Chapter 2: Love at First Bread
Across the district, in a dilapidated compound deep in the Seam, Katniss Everdeen squirms, fussing, as her Aunt Hazelle works her seamstress magic on her blue Reaping dress. It is the nicest piece of clothing the young Seam woman of eighteen owns, a hand-me-down from her mother's days as a Merchant. However, Katniss finds the hem of it a bit too conservative, much to her aunt's, the Hawthorne matriarch's, displeasure.
"Katty…."
"Please, Auntie Hazelle! Just one little inch?" Katniss begs.
Hazelle sighs and decides to relent. She should be grateful that her niece is agreeing to come out for this festival dance at all. When Hazelle's brother – the girl's father – died along with her own husband in that mining collapse, Katniss watched the withdrawing of her mother and seemed to attribute the folly of too much love as the cause. The headstrong young lady thus eschewed most social interaction, inviting few friends, and certainly spurned all attempts at romance. She hunted in the woods (at least before Thread came and turned the electric fence back on) more than she wandered the streets of the district, playing mother to her little sister Prim while also caring for her own mother.
But lately, Katniss has been coming out of her shell. Maybe Thread's sealing off the woods has left her stir-crazy, needing an outlet. Whatever the reason, Hazelle is at least pleased that Katty wants to do something normal for a teenager, like go out to a party.
The door to Katniss's room slams open and a pair of blonde pigtails launch themselves at the beautiful young woman's middle. Primrose is chittering excitedly with her sister, oohing and ahhing over her dress while, behind her, their cousin and Hazelle's eldest son, Gale comes sauntering in. He smiles in appreciation at how Katniss has gotten all gussied up.
"Finally getting off your high horse, huh, Catnip?"
Katniss playfully sticks her tongue out at him. "Everyone needs to relax sometime, Gale. And it makes Prim happy! I still need to care for her… I want to make a life, a home!"
Gale smiles. "Mighty glad to hear that, cousin." Scanning in his peripheral vision, he sees Thom, a friend of his from the mines and a fellow Seamer, eyeing Katniss with admiration and lust. Thom is looking to become Miner Foreman within the next few years, and Gale and Hazelle are both hoping that he and Katty will Toast the bread. No one could provide for her or Prim better, especially once their mother, Belle, grows weak enough to let death take her.
"Eyes up here," Gale snaps his fingers. Thom can wait for their wedding night to undress his little cousin, even with his eyes. Katniss floats to the mirror, she and Prim gushing at how the tucked hem now shows a little bit of leg.
"Katty insisted on me taking it in an inch," Hazelle whispers to her son.
Gale cocks an eyebrow. "And why is that?"
Katniss turns back to smile at him. "Because it's my first Harvest Festival, after all." And she and Prim twirl around and around as sisters sometimes do.
Later that night, many others are twirling and doing the reel in the Sqaure. A mixture of Seam and Town, though they are well segregated into groups. Katniss enters with Thom on her arm behind her older cousin and many of the other Seamers.
"Remember:" Gale had told them all. "Tonight is about family."
Clearly seeing the tension between the classes, despite everyone individually having a great time, Peacekeeper Darius Freeman and Mr. Storrow, the school principal, have weakly suggested that the Townies and the Seamers make a token attempt at dancing together. The adults have thus come up with a game akin to musical chairs. Two concentric circles will rotate about each other, and when the music stops, your dance partner is whoever is opposite you in the other circle.
The Townies and Seamers agree to it, at first. But when Gale Hawthorne comes to a halt opposite Delly Cartwright, the two classes self-segregate again and perform a passive-aggressive dance-off in defiance.
Wandering along the periphery of the Square, Katniss isn't dancing, of course. Thom Borden had tried to get her out onto the floor, but she had politely declined. Suddenly, in between the gyrating bodies of the other guests, she gets a better look at a flash of blonde hair, and sways to a stop, unable to help staring.
The boy that has entranced her is Peeta Mellark, the Baker's youngest son, on the opposite end of the Square. And to her immense surprise, he is staring right back at her. Katniss knows she and Peeta had been classmates together in school – and once, when they were children, he had tossed bread to her when she and her mother and sister were starving. That bread had given her hope that she and her family might live, yet she has never thanked him for it.
The noise and the other people falls away as Katniss and Peeta are drawn to each other across the expanse, gazing into each other's eyes, grey on brilliant blue. They share a dance all their own before he takes her hand and they retreat under the shadow of the statues of the Victors Haymitch Abernathy and Lucy Gray Baird, in the school play-yard just off the Square.
Katniss has expected that she might be asked to dance by someone tonight, but she never imagined… Her stomach does odd little flip-flops and her face is red. She is flustered – an emotionally weak state that would ordinarily make her scowl, but she is smiling instead, too blissfully happy to care. Her joy doesn't translate to a way with words (she's never been able to talk well with boys to whom she is not directly related), so she ends up stating the obvious:
"You're not Seam."
Peeta's grin is dazzling. "Is that OK?"
Katniss nods slowly, a tiny voice in the back of her mind warning her about what Gale has taught her, about the Merchants who live on the other side of the tracks which lead to the coal depot.
Peeta's happy expression dips a bit into shy uncertainty. "You're not thinking I'm someone else?"
She just continues to smile at him, recalling the bread he tossed at her to save her life. You never forget the face of the person who is your last hope. "I know you are not."
"I felt… I knew something never before was going to happen, had to happen, but this is so much…" Peeta is uncharacteristic in his stammering, and Katniss reaches for him.
