Chapter 4: Flour

I woke at five with my hands itching to do something, because I have woken at five every morning since I was twelve.

The bed beside me was empty and the lamps were still burning.

I found one of his shirts on a chair and put it on and nothing else.

His kitchen was at the back of the house, with a long scarred table and a steel counter.

A window gave onto a yard in the dark.

It was the only room in the house with a decent oven.

There was flour in a canister and a cake of yeast in the refrigerator, and nothing else worth the name of food.

"Who lives like this?" I said to the empty room.

I made the dough anyway.

I warmed milk and salted it.

I worked the flour in with my hands until the dough came together warm and heavy and alive.

The kneading was the first thing in twenty-four hours that felt like mine.

"You're up," Levan said from the doorway.

He was dressed already in dark trousers and a white shirt with the cuffs turned back, his hair wet from the shower.

His eyes went to my hands, and then to the bare legs under his shirt, and stayed there.

"You said five," I said.

"I said I'd wake you. I came back and you were gone."

"I don't sleep after five," I said.

"It's Sunday."

"The dough doesn't know that."

He crossed the kitchen and stopped at my shoulder, close enough that I felt the heat of him.

He bent his head and looked at the dough on the counter from about six inches away.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Khachapuri. For the first morning in a man's house. My mother did it for every bride in the neighborhood."

"I'm not a bride."

"No," I said. "You're a debt."

"Is that what I am?"

"I'm still deciding."

He laughed, once, low, and it changed his whole face. It was the first time I'd heard it.

Then his hands came down on the counter on either side of me and boxed me in.

"Your hands are covered in flour," he said into my hair.

"I'm busy."

"I noticed."

His mouth found the side of my neck, just under my ear, and I forgot what the dough was for.

I kept kneading.

It was a kind of dare, and I think we both knew it.

He kissed down the line of my throat while I pushed the heel of my hand through the dough.

His fingers slid under the hem of his shirt, which was all I wore.

"No underwear," he said.

"You had my purse in your hall and my clothes on your floor. What was I supposed to wear?"

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