Chapter 3: Three Minutes, Off the Boil
You did not go to the shop the next morning.
You told yourself it was because the trading house had a shipment in from the southern islands, forty chests that needed grading by noon. That was true. You told yourself it was none of your business whether a retired soldier with a scar across his face got on a boat for Paradis. That was also true. You told yourself you'd only known him eighteen mornings, nineteen counting the auction, and that nineteen mornings was nothing, a blink, not enough time for anything to matter.
That one was a lie, and you knew it the moment you sat down at your grading table and lifted the first cup and could not taste anything at all.
Greta found you at eleven, staring at a row of untouched cups.
She was seventy-four, white-haired, bent nearly double, and she still had the best palate in the port. She leaned on her stick and looked at the cups, and then at you, and then she sat down on the stool beside you with a creak of old bones and said, "Well. Who is he?"
"Nobody."
"Nobody doesn't stop you tasting." She picked up one of your cups, sniffed it, made a face. "Island stuff. Overpriced. Mark it down." She set it back. "It's the soldier, isn't it. The one with the tea shop. Half the docks have seen you going in there every morning grinning like a fool."
You put your head in your hands.
"He's going to Paradis," you said into your palms. "There's a peace delegation. They want him on the ship."
"And you don't want him to go."
"I don't have any right to want anything. He's not mine. He's never even said good morning to me." You laughed, and it came out wrong. "He says 'tch.' That's it. Nineteen days of 'tch.'"
Greta was quiet for a long moment. Then she reached over and tapped your wrist with one gnarled finger, the way she'd done when you were a clerk of twenty-three and kept over-steeping the samples.
"When I was your age," she said, "there was a sea captain who brought tea in from the far islands. Every season, he'd come to the trading house and stand at my table and wait while I tasted his leaf. Never said a word. Every season, I told him what was wrong with it." Her mouth crinkled. "Twelve seasons, he brought me tea, and I told him what was wrong with it. And then one season he didn't come back."
You lifted your head.
"Storm," said Greta. "Off the cape." She tapped your wrist again. "Every season I thought I'd tell him the tea was good. Next time. I thought there'd be a next time." She pushed herself up off the stool. "Mark the island stuff down. Then go and tell your soldier his tea is good, my dear, before somebody puts him on a boat."
The shop was open when you got there. It was always open. But the tables were empty, and when the bell rang over the door, Levi didn't look up.
He was behind the counter, taking tins off the shelves one by one and setting them in a wooden crate. His good coat hung on a peg by the back room. The cane was propped against the counter. He was packing.
Something in your chest folded in on itself.
"You're going," you said.
He set a tin in the crate. "Delegation sails in eight days. Onyankopon says they need someone the Yeagerists will listen to. Someone who was there." His voice was flat. "Some of the brats I trained are still on that island. If there's going to be a war, I'd rather there wasn't."
"Of course," you said. "Of course you have to go."
He picked up another tin, looked at the label, set it in the crate. "You didn't come this morning."
"I had a shipment."
"You've had shipments before." He still wasn't looking at you. "You came anyway."
You stood in the middle of the scrubbed floor with your hands at your sides, and every clever thing you'd ever said in this room deserted you at once.
"I made a blend," Levi said.
You blinked.
He reached under the counter and brought out a small tin, unlabeled, and set it on the counter between you. "Took me three weeks. Eastern hill for the body. A little of the smoky highland stuff for depth. Dried peel from those bitter oranges they sell at the north market, which is going to sound disgusting, but it isn't." He pushed it an inch toward you. "I wanted to get it right before I showed you. I was going to wait until it was perfect."
"Levi."
"Sit down," he said. "Don't touch anything."
You sat.
He made it the way you'd taught him, the way he'd always known, really, before you ever opened your mouth. Rainwater from the barrel by the back door. Off the boil. The cup warmed with a splash of hot water and emptied. Three minutes, timed on a battered pocket watch he set on the counter. He did it all with his back half turned to you, and when the three minutes were done he poured, and the color in the white cup was a deep red-gold, like the sky over the harbor just before dark.
