Shuli Go Stories Vol. 4: A Week's Bliss

Part 12

They awoke when the sun was already settling down. Lian had nothing but questions and a suite of apologies for Mei. She worried the beautiful woman was let down, terrified, or both. But Mei hid it well. When she awoke she did so with a smile, dressing quickly and asking Lian if she was hungry.

"Let's cook together," Mei had genuine giddiness in her words, and Lian convinced herself she'd read too much into the sex. Of course she has some complicated feelings on that subject, Lian told herself. Who wouldn't?

In the kitchen they cooked side by side. Mei admitted she wasn't much of a cook, and Lian admitted the best she'd ever learned how to do was to make barely edible food taste like something a human being should eat. So they bonded and laughed together as they struggled to make an elaborate meal from one of Mei's treatises on the art of cooking: roasted pork dumplings in a sweet sauce, served on top of a bed of saffron-infused rice.

It was a hopeless exercise from the start. Lian formed the dumplings too thin and too early: they were already hard by the time Mei finished coating the pork she wasn't quite sure had stayed fresh in her cool room with a sauce she'd had to adapt with a suite of incorrect ingredients. The rice burned and the saffron overpowered everything and when they laid out their travesty of a meal they had to hold each other up they were laughing so hard. They each took two bites, almost gagged, and resorted to a small pot of rice each.

"At least we don't have to clean up," Mei joked, her eyes twinkling. Lian could almost completely forget the forlorn woman she'd taken to bed just a few hours earlier.

"One of the best parts of making a quick escape," Lian confirmed.

After they ate, Lian glanced at the expensive clock – she'd never seen anyone with one that pricey before, not even the King of Wamai – and saw it was nine thirty already. But they still had time. She'd told the stableman to meet them at midnight.

Next Mei pulled out the large rucksack she'd set aside for their escape and dragged both it and Lian to her library. She'd already filled the bag with a few sets of clothes, her purse, some preferred snacks for the road. She had, she explained to Lian, left space for a few books.

"I know, I know, it's not the kind of thing you need on the road, but we'll need something to do while we're riding. And then once we get wherever we go, it'll be good to have a book or two to keep us company."

"If you say so," Lian admitted playfully.

"Ok good. Then you can help me pick which books."

"Umm..." Lian was even less qualified to act as a literary critic than she was to wax poetic about art. She could read, had even read some big, complicated, important books in her day, but she never did it for fun the way Mei seemed to. In fact the only books Lian had read and remembered enjoying were... "Do you have any of Mao's fables?"

Mei looked at her surprised, her smile from their cooking misadventure appearing almost at once. "You like those old things?"

"Yeah," Lian scratched behind her neck in embarrassment. "I read them all the time in school."

"I do have a copy..." Mei began searching the rows and rows of books. "Somewhere."

Lian helped her look and eventually spotted an old, beat up copy of the children's stories. It went in the bag.

"Now what else?" Mei asked.

"You're the expert, you pick."

Mei bit her lip and looked all over the room. Her eyes lit up and she pounced on a book near the bottom of a pile scattered on the floor. Her face beamed as she picked it up and approached Lian to put the book in the bag.