Getting to know my new partner

“Say, I was wondering something,” I said to Curry, after his grandmother had gone upstairs and left us to settle in the downstairs sitting room and nurse the bottle of celebratory brandy I’d bought on my way over. We were two glasses in and I was feeling pleasantly mellowed, with my belly full of Csoglaran dumplings and my earlier harrowing anxiety now subsided. “When did you ever get a look at my careers form, anyway? I never saw anybody else's. I thought only the watch commanders got to see those.”

Curry cut me a mischievous little grin from where he sat on the other end of the settee. “That would be, uh, when I sneaked in to the academy commander's office to pull yours out of the pile and make sure none of my answers conflicted too much with yours?”

“Curry! Those are used to make sure you get a fitting watch assignment! You’re not meant to do that!” I exclaimed, punctuating my scandalized surprise with a little kick to his thigh from my stocking-clad foot. This place was so homey that earlier I’d kicked my boots off and left them under the settee since it was clear we were going to be here a while.

He shrugged. “They were used to make sure we got a fitting watch assignment! Just… by me, to make it extremely easy for the commanders to get it right.” He motioned to my glass with a questioning look.

I leaned up from where I was half-reclined, and held it out for him to top off. “Then what was all that stuff you said about randomly assigned jackasses, if you rigged the game?”

He finished pouring, then shrugged again, rolling his big shoulders good-naturedly and setting the bottle on the side table. “For Nan’s benefit. Are you annoyed?”

“No,” I admitted. “I’d rather be a solo recruit and assigned to some strict-as-hell older guard officer than have to pair with most of the other people from our class.”

“Isn’t that the gods’ honest truth,” he agreed.

I had to make up my mind whether to ask the next bit, since perhaps it was better to let well enough alone, but I wanted to know. “You’re really not sorry you did that, now that you know about… my thing?”

Curry shook his head, and I saw nothing but plain truth in his face. “Not sorry,” he said. “Nor is Nan,” he added after a moment. “I’ve never seen her act so favorable to somebody she just met, actually. It was a little weird, even.”

It gave me an unfamiliar, belonging sort of feeling, to be reassured with such clear matter-of-factness. “Nobody’s really ever picked me for anything on purpose before,” I confessed. “Anything important, I mean. That’s… I’m glad you told me. Not annoyed.”

Curry’s face broke into such a broad, warmly pleased, and goofily tusky grin that it made me laugh. “I will say—you are probably the only person in our class who never made me think what a dumb asshole they were. So I would have picked you, too,” I added, just to have it said outright. “If I knew cheating was an option.”

“Cheating is always an option,” he rumbled agreeably in his deep voice, and held his glass toward me so that I could clink mine against it. “Ethics is just knowing when not to because it would be morally wrong.”

I wanted to tell him how properly adult it felt to be offered a toast, to something so meaningful, by my real, honest-to-goodness watch partner. But it seemed that to call attention to it would diminish the weight of the moment. Instead, I touched my glass to his and returned his smile. “Your nan is really nice,” I offered.

“No, she isn’t!” Curry said immediately, sputtering out the words along with one of his peculiar little big-man giggles that I had heard only a couple times before. It was not a particularly dignified laugh, and we were striving to be taken seriously, which probably explained its infrequent appearance.

It was impossible not to laugh along with somebody who sounded so silly. “She was nice to me,” I clarified. “Though only after I was a spiteful bitch to her. So maybe you’re right after all.”

“Nan likes people who aren’t predictable. Scolding her fluently in her own foreign language the first time I brought you home wasn’t what I had in mind, but your instincts served.” He giggled again, apparently enjoying the memory of this send-down.

“Instinct is a generous way to put it,” I said. “More like I just popped off. I’m better about that than I used to be, though.”

“Want some more?” He poured himself another glass of brandy, and I gulped down the rest of mine and held the glass out to let him fill it again. “I don’t mean to jinx anything, but I think we might make very good partners,” he said after a short, companionable silence had elapsed. “Like legendary good partners.”

“What, legendary like the kind troubadours care about?” I knew I was slurring a little by now, but I cut him the best play-skeptical look I could manage, with that big swig of brandy still curling its warmth through me and making everything about our future feel extremely, wonderfully possible.

“Why not? I’ve had enough of this brandy to make that seem like a thing.” He grinned.

“Curry, if you—” I began, then had to stop because I was rather drunk now and hadn’t realized until just then that my glass had tipped enough that I’d only narrowly missed spilling it all over his grandmother’s settee. “Oh!”

“Here—” He took the glass from me, then set it on the side table and stood up, wobbling a little himself. He’d been pouring his own drinks about twice as full as mine, which was the only reason I was still halfway coherent, but I could tell he was about as drunk as I was. I decided with vast satisfaction that my new partner had a true gift, if he could pour drinks for two very-differently-sized people and pace us so perfectly. “You had better be our official liquor-pourer,” I told him. “You’re very-very good at knowing how much to give us both.”

