something and insulting my muffins.

“No, it’s not,” I replied mildly. “But I’m busy and muffins take time.”

“The fuck they do,” came the reply. “You got flour and shit?”

“Val,” Taavi said, and there was a slight warning note in his tone. I guess I hadn’t spent enough time around Hart and Taavi, because otherwise I would have already known Hart’s first name, apparently. Or at least the ‘Val’ part.

Hart narrowed lavender eyes at his much smaller shifter boyfriend. “What? Mays isn’t going to be offended if I make muffins.”

I snorted. He wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t made the minimuffins, Kroger had. “Yeah, we got flour and shit,” I replied, leaving my fruit tray and going over to the cabinet that held all our baking supplies. Flour. Sugar. Baking powder. All that stuff.

“Extra eggs?”

I handed him a dozen. There were thirty-six more in the fridge because Noah had gone overkill, since clearly any Easter event had to include dying the eggs after hard-boiling them. That was yet another thing on today’s to-do list.

I went back to arranging my fruit tray, adding little dishes of nuts to it.

“You have regular milk?” Hart asked, his head stuck in the fridge.

“Just almond,” I replied, realizing that Hart had no idea I couldn’t have dairy. “I have alpha-gal.”

He lifted his head out of the fridge, one long-fingered hand holding the carton of almond milk. “You have what now? Since when?”

“Alpha-gal,” I repeated. “Since November. I can’t have any mammal-based anything.”

“Mammal-based?” the elf repeated.

I nodded, my focus on the tray. “Yeah.”