"And if you ever pretend a door is magically reinforced when it clearly isn't, I will use this knife to-"
My blood goes cold. "You knew?"
"Boris. I grew up in restaurant kitchens. I know what a standard oak cellar door sounds like when it latches. That door would've splintered if you sneezed on it."
"Then why did you-"
"Because I wanted to be trapped with you too, you enormous idiot."
The rat behind the recycling bin skitters away. From the square, the fiddle hits a high, bright note. Solene's grip on the knife never wavers.
The kiss in the alley is a declaration of war against oxygen. She bites my split lip and I taste copper and ginger and thepromise of thirty years of fighting over stovetop temperatures. The knife stays in her hand. She holds it angled away from my jugular with the casual precision of a woman who could debone a lamb shoulder blindfolded.
"Upstairs," she says against my mouth.
"Upstairs where?"
"Your apartment. Above the tavern. I've seen the windows."
"The bed isn't made."
"Boris."
"There are dirty dishes in the sink. Possibly from Tuesday."
She bites my lip again. Harder.
"Upstairs. Now."
I set her down. Her feet hit concrete and she is already moving, the knife still locked in her fist as she rounds the corner of the building toward the tavern's side entrance. I follow. Of course I follow. She could walk into traffic and I would follow. She could walk into a volcano and I would follow, and I would bring tongs because the heat would be useful for searing.
The side door is unlocked because I never lock it because I am six foot five and green-gray and nobody in this town is stupid enough to rob an orc. She takes the narrow staircase two steps at a time, her chef's coat flaring behind her like a battle flag. The stairs groan under my weight. The walls are close. My shoulders brush both sides.
She reaches the landing and turns. The single hallway bulb paints her from above, washing out the soot on her face, catching the copper glow of spice at her collar. She is breathing hard. Not from the stairs.
I reach her in two strides.
My hands find her waist and lift. Her spine hits the door to my apartment and the latch gives because I also never lock this and the door swings inward and we stumble through together, a mess of limbs and momentum. The knife clatters onto thekitchen counter as she finally, finally releases it, both hands coming to the front of my shirt and fisting the fabric and pulling.
The apartment is small. The kitchen is a disaster. The bed is across one room that serves as everything. She doesn't look at any of it.
"Apron," she says. "Off."
The leather strap goes over my head. The apron hits the floor with a heavy slap. Her fingers find the buttons of my shirt and she works them with the speed and dexterity of someone who juliennes carrots in four-second intervals. The fabric parts. Her bandaged palm presses flat against my sternum and the gauze is rough and warm and her fingers spread wide and still don't span the distance between my collarbones.
I gather the pins from her hair. The French twist collapses. Dark hair spills over her shoulders and down her back and she looks like someone I've never met, someone who exists only here, only now, only for this. My hands slide into that hair and cup the back of her skull and I kiss her so thoroughly that she makes a sound against my teeth that I will hear in my sleep for the rest of my life.
Her chef's coat. Stained beyond salvation. I unbutton it with hands that are too large for fine work, she said so herself, and two buttons scatter across the floor and ping against the baseboard. She laughs into my mouth. The coat drops. Underneath: a thin cotton undershirt damp with sweat from two hours of combat cooking and the sprint up the stairs.
I lift her again. She wraps her legs around my waist and the height difference vanishes and we are face to face and her eyes are dark and wet and ferocious.
Three steps to the bed. The mattress groans when I lay her down. Springs protest. The iron frame scrapes against the hardwood and leaves marks I will never sand out and never want to.
Her hands map the scrapes on my forearms from the cliff face. She traces each cut, each gravel burn, each place where the rock tore skin away because I was climbing too fast, desperate to bring back the one ingredient that would save the dish that saved us both. She presses her lips to the worst of them, a jagged line across my left wrist, and the sting dissolves into something bright and boundless.
"You're hurt everywhere," she whispers.
"Don't care."