AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“What does that mean?”
“Something.”
“But wh—” then he laughed, interrupting his own question. “Nice.”
“What is it in Spanish?” I asked.
“Algo.”
“What about Huastec?”
“There’s not a specific word for it, butjant’ojorjant’iniis probably closest. Depends on the context. If you’re talking about an idea, or an action, or an object, the form changes.” He shrugged. “Huastec doesn’t work quite the same way as European languages.”
“I guess that makes sense. Since it’s, y’know, not European.” I suppressed a wince at just how obvious a statement that was, but Taavi didn’t seem to mind.
He leaned forward, putting his empty plate on the coffee table.
“Do you want more?” I asked.
“You don’t—”
“Yes or no, Taavi.” I tried to make my voice gentle.
After a couple-second pause, he answered, “Yes, please,” so I took both our plates back to the kitchen, then turned the still-steaming water back on to boil for more eggs. While I waited, I threw a couple more English muffins in to heat, then went and got my empty coffee mug. Taavi still had coffee, but I brought out his glass for more juice.
The fact that I felt comfortable with him now—aside from the occasional foot-in-mouth moment of stupidity—told me that the periodic awkwardness of our date had pretty much all come down to my dumb fucking ass. I’d gotten so caught up in my own fucked-up head that I’d completely forgotten that Taavi had actually asked me on a dateafterhe knew me.
He'd told me as much, but I’m a stubborn dumbass and just… got scared.
Don’t get me wrong—I was still scared. Fucking terrified. I don’t know how to do relationships because I hadn’t really had a real one for nearly a decade, and I’d blown all of them. Please see above comments about being a stubborn dumbass and sticking my foot in my mouth.
I made Taavi some more eggs, put more potatoes on his plate, and took them out to where he was waiting on the futon, flicking through his tablet. He set it down and smiled at me as he took the plate with his one good hand.
“Sit up here with me?”
I really was a goner.
* * *
Taavi’d started slow-blinking notlong after finishing his second plate, and I suggested that he take a nap while I did the dishes—which hadn’t gone over terribly well, as he tried to argue that he should be doing the dishes because I made the food. I won by pointing out that he only had one good arm.
He fell asleep in less than five minutes, as I discovered when I came out to see if he’d finished his coffee.
The dishes done, I set about the long process of baking bread for thecapriotada, setting my laptop up on the counter so I could see the recipe, but also so that I could theoretically do a little work in between coating myself with flour and activating the yeast for thebolillorecipe, which seemed to be a pretty basic white bread.
I can do bread. Bread, pie crust, cookies, brownies… if you bake it and it involves flour, I’m probably pretty damn good at making it. So I felt fine about thebolillopart of this dessert. It was the rest of it that was… well, a little outside my comfort zone. I had no idea how to even cut up a mango, so that was going to be exciting, and the sugar cone thing I’d gotten from the Mexican grocery I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with, but we were definitely going to find out. I felt okay about almonds and raisins and cinnamon, although how all this was supposed to blend with the balls of Oaxaca cheese, I also wasn’t sure.
But hey, it’s fun to try new shit, right?
I’d just wiped off my hands after setting the ball of dough to rise for the first time when an email notification popped up at the bottom of my laptop’s taskbar.
I didn’t recognize the sender, but I often didn’t when the messages were queries for Beyond the Veil.
I clicked on it.
And froze.
The email address was one of those generic-as-fuck things you can get from Yahoo that anybody could make in a heartbeat and that was probably untraceable, since I’d have bet anything that the user had probably done it at a public library or some shit.
