Chapter 75 75
Annabeth's POV:
The rotisserie chicken was cold by the time we got around to eating it because none of us knew what time Thanksgiving dinner was supposed to happen. Like, was there a rule? My aunt always served at four, but Aunt Sarah was at Helen's house eating real food with real plates and probably actual gravy made from scratch, and I was in a safe house with a dented coffee pot and two dragons arguing about whether instant mashed potatoes needed milk.
"It says milk on the box," Kaelen said, holding up the packet.
"We don't have milk," Marcus said. "Use water."
"That's gonna taste like paste."
"It already tastes like paste. It's powder from a box."
"If you add butter it'll be better."
"We don't have butter either."
Kaelen stared into the cabinet like butter might appear out of sheer willpower. "There's margarine. I think. This yellow thing, it might be margarine."
"That expired in September."
"Margarine doesn't expire. It's basically plastic."
"It does expire, actually," I said from the table where I was pulling the skin off the rotisserie chicken because someone had to do something useful. "Margarine is an emulsion of water and vegetable oil and it can absolutely go rancid. The lipid oxidation creates—"
They both looked at me.
"What? I'm a biology student. This is literally my thing."
Marcus made the mashed potatoes with water and a packet of ranch seasoning he found behind a box of stale crackers. Kaelen found a can of cranberry sauce in the back of the pantry, the ribbed kind that slides out of the can in one solid cylinder and holds the shape of the tin. He put it on a plate and cut it into circles with a butter knife and arranged them like it was fine dining, which was either funny or depressing depending on how you looked at it.
The kitchen table was too small for three people and a full spread but we crammed everything onto it anyway. The rotisserie chicken on its plastic tray, the mashed potatoes in the only pot, the cranberry circles on the chipped plate, and a bag of dinner rolls that Marcus had bought and that were the best thing on the entire table because they were from an actual bakery and still soft.
"This is pathetic," I said, looking at our Thanksgiving feast.
"It's perfect," Kaelen said, and he meant it, I could tell, because his voice did that thing where it got quieter instead of louder when something mattered.
Marcus sat at the head of the table. Or the side. The table was round so technically there was no head, but he positioned himself in the spot that felt like the head, the way fathers do, like he'd been sitting at the head of family tables his whole life instead of spending eighteen years alone in safe houses killing people.
I hadn't thought of that until just now. Eighteen Thanksgivings. Alone. While I was at Aunt Sarah's eating homemade turkey and sweet potato casserole and complaining about having to help with dishes.
"You've never had Thanksgiving with anyone," I said. Not a question.
Marcus looked at me. His expression didn't change much, it never did, but something shifted in his eyes. "Not for a long time. No."
"My mom used to cook?"
"Your mother could burn water." The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile, not quite, but close enough. "She'd order from a restaurant and transfer everything into her own dishes so it looked homemade. She thought I didn't know."
"Did you tell her?"
"Never. She was so proud of herself." He paused. "She made the cranberry sauce though. From scratch, with fresh cranberries and orange peel. That was the one thing she actually cooked."
I looked at the canned cylinders of sauce on the chipped plate and something squeezed hard in my chest.
"Should we... I don't know, say something?" I asked. "Like, give thanks or whatever? That's the thing, right?"
"If you want," Marcus said.
"It feels weird not to."
Kaelen was watching me from across the table. He hadn't said much in the last few minutes, just sat there with his hands in his lap looking at me and Marcus like we were something he'd been wanting to see for a very long time.
"Okay," I said. "I'll start." I cleared my throat. Felt stupid immediately. "I'm thankful that... that I'm alive. Which sounds dramatic but three days ago I had a needle in my neck in a hotel room, so. I'm thankful I'm alive and that my fire is coming back and that I know who I am now even if who I am is complicated and terrifying and involves a lot of running."
I picked at a dinner roll. Tore off a piece and didn't eat it.
"And I'm thankful for Aunt Sarah, even though she's not here. And for Mara, who's probably eating her grandma's delicious dinner right now and sending me passive-aggressive texts about still being sick." I looked at Marcus. "And I'm... I don't know. I'm not ready to say I'm thankful you're alive because that's still complicated. But I'm glad you're here. At this table. Tonight."
Marcus's jaw tightened. He nodded once, short and sharp, the way men do when they're holding something back.
"Your turn," I said to Kaelen.
He was quiet for a second. Looking at his hands, then the table, then me.
"I'm thankful you forgave me," he said. Simple. Direct. His eyes on mine, blue-green with that warmth underneath that always made my stomach do the stupid thing. "And I'm thankful for my sister who made me eat pizza and my brother who asks if golden dragons can die from sadness. And for Marcus, who I was terrified of for weeks and who is now making me mashed potatoes from powder."
