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Chapter 9

Cheesy Stars

Icome out of the shop the next day, bunny ears still on, because I almost always forget to take them off until I’m halfway home.

My shadow is waiting with something bundled under one arm, which is new, because he doesn’t usually carry things. He doesn’t usually need to. And the sight of him standing there holding an actual wicker basket, looking entirely out of place with something so cheerfully domestic, throws me for a moment.

“What,” I say, “is that?”

“Cheese,” he says. “A picnic,” he clarifies with the particular careful dignity of someone who has rehearsed the word beforehand and wants full credit for using it correctly. “You have not stopped rearranging things. I thought a distraction might help.”

“You really don’t mind, then,” I say, nodding at the basket, though that isn’t really what I’m asking, and I think we both know it.

“Mind what,” he says, steady, like a man who’s already decided the answer won’t change no matter what I put after it.

“That I’m meant to be... all that,” I say. “The light. Whatever Magdalene’s decided I am. That I’ve apparently got people watching me the way you watch a kettle that might boil over.”

“Why should I mind,” he says, simply. “You are the same person you were the day before she said any of it. A title changes nothing about the person underneath it.”

I want to ask him a hundred more questions after that, whether the others feel the same, whether he’s frightened for me, whether any of it changes what he wants from me or what I’m allowed to want from him, and he must see all of it building behind my face, because he sets the basket down and looks at me properly.

“Not tonight,” he says, firmer than I’ve ever heard him say anything. “Tonight I would like it very much if we simply did not discuss any of it. The prophecy. The goats. What you are meant to become. I would like, for a few hours, to be a man with a basket, and for you to be a person having a picnic, and nothing more complicated than that.”

“That,” I say, feeling something in my chest unclench that I hadn’t fully noticed clenching, “sounds like the single best idea anyone’s had all week.”

“Good.” A pause, and something almost sheepish crosses his face, which is such a strange thing to see there that I nearly miss what he says next. “The picnic is also, in part, an apology. For the goats. I should not have offered to remove them, or Magdalene, and I have thought of very little else since.”

“Apology accepted,” I say. “Though I’d have accepted it without the cheese.”

“I am aware,” he says. “I wanted the cheese involved regardless.”

My chest does something complicated and warm as the new, unexpected shape of my evening fully registers. “You planned a picnic.”

“I observed several. In the park. Couples, mostly. On blankets, with baskets very similar to this one. It seemed a reasonable format to attempt.” He shifts the basket slightly, as though presenting it for inspection. “I was uncertain what ought to go inside it. Hex was not especially helpful. He suggested things called canapes, which I could not adequately source.”

“I think we’ll survive without canapes,” I say.

“I hope so,” he says. “I have never made one, and I did not want our first attempt at this to also be my first attempt at that.”

“This is the loveliest thing anyone’s done for me in forever.” I peer into the basket, which seems to contain a large block of cheddar cheese and a jar of jam. “Shall we go, then?”

He nods, solemn as anything, and leads the way with the basket held slightly too formally in front of him, like he’s presenting evidence rather than carrying snacks. I follow him through the darkening streets towards the park near my student accommodation, charmed nearly speechless by the whole endeavour.

It’s only once we’re actually there, at the gates, that I notice the obvious problem.

“It’s shut,” I say. “Look, there’s a padlock on the gate.”

He looks at the padlock. He looks at me. Something in his expression suggests that this detail had not, in fact, occurred to him at all.

“The couples I observed,” he says, slowly, working through it, “were not presented with this problem.”

“Most picnics happen during the day, when the park is open,” I say. “That’s usually rather the point of them.”

“That seems needlessly restrictive,” he says.

I laugh, properly laugh, loud enough that it echoes slightly off the empty street, and something in his shoulders relaxes at the sound of it, like he’d been bracing for disappointment and found delight instead.

“Well,” I say, eyeing the low iron fence beside the padlocked gate, “we’re already here. And I don’t see any security guards.”