She obediently did.
“Come here. Take a seat.”
The lights dimmed and then brightened again. She folded her legs beneath her, taking up a perch on a pillow a few feet away from him. Kal took the lid off the tray, revealing an enormous bowl of dumplings floating in broth.
Dumplings. Huh. He didn’t exactly remember ordering dumplings.
Did it matter?
The princess stared at the food, her cheeks and earlobes pinking up.
Kal handed her a spoon. “Dig in.”
“There’s only one bowl?”
“We’ll share.”
With the lid off, the food smelled outrageously good. He wanted to bury his face in it, take a bath in a tub full of dumplings, plucking them out of the water one by one and swallowing them until his stomach became perfectly round and tight as a drum.
Hungry. He hadn’t been this hungry in…he didn’t know.
She fished out a dumpling. It took her forever, the spoon too small, her fingers shaky. Finally she managed it, taking a delicate bite before handing the bowl to him.
When he looked at her again, the entire dumpling had vanished into her mouth, her pink cheeks bulging, her tongue snaking out to lick broth from her lower lip.
Not such a princess.
Amused, Kal tried to corral a dumpling for himself, but his hands were no steadier. He gave up and plucked one from the bowl with his fingers.
Hot. Jesus. He dropped it, picked it up off the carpet, popped it in his mouth. It tasted of brine and ginger, ground nuts and fresh green things. It was the best fucking dumpling he’d ever eaten, and he wasn’t hungry anymore, he was starving.
She held her hand out for the bowl. He gave it back, watched her reach in with her fingers, palm a dumpling, pinch another between her fingertips.
“Classy.”
The lights dimmed again just as she did something lopsided and conspiratorial with her mouth, a smirk that ended in a deep dimple. “Always.”
She shoved another entire dumpling in her mouth.
The lights came back up.
He tried to recall his last decent meal, what it had been or when he’d had it, but he couldn’t, couldn’t remember when he’d sat on a firm surface in a warm room, his body clean, his jaws working, the ground level and firm beneath his feet.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked at a woman.
They ate like animals.
“These are so good.” Flushed now from forehead to fingertips to toes, the princess had greasy lips. Kal grabbed the wine bottle, screwed the cap off, poured it out into plastic water glasses. When he handed her one, she drank it like it was water, and he tried not to think about her lips or her throat or how smooth and soft her skin was.
They’d made fun of her beauty routines at Base Camp, the giant bag of toiletries she would unzip, lining tiny bottles up on a flat rock, applying various scented products to her face, her hands, her feet.
Ridiculous princess.
He’d thought so. But she plucked the last dumpling from the bowl and ate it without shame, her gaze traveling over his chest and shoulders, down over his legs and back again. Her skin was the same shade of pink as her T-shirt, and even though the food was gone, her eyes looked hungry.
She cradled the giant bowl of broth in both hands, brought it to her lips, and sucked down the brine. As human as him.
Completely fuckable.