Chapter 6: What Foxes Eat

Jiang Lü cooked for her on Thursday night, and she cooked.

A clay stove glowed in the corner of the courtyard room.

Three pots steamed on it, and a fourth sat waiting on the stone floor.

The ginkgo outside the open door shed gold into the dark.

"Sit," Jiang Lü commanded, a ladle in one fist. "You are not allowed to help. I have a plan."

"What's the plan?"

"Soup, then rice, then duck, then the sweet thing. I have been studying."

"Studying what?"

"The fourth video on how a person feeds the one they are courting."

Jiang Lü tasted the soup, frowned, and added a pinch of salt.

"It said not to ask her what she likes. It said to know."

"Do you know?"

"You eat noodles at your desk at eleven o'clock at night and leave the vegetables."

"You like pepper, but not the numbing kind. You drink too much cold tea."

Tang Yu put her chin on her hand.

"That's observant."

"It is a small thing to notice about someone," Jiang Lü said, and turned her back to the stove too fast.

The soup was chicken and lotus root, clear and sweet.

The duck was crisp.

The sweet thing was a bowl of osmanthus rice balls so delicate that Tang Yu stopped talking and ate three.

Over the second one, because the room was warm and Jiang Lü kept filling her bowl, she told her about the meeting with Zhou.

She meant to leave out the sum, and then Jiang Lü refilled her tea without a word, and she said it anyway.

Jiang Lü sat across the low table and listened without moving.

Her hands rested on her knees and her eyes were on the stove.

When Tang Yu finished, she said nothing for a long while.

"You turned him down," she said at last.

"Of course I did."

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