Page 80 of Orc'd & Loaded
"Some of these really do need-"
I kiss her collarbone and she forgets the end of the sentence.
We are not quiet. The tavern below is empty, the staff still celebrating in the square, and the freedom of that emptiness turns us reckless. The bed frame hammers a rhythm against the wall. She arches beneath me and the bandaged hand grips my shoulder and her nails on the other hand rake lines down my back that mirror the hawk's talons and I wear both sets of marks with equal pride.
She says my name. Not Boris the tavern owner. Not Boris the competitor. Just Boris. Small and broken and repeated like a spell she is casting, like if she says it enough times the magic will hold and morning won't change anything.
It won't. Nothing changes this.
The celebration is its own language. Every touch sayswe built something. Every gasp sayswe won. The day, the soot sprites, the cliff, the sabotage, the critic's silence before his verdict, all of it compresses into the space between her ribs and mine until there is no space at all.
When she shatters, her whole body bows off the mattress and the iron frame screams against the floor and somewhere downstairs a glass falls off a shelf and breaks.
I follow. The world narrows to a white point behind my eyes and the grip of her legs around me and the smell of woodsmokeand ginger and the faintest trace of buttercream still lingering in her hair from a cellar that feels like a lifetime ago.
Stillness.
The sheets are tangled at the foot of the bed. The pillow is on the floor. The iron frame has migrated fourteen inches from the wall, leaving twin scratches in the hardwood like railroad tracks.
She lies on her side, tucked into the curve of my body, her spine against me. My arm drapes over her waist. Her bandaged hand rests on my forearm, thumb moving in slow circles over the worst of the cliff scrapes.
The window is open. Night air carries the fading fiddle music from the square and the smell of dying bonfire embers. Her breathing is slow and measured. Mine rumbles deep enough to vibrate the mattress springs.
Her fingertip traces a line from my collarbone down my body. Circles the thick muscle there. Follows the ridge of an old scar from a kitchen burn I got at sixteen, my first week working the hearth line in my father's cookhouse.
"Your building and mine share a wall," she says.
"Brick. Load-bearing on my side. Decorative on yours."
"You know the structural specs of my cafe?"
"I know everything about your cafe. I looked at the blueprints when I signed my lease."
Her finger continues its slow circuit. Down the sternum. Across a rib. Back up.
"If someone were to remove that wall," she says. "Hypothetically."
"Hypothetically."
"The two kitchens would connect. One shared prep space. Double the counter footage. Your hearth on one end, my plating station on the other."
"You'd need a permit."
"I know a woman who can cite municipal bylaws from memory. She's very persuasive with inspectors."
"What are you saying?"
She rolls in my arms until she faces me. The hallway light leaking under the door catches her jaw, her mouth, the sharp angles of her face that I once found intimidating and now find essential.
"I'm saying we buy a sledgehammer tomorrow morning." Her bandaged palm presses flat over my heart. "And we knock that wall down."
SOLENE
The ticket machine screams.
Six orders deep on a Saturday night and the printer never stops chattering, spitting curling white paper like a mechanical tongue. I rip the newest ticket free, scan it in half a second, and slap it onto the rail next to the other five.
"Two root tasting, one bone marrow flight, one mushroom tower, fire the deuce on table nine!"
