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Once, Calliope had said to Dream, “The day has been long in the gardens, and I am weary for it.” And Dream had read the flash of daydream behind the words to know that she actually meant Do not come to my bed tonight, as clear as if the soundwaves had spelled it out with letters upon a page.
Once, Johanna Constantine had said to him, “Oh, yes, good sir, it should pose no trouble at all to sally forth to the likes of Greece without a whit of notice.” And Dream had reached into her mind and understood that Johanna was employing sarcasm. Her words were to convey that it would, in fact, be quite difficult for her to make an unexpected journey across the continent.
Dream had had little use for spoken words, indirect and mistruthful as they were, especially when their true intentions could be so readily plucked from the mire and read like a fortune from a cookie.
(For particularly grating conversations, he would let the false craft of his auditory nerves slip back into dreamstuff, and stop listening at all.)
Now, Dream sits in the back of a cab with a bag of groceries between his knees and the cabbie up front has said to him, “How’s your day, then?”
And Dream cannot know his intent. He cannot read his dreams.
Nevertheless, Hob has instructed him well on this ritual.
“It is well, thank you,” Dream says, although it has not been well at all. He started the day with a migraine and then spilled tea upon his favorite cardigan. “How is yours?”
“Oh, it’s all right. Another day in the books, innit?”
“Yes,” Dream agrees.
“Awful weather today,” the cabbie remarks.
The weather is quite usual for November in London, but Dream replies, “Yes. Terrible.”
“Think it’s supposed to rain all weekend, too. Bleedin’ shame. Got tickets to the match this weekend, you know? Me and my mates, we try to go at least once a year—and it’s not easy, once you’ve all got kids and wives and—well my one mate, he’s got a husband, but that’s all right these days, innit? Anyway, took us ages to get a weekend off together. And now we’ve got rain.”
Again, Dream wants to comment that rain is more common than not for this particular month, and surely should not have come as a surprise, but he bites it back and instead says, “That is most unfortunate.”
“Too bloody right,” the cabbie sighs. “What about you? At any matches this year?”
“None,” Dream answers.
“You follow footie at all?”
“I do not,” Dream says.
There is a pause. “Right, then. Well, that’s okay. S’not for everyone, is it?”
“It is not, no.”
“What’s your thing, then?”
“I am partial to reading,” Dream says. It is his standard response in these situations. It can be applied to any number of inane questions that strangers apparently do not actually want answers to. What are you doing tonight? What do you do for fun? Any plans for the weekend?
“Oh, like books?” the cabbie asks.
“Yes,” Dream says. “Like books.”
He glances out the window, praying that they will have somehow miraculously teleported from Brixton Road to the townhome he shares with Hob.
They have not.
“My mum used to be a big reader. Books all over the house, growing up, you know? But I never got into it, myself. Too slow. Feels like everything these days gets made into films and miniseries anyway, so why bother reading the book when you can just wait for them to do it proper on the Beeb?”
Dream opens his mouth—but then, ah!
He catches himself.
Rhetorical questions are still tricky for him.
Dream has recognized this one just in time, though, and so he does not respond because rhetorical questions are questions that are posed without expectation of an answer. He is pleased with his success.
Several streets fly past.
“Er—sorry, mate,” the cabbie says, glancing back at him. “Didn’t mean any offense by it.”
Dream frowns. “I was not offended.”
“Oh! Right-o. Sorry, I just thought—what with you going silent and all. Thought maybe I’d gone and said the wrong thing about your books. I’m always running my mouth, me, gets me in all sorts of trouble.”
…So it had not been rhetorical, after all.
Dream had been wrong. Now he has caused offence. He does not understand, he’d been so sure of his analysis—
“What sort of books d’you like, then?” the cabbie asks.
Dream slumps a little in his seat, and stares out the window. He does not want to respond. He does not want to be in this cab anymore. He is so unbelievably tired of having to play these guessing games that over and over he just cannot seem to win.
“I enjoy poetry,” he makes himself say, anyway.
He hopes, wildly, that the conversation will end here.
Of course, it does not.
Dream is in charge of dinner tonight. Hob primarily takes care of the cooking, as he is both talented and passionate about it, but Thursdays belong to Dream. This particular evening, he is making a recipe from BBC Food, which had been promisingly labeled “Easy Chile Con Carne”, but already Dream has had to navigate several gaps in the instructions.
For example, the recipe does not specify the type of saucepan to be used. Recipes rarely do, which Dream finds irritating, but Hob has taught him well enough that he can now squint at the steps and ingredients and usually discern whether a non-stick or stainless steel pan is in order.
Tonight: stainless steel. He is sauteing vegetables first, and he has learned that the caramelization provided by the stainless steel is preferable.
The garlic is to be “minced”, which is pleasingly specific, but the onion only indicates “chopped”. This is not a standardized knife cut. Chopped could mean anything from “not quite minced” to “slightly finer than a rough chop”.
Aggravating.
But Dream had made a similar recipe last week, which had also involved a meat sauce, and that recipe had called for a diced onion. He will do the same here.
He chops the vegetables, opens tins, drains juices, and pulls spices from the rack.
Mise en place is never in the instructions, either, but Dream has long learned that this is optimal practice.
The next bullet he dodges is the direction to fry the onion and garlic.
Dream knows better.
One would assume, from the text, that the recipe calls for the onion and garlic to go into the pan together and fry for the same amount of time. One would do this, and end up with either burnt garlic or undercooked onions. Again and again, recipes do not specify to put the onions in first, let cook for several minutes, and then add the garlic in the final minute of cook time.
These are things, Hob has explained, that recipe writers assume most people will just know.
Dream did not know.
But he has learned, at any rate, and so the onion goes into the pan alone.
He adds the garlic in the last minute, when the onions are soft and almost transparent, and then continues on with the meat, following the directions to brown it and break it up into small crumbles as it cooks, until no pink remains. He adds red wine, and boils for two minutes. He then decreases the heat and stirs in the prescribed amount of tomatoes, assorted spices, Worcestershire sauce, an oxo cube, and—
Ah.
“Hob,” Dream says.
Hob, at the table with a stack of papers, looks up quizzically.
Dream thrusts the shaker out. “Salt to taste,” he announces.
Hob grins, and rises. “Ah, they got you again, huh?”
“As usual, every other ingredient is provided a measurement,” Dream complains, as is his wont, “and it is not as if the experienced chef cannot adjust those to be ‘to taste’. It is utterly unfathomable why a recipe for amateurs therefore assumes the ability to intuit salt content.”
“Yes, dear,” Hob agrees, and gently steers him back around to face the stove.
“Even a suggested range would suffice. Instead we are punished for our ignorance and left to blindly fumble and guess and then suffer either under-flavored slop or seawater—”
Hob rubs a thumb over the base of his neck. “Sweetheart.”
It feels nice. Dream does not want it to feel nice.
Hob studies the pan as well, thumb keeping steady time across Dream’s vertebra, and then peers at the tablet on the counter displaying the recipe. “About… ten shakes should do it, I think.”
It had taken him all of five seconds to decide that. And he’ll be right, as always.
“You’ll get there, eventually,” Hob says, giving him a squeeze. “And if you don’t, then you’ve got me here to figure it out with you.”
He says this a lot.
Not just about salt.
“Thank you,” Dream mutters, and begins resentfully shaking salt onto the burgeoning chili.
Hob presses a kiss to his cheek.
And Dream is left to his counting.