“Just a little bigger than, yes,” she said, standing beside the toppings table and watching us. The glimmer had faded from her eyes.
He picked up the dough again with both hands, then used his right to pull it in toward his chest before tossing it up. He caught it with the same hand and repeated four more times as I watched his bicep pop and release, pop and release.
On the fifth time, when it came down, he caught it with both hands. Making fists underneath the dough, he shimmied it across his knuckles before throwing the pizza up just above his head, spinning perfectly like I’d seen in a great many pizza restaurants. He caught it with the backs of his hands before throwing it up again, his hands getting a little wider and a little wider with each toss, stretching the crust out.
“They weren’t really intended for all that,” Earnessa muttered. “Just rolling them and sorta…”
She put fists in the air like she was pressing something down onto a table. “Just sorta flattening them out would’ve been fine.”
Austin finished by turning the dough on his hand a little before looking around for where it was supposed to go. Kingsley reached under the table and grabbed what looked like a brand-new, shiny pizza tray and laid it on the cutting board. Austin set down the dough, finishing by ensuring there was a good crust.
“Thanks, bro. Good lookin’ out.” Kingsley stole the pizza-shaped dough and headed to the pizza sauce, leaving Austin back at square one.
Austin smirked, shaking his head, and I laughed, loving seeing them razzing each other.
“Uncle Auzzie, can you show me?” Mac popped a piece of sausage into his mouth and hurried to Austin’s side.
I watched with a swelling heart as Austin painstakingly walked Mac through the steps of prepping
and throwing the dough, having to start over three times before his nephew got the hang of it. He never once tried to hurry things along or lost his patience, his entire focus on helping the young man succeed.
As Austin loaded the dough onto a fresh pizza pan, a worrying vibration thrummed through me. I turned away quickly, closing my eyes, narrowing in on that feeling. It was from my connection to one of the gargoyles, I knew, but I’d have to concentrate to get more information. Those connections were a science, and my knowledge was still at a remedial level.
The vibration thrummed again and then continued, allowing me to localize the feeling to a gargoyle in the air, due west from here, high up and circling. He’d spotted something, if I had to guess
—very likely beyond the town, given the distance, but I didn’t have a great frame of reference. I needed to do some flying tomorrow. Suspicion but not worry came through the link. He lowered in the sky a bit, then a bit more, before dawning understanding took over. He must’ve recognized whatever it was that had initially made him suspicious.
I kept tabs on him as he continued to circle. To watch. In another few minutes, he pulled away, and I let the connection fade into all the rest.
“What is it?” Austin asked, waiting beside me.
Kingsley paused by the French doors with his completed pizza in his hands and looked back.
I quickly told them what I’d felt. “It’s nothing. False alarm from one of the gargoyles.”
Kingsley didn’t turn away, though. “You feel those connections all the time?”
I toggled my hand as Austin picked up a pizza pan prepped with dough. “Mostly they’re in the background. Only certain emotions trigger me. Just now, it was suspicion and caution. Danger, fear, intense anxiety, usually related to an enemy and not something like a spider—it’s like the connection knows what’s battle related, and everything else is filtered out.”
“Huh,” Kingsley said, fully facing me now. “And it’s permanent?”
“For now. There has to be a way to reverse it—I just haven’t had time to figure it out. Right now I’m just trying to figure out how to organize it. In battle or training, it can be incredibly overwhelming because I have emotions coming at me from all angles. I don’t have time to sit all calm and collected in a field somewhere to sort through them.”
“So you can employ a silent warning system?” Kingsley asked. “We’ve struggled with that. We get trespassers, the ones trying to feel us out, but we can never catch or kill them because a wolf howl immediately alerts them that they’ve been seen. We’ve tried telling the sentries to run a distance away so they can call it in, but these mages mask their scent and—”
“No, no, no!” Earnessa walked between us, her hands raised. “No work talk. This is a family dinner, remember?”
Kingsley’s jaw clenched, but he nodded and resumed his walk toward the brick oven.
I looked at the empty cutting board. “So…” I gingerly reached for a ball of dough.
“Jess, no.” Austin chuckled, his free hand on the small of my back. “I’ve got ours.”
I looked between him and the personal-sized pizza dough he had on his pan. “I realize you like sharing, and I’m all for that, but you’ll need two of those just to feel moderately full.”
“We’ll make more later. I’ll teach you how.”
Looking into his soft eyes and handsome face, I smiled like a dope and let him steer me toward the pizza sauce.
“Okay, let me guess what you love,” Austin said, removing his hand from me and reaching for the handle of the ladle. He straightened up and put his head back for a moment. “You like a little spice in your sauce, I seem to remember.”
He let the handle go and lightly dipped his finger into the sauce before tasting it.
“Not hygienic,” I murmured, watching his lips close around his fingertip.
“Meh. It’ll do. We can add more with the ingredients. Okay.” He circled the sauce around the dough before leading me to the cheese. “You like your cheese.”
“Mr. Tom never gives me enough cheese,” I said as I watched Austin sprinkle four of the five available options onto the sauce. “Correct, blue cheese does not belong on pizza.”
“My girl is a carnivore,” he said, looking over the options. “But does she feel like being a fancy carnivore today?” He glanced down my body, taking in the apron and dress that wasn’t mine. “I’m thinking we need a laid-back pizza. How about…”
He spread on pepperoni, sausage, salami, and lingui?a.
“What would’ve been fancy?” I asked as he headed to the veg.
“A little prosciutto, maybe a balsamic drizzle…” He looked over the vegetables.
“Let’s do that with the next one.”
“As my lady commands.” He spread on some yellow onion and green bell pepper before hesitating at the sliced olives. He released a breath, and I grinned as he reached for some.
“I thought we were sharing?” I asked sweetly, knowing he hated the very idea of olives.
“We are,” he said, spreading them on half. “I’ll be feeding you first, and I have your half all picked out.”