Collin blackish's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Collin carried the pot of his grandmother's stew across the frozen path, and he knew the leopard was watching him again. He had seen the pale gaze cat twice this week, low in the drifts, tracking him each time he crossed the ridge toward the big red house where Rowan lived. He was going there because a woman had pulled him out of a blizzard three weeks ago and had barely looked at him since. He did not know how to talk to her. He knew how to cook. So he had spent the morning browning meat and peeling roots the way his grandmother taught him, and now he was walking half a mile through open snow to hand her a warm pot before it went cold. He heard the leopard before he saw it. A soft crunch, off to his right, where the wind should have been the only sound. Collin stopped. The cat stepped out of the drift twenty feet ahead of him, low to the ground, eyes the color of dirty ice. It did not rush. It was measuring him. He was holding a heavy iron pot with both hands and wearing boots that slipped on packed snow, and he understood that if he ran he would be on his back in three strides. He set the pot down slowly in front of his feet. He lifted the lid. Steam climbed into the cold air, thick with meat and onion and marrow. The leopard's ears twitched forward. Collin backed away one careful step at a time, leaving the stew between them. The cat crossed the distance in a low, patient walk and put its face in the pot. Collin kept backing up until he reached the porch of the big red house. He knocked. Rowan opened the door in her wine-colored coat, saw his empty hands, then looked past him at the leopard eating his grandmother's stew in the snow. "That was for me," she said. "It was," Collin said. She watched the cat a moment longer. "Come inside before it finishes and remembers you." She stepped back to let him in. It was the longest sentence she had spoken to him since the blizzard. He crossed the threshold, and the door closed behind him, and for the first time since she had saved his life he was standing in a warm room with her, empty-handed and still alive.