He brought it to you and set it down at exactly the right distance from the table's edge. Then he stepped back, and folded his arms, and waited.
You lifted it. Breathed in. Malt, smoke, a bright thread of orange peel that shouldn't have worked and did. You drank.
You set the cup down. Your eyes were stinging.
"Well?" said Levi.
"It's good," you said.
He went still.
"It's good," you said again, louder. "It's the best tea I've ever had in my life. It was the best tea last night, too, before Onyankopon walked in, and I didn't get to say it. And it was good on the eighth morning, and the twelfth, and I said it wasn't, because I wanted an excuse to come back the next day." The words were spilling out now and you couldn't stop them. "I've been coming in here every morning for three weeks to argue with a man who won't say good morning to me, and I'd do it for three more years. I'd do it for thirty. And now you're getting on a boat."
The shop was completely silent.
Levi unfolded his arms. He came around the table, not hurrying, and you saw that his hand was not quite steady when he reached out and took the cup from in front of you. He looked down at it. Then he drank from it himself, three-fingered, holding it from the rim the way he always did, and set it down very carefully in its saucer.
"Tch," he said quietly. "You're right. It's good."
Then he put his scarred hand flat on the table beside your cup and leaned down, and his grey eyes were very close to yours.
"Good morning," Levi Ackerman said.
You stared at him. And then you started laughing, wet and helpless, and he made a sound low in his throat that you realized after a second was him laughing too, quiet and rusty, like a door that hadn't been opened in years.
"You're an idiot," you told him.
"I'm aware."
"I'm in love with you."
"I'm aware of that too." His eyes didn't leave yours. "You've been terrible at hiding it. You stare at my hands."
"I do not."
"Every morning." The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile, not quite. Something better. "I stare at your mouth. When you're telling me what's wrong with my tea. It's very irritating. I've spilled hot water on myself four times."
You reached up and put your hand on his face, over the long scar, and he let you. His skin was warm. His eyes closed, briefly, like someone stepping into sun.
He kissed you.
It was careful at first, careful the way he did everything, as if he was measuring and timing and getting it exactly right. Then your fingers slid into the short hair at the back of his neck, and his three-fingered hand came up to cradle your jaw, and careful stopped being the point. He kissed you like he'd been waiting nineteen mornings to do it and wasn't going to waste a second more. He tasted of orange peel and smoke. You held on to the front of his shirt with both hands, and when he finally pulled back, just far enough to breathe, his forehead rested against yours.
"Come with me," he said.
You opened your eyes.
"To Paradis. On the ship." His voice was low and rough. "The delegation needs people who can talk to merchants. Trade's going to be half of any peace. They need somebody who knows what's worth buying and won't be cheated." A beat. "And I need someone to tell me when the tea's wrong. Nobody on that island has any taste. Hange drank three sugars."
"I have a job," you said faintly. "Greta. The trading house."
"Greta," said Levi, "came in here yesterday afternoon. Bought a cup. Told me it was over-steeped. Then she told me that if I let you sit on this side of the sea pining for me while I sailed off to save the world again, she'd have me thrown in the harbor." He paused. "I believed her."
You laughed again, and he kissed the laugh off your mouth, quick and fierce.
"Eight days," he said. "Think about it."
"I don't need eight days."
"Tch. Think about it anyway. I'm not having you regret it." He straightened, and looked around his little shop, at the half-packed crate and the scrubbed tables and the sign outside that said only TEA. "Shop'll still be here. When we're back. I'm paying the rent a year ahead."
"When we're back," you repeated.
"When we're back," said Levi. He picked up the unlabeled tin, the blend, and pressed it into your hands. "It still needs a name."
You looked down at the tin. Then up at him: the scar, the tired eyes, the mouth that had just said good morning to you for the first time.
"Three Minutes," you said. "Off the Boil."
He looked at you for a long moment.
"That's a terrible name," Levi said, and kissed you again.
Outside on Lantern Street, the morning bells were ringing down at the harbor, where in eight days a white ship would put out to sea with a cargo of diplomats and old soldiers, and a crate of tea, and one very loud critic standing at the rail.