“It’s a talent.” Curry picked up the bottle. “You can stay,” he told me when I moved to help him, then picked up both our glasses at once in one of his big hands and the bottle in the other. “I’m getting us water,” he said, turning toward the kitchen. “And pouring this expensive brandy you couldn’t finish back into the bottle.”

“Help me think of something to be my official thing!” I demanded.

Curry laughed, turning in the doorway to look askance at me. “Because talking to dead people isn’t special enough for Bersk.”

“Oh… right,” I giggled, then reflected on how nice it was to just be casual about something that had always been a private, unpleasant, secret. I decided to ignore his polite offer to let his guest stay in the sitting room while he did hostly-type things, because Curry had done fine work of making me feel like I wasn’t a guest anymore. I lurched a little, when I got to my feet, but quickly steadied myself and followed him to the kitchen with barely any swaying at all.

In the kitchen, Curry motioned to one of the stools we’d occupied earlier. “Can you sit on that without tipping over?” he asked me dubiously, but I was already climbing up. I situated myself, elbows on table, grinning my excessive, unwarranted pride at what a good job I had done of not falling.

His grandmother had a sink, a nice, proper, plumbed sink, with a spigot and a drain, and I watched, impressed, while he drew a cup of fresh, cold water for each of us. “Drink that,” he ordered me, then began opening and closing cupboards and taking things out.

I took a drink of the water. “What are you doing?” I inquired, unable to make sense of any of it.

“Making egg-toast. The stove is still warm, so it only needs stoked a bit. The bread’ll soak up the booze. My real talent,” he bragged, “is I never get a hangover. Stick with me, and neither will you.”

“Can I help?” I hopped off the stool.

“Yeah. Break these into that bowl there.” He motioned to some eggs sitting in a bowl on the table, and pushed an empty, slightly larger, bowl over to me. “Then we’ll add some—Bersk,” he exclaimed suddenly, startling me, “what the fuck are you doing?”

“Um—is that wrong?” I looked down at the mass of broken yolk and shell fragments in the bowl. “You said break them,” I explained.

Curry stared incredulously at me a moment, then took the bowl back and began using a fork to fish out the bits of shell. “Sure, but did it occur to you that most egg dishes aren’t famously known for their characteristically gritty texture?”

“I thought—” I hadn’t thought, actually. “I guess I figured people just had to pick out the broken parts,” I confessed sheepishly. “What’s the right way to get the good part out, then?” I asked, then flushed with foolish embarrassment when he gave me a look of utter surprise.

“What, you’ve never seen somebody break an egg before?” He sounded more confused than anything.

“Er—I guess it’s just, I never really lived anyplace with a kitchen I was allowed into.” I realized as I said this, how pathetically abnormal that probably was.

“Oh—” he said, suddenly putting it together—that institutional homes didn’t have cozy little kitchens like this, with grandmothers and the like. I saw Curry grasp how a person could feasibly grow up never seeing an egg prepared—and then accept it. He absorbed all this, and then moved on from the question as if he no longer saw anything unusual at all about an almost-adult woman who never learned to break an egg correctly.

“Here—” Curry took a second egg from the dish and showed me how he held it, then tapped it against the flat table top. “Not too hard,” he said, “and just one firm rap should be enough to do it—you want it cracked, but not enough so it breaks all the way through.” He showed me the side of the egg with the shell now spidered in cracks, but the contents still held in by a membrane beneath. Then he held it over the bowl and used one thumb to neatly split apart one of the large cracks, depositing the egg’s contents in the bowl, yolk still pleasingly intact, and leaving the empty shell in his hand. “Some people prefer to tap it on the rim of the bowl,” he said, “but I like using the table because my hands are too big to get a little narrow crack open neatly.”

He watched as I imitated him with the third egg, holding my breath for the tapping part, then getting the yolk and whites safely into the bowl. Curry laughed when this remarkable triumph excited me enough that I accidentally dropped the shell halves into the bowl. “Shit,” I said in disappointment, but he only shrugged and plucked the bits out.

“You still did better than me the first time I tried it. For as drunk as we are, you did all right.” He handed me a spoon. “I’m going to show you another technique now. This one might be too advanced for you now, but I think you can master it eventually.”

“What’s that?” I looked eagerly up at him, so very pleased to be learning so much about cooking, all in one night, and with such agreeable company.

“They call this ‘stirring,’” he said, taking my hand with the spoon and guiding my arm in a circular motion, then began to giggle again when I caught on to the stupid gag and used the spoon to smack him in the side.

The motion threw me off balance, which made me laugh, which made it harder to get my balance back. Curry reached over and steadied me, giving my shoulder a reassuring squeeze as he withdrew. “You know how full of shit you are, right?” I grinned up at him.

Curry grinned back. “Keep talking like that and I won't explain what a knife does.”

When I made a face he put the spoon back in my hand and patted me on the head. “Here, Fuzzy. Go to town on it, why don’t you.”

I decided to let the stupid nickname slide this time, because this evening had somehow blossomed into the happiest and most pleasant night I could ever recall having spent.