"My hands are cold." Their palms touch, and electricity shoots up her arm and into her skin. It strangely makes her smile, even as she shivers. "Yours too." Lifting her head, lashes fluttering, she dares to bring her palm close to his handsome face. Ah – here, he is…. "So warm…."
She feels heat flood her and pool low in her belly when Peeta caresses her. "So beautiful…."
The pair sway into each other, hovering, holding back, feeling a little bit shy, perhaps. As they close the distance between them, Katniss is trembling. Once upon a time, she swore off the thought of ever marrying a man or having children, but now….
"You have no idea, the affect that you have," Peeta murmurs.
"I…. I don't know what you mean," Katniss stammers. "But you're..."
Her voice is silenced by the feel of his lips on hers, as they meet in a kiss. She sinks into it, wrapping this boy in her arms as she dares to kiss him back. And for a shining moment, she forgets about Gale, or about Primrose, or about the Hunger Games, or about Seamers and Townies, or about….
Something grabs her and yanks her back, then muscles into the space which, only moments before, Peeta's body was filling as it pressed against hers. Katniss almost whines at the loss of the handsome Baker son's warmth.
"Get your hands OFF, Townie!" Gale is bellowing, sticking a finger in Peeta's face. "Stay away from my cousin!"
"Cousin?" Peeta is gawping even as Gale moves in, and Katniss wants to cry out, "No!" along with her heart, but her swollen, flushed and very-kissed mouth refuses to work.
Then Gale is practically shaking her. "Couldn't you see he's one of them?!"
"No," Katniss answers defiantly. "I saw only him."
"There's only one thing a Townie wants from a Seam girl…" Gale lectures.
"That's a lie!" Peeta shouts. Suddenly, Katniss sees a blonde-haired young man who resembles Peeta (he might be one of his brothers) move in between them.
"Look, if you two characters wanna settle this outside by the Slag Heap…"
Then Thread and Officer Darius are at the scene, their presence subduing the tension – for now. It isn't enough to prevent Rye from taking Gale aside and discussing something urgently with him in the shadows. Katniss sees her cousin's jaw set before her gaze is sweeping back to drink in Peeta, even as she feels a hand around her wrist, tugging her out of the school play-yard and to the edge of the Square.
"Come, Katniss." And Thom leads her away.
Peeta finds himself floating out after a contingent of Seamers now leaving the Harvest Festival in droves. He quickly loses sight of Katniss, on the arm of that Borden boy (whom he knows to be particular friends with Gale Hawthorne), and his head is spinning. Only one singular focus guides him: to find the girl in the blue dress who once sang so beautifully in school assembly that all the birds fell silent. The former co-founder of the Townies gang now wanders almost without even realizing it into Seam territory, searching the backroads for the bewitching, beautiful girl of the coalfields.
"Katniss! Katniss!"
"Sssssh!" Over the crumbling fence leading into one compound, on a simple patio-deck leading from one window, there she is, now in a nightdress and smiling at him. How he adores her smile. With little regard for his own safety, Peeta gleefully hops the fence into the backyard's dry and dead grass.
"Come down!"
She hesitates, adorably biting her lip. "I can't…"
"Katniss!"
"… My mother, aunt and sister will wake up."
"Just for a minute?"
"A minute is not enough," Katniss smiles at him sadly.
"For an hour, then."
"I…"
"Then forever!" And Katniss has to frantically shush him as Peeta practically shouts it. "Then I'm coming up!"
As he doggedly climbs the drainpipe leading down the side of the house, Katniss hears her Aunt Hazelle calling from inside.
"Katniss!"
"I'll be right there, Auntie Hazelle!" She turns back and her mouth prettily drops as she sees Peeta swinging his legs onto the patio. "Quiet!" she chides.
The second he's over the railing, she is in his arms. His lips crush hers in a kiss that makes Katniss lose her breath and she breathes out a moan into him. "Hmmmmm….."
Reluctantly, she breaks the kiss first. "It's dangerous! If Gale knew…"
"We won't let him know – I'm not one of them, Katniss!"
She eyes him knowingly. "But you are not one of us. And I am not one of you…"
"To me, you're all the beautiful…"
"Katty! Katty girl!" The voice inside calls and Katniss presses a gentle hand into Peeta's lips as she turns back to the window.
"One moment, Auntie!" Taking Peeta's hand, she guides him into the farthest corner of the patio. Peeta is smiling at her curiously, and it makes her gooey inside.
"Katty girl?"
Katniss smiles weakly. "Her pet name for me."
Peeta laughs, and it's like the sweet music her father used to sing to her. "I like her! And she will like me!"
Katniss's face falls. "No… she is like Gale – afraid." Then, in the next second, the brightness is back in her eyes, and she giggles. "Imagine, someone being afraid of you!" Peeta – her sweet Peeta! – scary? The thought is laughable.
"See?" Peeta smirks.
She blushes. "I see you."
"Oh, Katty, see only me!"
Katniss and Peeta spend long moments, nearly an hour, huddled together on that small patio deck and talking quietly. "Come by the tailor's in Town tomorrow evening. I work there during the late shift," she tells him, already anxious to see him again. At last, he kisses her forehead once, then her lips, very gently. Katniss leans into him with a sigh.
"Good night," Peeta's voice strokes her, and Katniss nearly whimpers, watching as he scales down the drainpipe, steals across the yard, hops the fence and vanishes into the night.
What a fool she's been! To think that love was something she could do without! Well, no more. Some say that love makes fools of folk. But for Katniss Everdeen, it has made her wise.