Page 11 of Bear My Heart

"No. No, I don't think we would. It took us ages and there were two of us!" Shanti protested. "Are you Chef Charlee? I'd heard good things about you, but this⁠—"

"Takes the cake?" Peter asked, and fell deeper into the booth, laughing at his own cleverness.

It took everything Shanti had not to completely dissolve into helpless laughter along with him. It wasn't that funny, but she was very, very high on sugar, and was having the best evening she could remember in many years. Even Charlee laughed and offered a round of applause. "I am Charlee, yes. Did you come in from somewhere just to eat at Hold My Bear? We're flattered, if so."

"No, I'm from Virtue. Peter here is from Alaska, though."

Charlee's eyes widened. She was a pretty woman, with very soft light brown curls and green eyes, and she looked happy in a way that Shanti envied. "Alaska, huh? I've always wanted to go there. And I could have sworn I knew everybody in Virtue by now, but goes to show what I know!"

"I don't get out much," Shanti admitted softly as Peter pushed himself up in the booth like he was trying to pretend he wasn't sugar-drunk.

"If you ever get the chance, go," he told Charlee. "It's beautiful. Bring this," he said with a gesture at the empty brownie platter. "Everybody will love you. Or don't, because they might mob you. That was incredible."

"I invented it for a friend," Charlee said with a smile. "Hardly anybody orders it because it takes so long and it's so huge, but it's always fun to make when they do, and I always like to come out and see how it was received. Glad it passed muster."

"It wasn't just the sundae," Shanti promised. "Dinner was also really good."

"Then my job here is done." Charlee whipped her apron and chef's hat off dramatically and stalked down the aisle, leaving the waitress to gape after her and Peter and Shanti in gales of laughter again. From where she was sitting, Shanti could see Charlee wink over her shoulder at the waitress and pull her chef's hat back on as she headed toward the kitchen again, but that had been a ten out of ten for theatricality.

"Can I bring you anything else?" the waitress asked, now grinning.

They both shook their heads. "The bill, please," Peter said. "But don't expect us to head out immediately. I don't think I can move."

"Sugar coma," Shanti agreed, although she didn't feel comatose yet, just jazzed up on chocolate.

"I know it'll be late-ish once we roll out of here, but do you want to try to walk it off?" Peter asked her as the waitress left. "You could show me around Virtue?"

"I'm not sure there's much to see in the middle of the night, but if you'd like, sure. A walk sounds like a good idea." More to the point, for some reason, Shanti didn't want to leave Peter Baranov's side. She had genuinely never felt that way about anyone, and wanted to cling to it for as long as it lasted, even if that was only a few more minutes. "Where is the construction crew staying? I can take you there the long way, maybe, so you can see some of the town."

"We're being put up in bunks on site, actually. Some of that storage area is dedicated to storing us overnight."

"Oh. Well, I guess I can take you the long way back to the train station, then." Shanti pursed her lips, trying to think how she would do that, exactly, then shook her head and said, "It's a small enough town that taking anybody the long way still isn't very far," wryly.

"Shkalnik's like that too," Peter said with a grin. "'Well, now, we've got Main Street and…the other street…'"

Shanti laughed. "Yes. Virtue does have Main Street, Church Street, and School Street, though."

Peter gave a mock-solemn shake of his head. "Airs, I tell you. You East Coast small towns have got big-city airs."

"We do," Shanti murmured happily. "Come on, and I'll show you around Virtue's airs."

CHAPTER 6

Virtue didn't really have airs, any more than Shkalnik had only two streets. Its downtown was compact, at least compared to Shkalnik, although nowhere with a town square as enormous as Virtue's could really be considered small.

They'd already come down School Street on their way to the gastropub, so Shanti took them to their left out of the pub and they wandered down a longish block, past a veterinarian's office and eventually around a couple of corners that had them walking back up toward the square past a boutique hotel and a corner store. Shanti was all bundled up, little more visible than her nose and puffs of warm breath on the cold air. She told him what she knew about the town—"The hotel used to be a row of houses, but they were converted six or eight years ago"—as they walked around, her quiet voice not much louder than the snow squeaking beneath their feet.

They paused at the church end of the town square, Pete's attention torn between the biggest gazebo he'd ever seen, and what looked like the world's greatest playground off to its right. Shanti's soft voice turned wry with fondness and admiration. "The gazebo's been here forever. I think it originally dates from the late nineteenth century, although it's been rebuilt at least once recently because somebody ran a bulldozer or something into it. The playground is new, just a couple of years old. One of the kids in town pushed an initiative for it through the town council."

Pete laughed, startled. "No way."

"Really." Shanti smiled up at him. "I heard his argument was there was tons of room for soccer and baseball already but there wasn't anything to climb and they should do something about that. Apparently he's very persuasive."

"I guess so! We've been trying to push a skate park through in Shkalnik, but that's been the grown-ups, not kids. Maybe we should get some of them involved," Pete said thoughtfully as they fell into step together again. Shanti took him up past a little two-screen movie theatre and out to what she called 'the new library,' which had opened a good ten years ago now, she said.

"But it'll always be the new library, I think. The old one was back on the square and it wasn't big enough for the community, much less the librarian's ambitions. She has half the under-threes in town running around in there most days of the week, I hear. There are houses out that way, mostly abandoned," she added, waving past the library as they turned back toward the town. "And Imelda runs her summertime coffee cart down there."

"And…the doughnut store in the winter, is that what you said?"