We stand in the wreckage of the cooler like two soldiers after a skirmish. Crushed blueberries smeared across the concrete. A toppled crate of butter blocks. Raspberries scattered in a wide arc from the shelf I knocked sideways with my elbow at some point during the proceedings.
Magnolia slides down from the wall. Her legs buckle, and I catch her by the hips before her knees hit the floor.
"Steady."
"My legs are numb. The wall is literally below freezing."
"I was trying to provide adequate insulation."
She looks up at me. Flour in her eyebrows. Chocolate on her neck. Buttercream in a long streak across her left cheek like war paint. Her hair has abandoned all architectural ambition and hangs in wild tangles around her face. One of her earrings is missing.
She is the most devastating thing I have ever seen, and I have seen a Dire Wyrm crack open a mountain.
A laugh punches out of her. Loud and sudden and echoing off the steel walls. She claps both hands over her mouth, but it tears through her fingers anyway, shaking her whole body.
"Your shirt."
I look down. The torn fabric hangs from my shoulders like broken flags. Buttercream fingerprints mark a path from my collar to my belt line in a pattern that tells a very specific and very incriminating story.
"I have a spare in the room."
"You have flour." She gestures vaguely at my entire torso. "Everywhere. You look like a green powdered donut."
"I don't know what that is."
"It's a compliment. Trust me."
She staggers to the industrial towel dispenser mounted by the door and yanks out a fistful of coarse white kitchen towels. She runs three of them under the emergency hand wash station, wrings them out, and throws a wet towel directly at my face.
It lands with a cold slap across my nose.
I peel it off. She is already laughing again, doubled over, one hand braced on a shelf of cream cheese blocks.
"Your face. Oh my god, yourface."
"My face is my face."
"You caught a griffin with your bare hands and you just stood there and let a wet towel hit you square in the nose."
"The towel was not a threat."
"The towel destroyed you."
She is wrong. The towel did not destroy me.
She destroyed me. Approximately seven minutes ago, against a wall of frozen berries. Completely. Irreversibly.
I drag the towel across my chest, scrubbing at the flour and buttercream. The cold water raises every scar into sharp relief against my skin. Magnolia stops laughing long enough to watch, and the heat in her eyes makes the cooler feel tropical.
"Turn around."
"Why."
"Because you have a handprint on your back. My handprint. In chocolate. And if anyone sees it, your mercenary reputation is finished."
I turn. The wet towel presses between my shoulder blades and she scrubs with the vicious efficiency she brings to cleaning her baking pans. Firm, circular, thorough. She has to stand on her toes to reach the top of my shoulders.
"Hold still. You're swaying."
