Page 61 of Moonlight Hearts

He meant that too, was totally serious.

“But ties are the devil.You told me that.”

“Sure they are.Still.I’d put one on for you.”

I sipped some more of my tea.“Keep that up and you’re going to make me cry again.”

Soyer, his text to Elias sent, put his phone away again and finished the tea.“Can’t have that.Do you want to go plate shopping with me now?”

I tossed the rest of my tea back too.“Yup.Uh, we’re buying some tea, right?We’ve been sitting here for almost an hour.”

Soyer held my gaze.“I did that.Our bag’s out front.Want to carry it?”

The fancy paper bag with the tea selection inside smelled delicious, but before long, the subtle scent of herbs and tea leaves was overpowered by cooking fumes.The underground had a street food culture, and Soyer had taken me right into the beating heart of it.

“This is called the Cauldron.It was designed to be a reversing loop, but now it’s all just food vendors.”

Soyer pointed, but I was distracted by a bird lady hawking something skewered and charred in a language I didn’t know.She was roasting things over an open fire and using her feathered hands to fan the flames.

“It’s so busy.”

“People get hungry, and the food here isn’t too bad.”

He was leading the way, though his hold on my hand was firm, almost as if he were afraid someone would jostle us and pull us apart.Yet, this crowd was different from the crowd back at the Innovation in Business and Technology fair we’d gone to.Here, people knew the Black Shuck, and they were giving him and, by extension, me a wide berth.

Seeing the press of the crowd and yet being apart from it thanks to Soyer made me feel seen, noted, and I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not.Unlike my Black Shuck, I didn’t have an intimidating reputation I needed to uphold.

A baker selling flatbreads to my left distracted me, but then Soyer pulled me in the opposite direction, toward the center of the loop.I thought he was going to take us to the edge of the road to get away from the crowd and take a break maybe, but that wasn’t it.

Hiding behind an ice cream cart and a nut roastery, there was a metal door.It had a circular sign on it—just black lettering that had been painted on ages ago and since flaked in places.The Pottery, it read.

Soyer pushed the door open, and we stepped inside, warm light and a well-ordered show space larger than anything I’d seen down here greeting us.When the door closed behind us, it effectively shut out the noise from the bustling crowd outside.

They had everything here.As far as I could tell, this store took up the whole area inside the loop.What it had been when this was still the subway, I didn’t know, but now it was cutlery, copper pots and pans, select appliances—some of which looked futuristic—plates, and glassware.There wasn’t an overabundance of any particular thing here, no endless variations on plates for example, but those they had were set up on their shelves, lights pointing at them as if they were pieces in a museum, not something you’d eat dinner from.

“You look like you’ve never seen dessert plates,” Soyer said.

I tore my eyes away from a set of three that were mounted like you would a painting.They were red on the outside, then white in the center with a golden dot right in the middle.“This is where you buy your plates?”

“And a lemon squeezer.Come along.”

I followed him, though all the glassware and fine plates made me hyperaware of the bag I was carrying, of how I moved.I didn’t want to break anything.I saw two salespeople hovering while Soyer picked up a copper pan and examined it.I looked at a set of two mugs, each with the cutest little black kitten on it.

“Do you know what you’ll be making?”I asked him.

“A stuffed pumpkin.A challenge for my oven, but I’ll just have to take a measuring tape when buying the pumpkin.”

“Oh, you mean you’re cooking it whole?”

He looked up from the pan, the copper reflecting a distorted image of his beautiful face.He glanced at the mugs I’d been looking at.

“Yes.It’s a harvest celebration, after all, a reason to feast and celebrate that the earth has provided enough to let you live through winter.It’s how you’re supposed to celebrate.You found new mugs.Good.We’re going to get a few.”

“We’d have marshmallows in cocoa when I was little.We celebrated getting the most marshmallows.Do we really need more mugs?”

He looked at me with fond exasperation.“We do.I’ll make you cocoa too, my heart.But I’ll also do unspeakable things to pumpkins.”

I leaned in.“You know, Kasey made that pumpkin soup in a pumpkin shell for the Moonlight, and it was pretty good.We sold out of that a couple of times.”