"I'm making you mashed potatoes because there's nothing else," Marcus said.
"Still counts."
Marcus looked at both of us for a long moment. Then he picked up his glass of water, because we didn't have wine or beer or anything except water and terrible Folgers, and held it up.
"To Samantha," he said. "Who couldn't cook but tried anyway."
Something in my chest cracked open. Not in a bad way. In the way a seed cracks to let something through.
"To Samantha," I repeated, and picked up my glass.
Kaelen raised his. "To Samantha."
We clinked our water glasses over a plastic tray of Costco rotisserie chicken and instant mashed potatoes and canned cranberry sauce, and it was the most real Thanksgiving I'd ever had.
We ate everything. All of it. The entire chicken, every scrap of mashed potato, every single cranberry circle. Kaelen had three dinner rolls and then started a fourth before I stole it out of his hand because I wanted it more.
"You already had two," he said.
"And you had three. Don't be greedy."
"I'm a dragon. We're literally known for hoarding things."
"Gold and treasure. Not bread rolls."
"Bread rolls are treasure right now."
Marcus cleared the table while we argued about the rolls. He washed dishes without being asked, efficiently, the way someone does who's spent a long time taking care of himself. No wasted motion, no lingering. Just clean and done and moving on to the next thing.
He dried his hands on the towel by the sink and looked at us. "I'm going to check the perimeter and make some calls. Don't leave the house."
"We know," I said.
"I mean it, Annabeth. No porch, no yard, nothing."
"No porch?"
"Not until I've cleared the area." He shrugged on his jacket. "I'll be an hour. Maybe two."
The door closed behind him and the safe house got quiet. That particular kind of quiet that happens when two people are alone in a small space and neither one knows what to do about it. The fridge hummed. The pipes made that clicking sound they made when the heat kicked in. Somewhere outside, the wind pushed against the windows.
Kaelen was leaning against the counter, arms crossed, watching me.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing. Just... this is nice."
"Eating expired food in a hideout?"
"Being in the same room as you without one of us wanting to run away."
I wanted to say something sarcastic but couldn't find it. He was right. This was nice. Weird and sad and not at all what Thanksgiving was supposed to look like, but nice. The kind of nice that matters more because it's unexpected.
"You wanna watch something?" I asked. "There's no TV but I have my phone. We could watch a movie on it like pathetic people."
"What movie?"
"I don't know. Something dumb. Something that has nothing to do with dragons or secret organizations or fathers who fake their own deaths."
We ended up on the couch, which was barely big enough for one person let alone two, so we sat pressed together with my phone propped on a pillow between us. Kaelen's arm ended up behind my head on the back of the couch because there was literally nowhere else to put it, and at some point during the opening credits of The Princess Bride, because it was Thanksgiving and that movie was the correct answer, my head ended up on his shoulder.
Neither of us mentioned it.
The movie played and I half-watched it, more aware of the warmth of his body against mine than anything Westley or Buttercup were doing. His breathing was slow and steady under my cheek. His arm had shifted from the back of the couch to my shoulders at some point, his fingers resting lightly on my upper arm, and every few minutes his thumb would move, just barely, that same thing he did during healing sessions.
I let myself have this. Just... have it. Without analyzing it or being scared of it or building walls around it. Just a boy and a girl on a crappy couch watching a movie on Thanksgiving while the world outside was dangerous and uncertain and full of people who wanted to drain their blood.
"As you wish," Westley said on screen, and Kaelen's chest moved in a way that might've been a laugh.
"You like this movie?" I asked.
"It's my favorite."
"Seriously?"
"Lucian showed it to me two years ago. We watched it three times in one weekend."
"That's... weirdly endearing."
"Lucian would be thrilled to hear you say that."
The movie ended. My phone screen went dark and we were sitting there in the dim living room with just the kitchen light on. I didn't move. He didn't move.
"Marcus said no porch," I said.
"He did."
"He also said he'd be an hour."
"He's been gone for one hour and forty minutes."
I tilted my head up to look at him. His face was right there, close the way it had been during healing sessions, except there was no pretense now. No medical excuse, no bond-needs-to-be-open justification. Just us, close, because we wanted to be.
"Fifteen minutes on the porch," I said. "He'll never know."
"He'll absolutely know. That man has the senses of a bloodhound."
"So we'll deal with it."
Kaelen looked at me for a second, then shook his head with this expression that said I know this is a terrible idea and I'm going to do it anyway.
"Fifteen minutes," he said.