“How the hell did that end up in the cake?”
“No idea,” Nate said serenely. The fork was almost to his lips by the time Ella realized what he was doing and grabbed his wrist.
“What are you doing?”
“Eating.”
“Yeah, and there’s a bug on your fork!”
“So?”
“So, you shouldn’t eat it! It’s huge and leafy looking and weirdly colored- what if it’s poisonous or something? Colors usually mean poisonous, you bork.”
“Don’t like poison.”
“Yes, Nate, we don’t like poison. So put the fork down before I make you.”
Nate didn’t put the fork down. “Poison gives me indigestion.”
“So don’t eat it!”
“Vegetables also give me indigestion, but Mother always made me eat those.” He nodded to himself and, before Ella could react, simply switched the fork from his right hand to his left and swallowed the giant, leafy, weirdly colored bug without flinching.
Ella closed her eyes and counted to fifty. She did her utmost to ‘center herself’ like Mom always told her to, but it was rather difficult when she could hear the crunching as Nate chewed- a crunching that should not be happening when eating cake, a food universally made to be soft.
It was even more difficult when she realized she still hadn’t released his wrist and didn’t really want to.
“You’re a stranger,” she said.
“Yes,” Nate agreed, and kept eating.
“I met you this morning at Aldi.”
“Yes.”
“We have no history.”
“No.”
“No pre-existing friendship.”
“Nope.”
“We aren’t mysteriously related.”
That got her a secretive smile. “Definitely not.”
“And yet you’re in my house eating cake, and we’re planning to spend a potentially large portion of our lives in each other’s company while attempting to calculate an impossible figure using nothing but our minds and what we’ve learned in the public school system and from the internet.”
Nate mulled over this as though checking all the facts. Ella could almost see the checklist being ticked off behind his eyes and the green light once it cleared. “That is correct.”
Ella laughed. Once she started, she couldn’t seem to stop.
“I’m insane, aren’t I!”
“That is a distinct possibility,” agreed Nate.
“No more-” Ella paused to catch her breath, “-No more than you, though, I suppose.”
Nate put down the fork, grasped her by the wrist of her hand still holding his arm, and pulled it down until their hands folded into each other.
“Oh,” he said, “You don’t know the half of it.”
YOU ARE READING
The Speed of Dark
Humor'When Penn first met Ella, her presence caused him to within seconds divest of all traces of dignity he possessed. He held out his hand like they were potential business partners instead of strangers in the freezer aisle of Aldi and told her that hi...
