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“We should talk.”
Peeta’s stern, more stern than normal, but it’s better than the stilted formality that’s grown between us ever since the games.
But I don’t want to talk to Peeta. I don’t know how to talk to Peeta anymore, if I ever did to begin with. It doesn’t seem fair to keep up the ruse he’d created, and there’s no way to return to what we’d been before. We hadn’t been anything before. Just the boy with the bread and the girl he’d saved, a tentative past connection that meant everything and nothing.
But it isn’t just Peeta. It’s impossible to return to anything the way it was before the games. Other than Haymitch, he’s the only one who understands that.
Maybe that’s what makes this so hard.
I give him a silent nod. It isn’t as though much else fills my days, and it isn’t though I have any excuse not to meet with him, other than simply not wanting to do so. My eyes shift about me, taking in the empty houses around us, my own barely used with my mother and Prim, and Haymitch’s. Sometimes, I envy his loneliness. I do not envy his nightmares; I have my own.
“When?”
Peeta’s house smells strongly of bread. It’s the same way he smells, but stronger; in the Capitol, during the games, that smell was gone, replaced with their fancy oils and powders then with dirt and blood. By the end, he smelled like one of the rabbits Gale traps in the woods. They have more time to be afraid.
Even now, away from the bakery, Peeta’s house smells like bread. He bakes the way I hunt, to keep his mind off of everything else. But no matter how much we try to go back, we can’t. There will always be a difference between us and everyone else. A different kind of surviving. The scent is even stronger inside the house, overwhelming flour mixed with the sweeter scent of sugar and the sharp alcoholic tang of yeast.
I find him waiting for me in the kitchen, apron tied about his waist, flour decorating his hair like snow that doesn’t melt. “You wanted to talk?”
“Mm. Hold on. I’m almost done.” Peeta pushes his hair back with one hand, leaving a trail of flour behind. Then he sets his newest loaf on a tray, sticks it into the oven where it will be seared with fire, and leaves it be. He offers me a smile. “Needed a break.”
“I know.” I sit on the stool across from him. “You’ve got flour—”
“Everywhere. I know.” Peeta chuckles. It’s a real laugh, even though it isn’t much, and the smile he wears when he makes it feels normal. Like the way he’s supposed to be. He lifts his apron and rubs his face with it. “Better?”
Now there’s just as much flour on his face as there is on the counter. “No,” I say. “Worse.”
“Huh.” Peeta looks confused. He stares at his apron. “That was supposed to help.” He sighs and looks up at me. “Well, I guess we’re just going to have to make you match.”
I barely get my mouth open before Peeta throws a spray of flour at me. It coats my face, thick like the powder they force me to wear in the Capitol, and my mouth drops open as a little cloud puffs around me. I reach over and push him. “Hey!”
Peeta stands back, out of the way, and he smiles like he does when he’s happy, not the fake sort of thing he wears when we need to pretend for our safety. “Now you don’t have an excuse.”
“An excuse?”
“Everything’s been so tense lately,” Peeta says, placing his hands flat on the flour-covered counter. His smile fades as he looks down at them. “You can’t teach me how to hunt, but I thought….” He glances up and searches my eyes. “I thought I could teach you to bake. Something simple.” He pulls a few shaped cutters from a nearby tray. “Like cookies?”
I don’t want to stay here. I don’t want to learn how to bake from Peeta, almost as much as I don’t want to teach him how to hunt. Our lives are already so hopelessly entangled that this only makes everything more confusing. It would be easier to not, easier to go back to my house and wash everything off.
But Prim will ask. I can ignore my mother, but I can’t ignore Prim.
So I scowl and nod. “Fine.” I nod at the shapes. “But only if we make one that looks like Haymitch.”
Peeta pulls out another cutter, one that looks like a wine bottle. I don’t ask why he has one that shape or who would ever want a bottle-shaped cookie. He offers me a smile. “Drinks and all.”
I don’t smile. “Drinks and all.”
Peeta convinces me to make another batch while we wait for the first one to cook, and while we wait for the first batch to cool enough to decorate – I tell him I won’t be good at it, but he won’t let me leave the decorations up to him – he slices the freshly cooled loaf of bread, slathers it with butter, and hands it to me. I try to tell him I’m not hungry, but he won’t listen. Despite this, I take the slice and take a bite.
The bread melts in my mouth. It’s sweet from the butter, a luxury that we have more than enough of now but that still feels like a luxury. I scarf the rest of the slice down but don’t ask for another. He smiles, assuring me that he’ll send the rest home with me. Peeta gives us fresh bread and cookies every day, but it’s still – it’s another luxury. One we don’t deserve.
It’s while decorating the body-shaped cookies that it happens.
My attempts at recreating Effie with her bright pink hair look nothing like her, just a puff of pink covering the whole of what should be her head. I scowl at her and grab for another one of Peeta’s intricate decorating tools. I want to scrape away all of the icing I’ve already laid, but that would be a waste. Even something as simple as this, I can’t waste food.
I glance over at the cookie Peeta is decorating and stop.
The cookie, burnt a little from something beyond our control, has a much darker color than the other golden cookies we’ve been decorating. This one, Peeta’s decorated to be a girl instead of a boy, and she looks the spitting image of Rue.
My breath catches in my throat. “Peeta?”
Peeta doesn’t look up. He stares at the cookie, continuing to decorate it – continuing to recreate her – as though it’s the only thing in the world. “I won’t eat her,” he says.
I hadn’t even thought about that. Eating Rue – biting off her legs, her arms, her head – the idea of it makes me sick to my stomach in a way that eating a fake Haymitch didn’t. I remember her in those last moments, after she was dead, after I’d surrounded her with flowers, after I sang for her, for an audience I didn’t see and didn’t care about – and still don’t care about, although their investment saved the both of us together – and I stumble backwards. “What are you doing?”
When Peeta finishes, he holds the cookie gentle in his hands. “This is the only way I can save them.”
It’s a horrible explanation, and it doesn’t make any sense. “You aren’t saving anyone—“
But Peeta lifts the carefully decorated Rue cookie. He takes her to the freezer and sets her inside, where other cookies decorated like each of the other tributes – even Cato, who’d attacked him, who’d been left with us at the last; even Marvel, who’d killed Rue and who I’d—
“You made all of them,” I say, trying not to feel sick. “All of them.”
“This is the only way I can save them,” Peeta repeats. He sets Rue inside with the rest of them and then shuts the freezer door. “I know it’s a waste, but—”
I wrap my arms around him the way I need someone to hold me during my nightmares. “It’s not a waste.” I stare at the closed freezer. “It’s an honor.”
I don’t tell him that I saw myself in the freezer, too, or that I’d noticed how there wasn’t a cookie of him.
While Peeta is visiting with his family later, I sneak into his house. It isn’t hard. He doesn’t lock his door. I don’t think I would either, if my mother and Prim didn’t live in my house. Whatever I have can be stolen; it’ll just be replaced later, and I don’t need any of it, don’t want any of it.
Streaks of flour coat my face like claw marks.
I open the freezer and gently place another tribute inside. The Peeta I’ve made isn’t beautiful, like the cookies he’s decorated. It’s misshapen, and one of its legs has a lump in it. I’m not good at baking. Prim won’t even eat the other cookies I’ve made.
But this one wasn’t about baking. It was about this, setting a Peeta to be protected, to be saved, with all of the others he’s made.
A few days later, Peeta meets my eyes and gives me a nod. That’s how I’ve known he’s seen it.
For once, in all of this, I feel warm.