Page 75 of Champion
"Orzon's first attempts at trying to replicate human cooking didn't turn out too well," Clara told me covertly, with a shudder.
"He had a problem with salt," Pearl defended him. "He's getting better."
I peered at the entrée, taking a deep whiff. "It smells good, " I said, taking another whiff. "Kind of like lasagna." Myeyes focused on the sauce simmering on top of the concoction. "Blue lasagna?"
Pearl shrugged at my frown. "It is lasagna. Alien tomatoes just happen to be blue."
Using a massive utensil, an amalgamation of spoon, fork, and butter knife, Pearl dished each of us a healthy helping of lasagna. I stared at my plate, unsure if I could get past the idea of blue tomatoes. Emmy proved braver, bringing a hefty spoonful to her mouth. Her eyes widened, and at her issuance of an appreciative moan, the rest of us dug in.
The dish was surprisingly delicious, meaty, and cheesy, with the slightest bit of tartness from the alien tomatoes. I glanced around the table, grinning at Charick's obvious enjoyment of the dish before letting my gaze touch affectionately on each of my friends. We looked so different from that moment sitting around the campfire, each of them so young and beautiful and yet, somehow, the same. How many times had we lived this scenario, sitting together and sharing a meal and our lives with each other?
The memory hit me so suddenly that I giggled.
"What is it?" Pearl cocked an eyebrow, suspiciously eyeing my plate.
"The lasagna is great," I reassured her, then added. "It's just… do you know what this reminds me of? All of us sitting together eating lasagna?"
Our glances bounced off each other, faces taking on concentrated frowns as they tried to remember. Agnes was the first to get it.
"Oh my God!" Delightful shock played over her face.
Clara's eyes widened as she found the memory. "DePalma's on Broad Street."
Daisy's laugh was high-pitched and lilting. "The first meeting of the Outlander Tuesday Night Book Club."
"That was a lifetime ago," Pearl snorted. She wasn't wrong.
"We went through three bottles of wine that night arguing over who'd best play Jamie Fraser in a movie version of the book," Emmy recalled.
"Sam Heughan made a damn fine Jamie Fraser, but I still say Henry Cavill might have done it better," Pearl insisted with a grunt.
"Uh-huh," Daisy shook her head so hard the hair flew about her face. "Kit Harrington would have been good, though."
Emmy made a face. "Liam Neeson, even at his age. Can you image him as an elder Jamie?"
"Nope," Agnes held up her hand, signaling all discussion should stop. "Nobody would have done better than Keanu."
"You always vote for Keanu," Pearl grumbled, giving Agnes shoulder a playful smack.
"He's the perfect man," Agnes said as though she were extolling wisdom for the ages.
"You still say that now that you've found yourself a hot Vaktaire?" Emmy crossed her arms, affixing Agnes with a grin and skeptical glare.
"He looks just like Keanu," Agnes sighed, letting her gaze dance happily to where her mate sat, scarfing down lasagna and discussing star charts.
Hakkar looked nothing like Keanu Reeves, but one should not argue with a woman in love. Something Emmy and the rest of my friends seemed to recognize as well.
Pearl laughed. "That night, did anybody, in your wildest imagination, ever dream we'd end up here?"
"When you sayhere,do you mean in outer space? Or do you mean in outer space, with our twenty-something bodies back and mated to our own alien version of highlanders?" Clara clarified.
"No to both," Emmy hooted.
"Seriously?" I issued Pearl my most playful glare. "At that first book club meeting, all I could think about was how I'd manage to get all those big-ass books read." At the time, I’d been a widow starting a new job, and raising an adolescent boy on my own. Yet, if that first book club meeting had shown me anything, it was that I wasn't alone… not at all. These wonderful women had been with me every step of the way, holding my hand and sometimes carrying me when I didn't have the strength to walk on my own. We might have claimed our Tuesday nights were about the Outlander series, but it had been so much more.
"As I recall," Pearl mused, lips pursing. "You were the first of us to finish reading all the books."
"All but the last one," I agreed, remembering that the last book in the series hadn't been published when we were abducted.
