Welcome to Thirsty Thursday & Hungry Hearts, an original weekly meme hosted by (un)Conventional Bookworms. “So many of the books we read have food or drinks in them, some we’d love to try, and others we’d never ever want to taste… The idea of Thirsty Thursday & Hungry Hearts is to share a quote with food or drinks that showed up in a recent read, as well as if it’s something you think you’d like or not. Please share the title of the book it happened in, as well as the character who ate or drank the special little something you discovered between the pages of a good read.”

For my first time participating in Thirsty Thursday & Hungry Hearts I grabbed the scene of a breakfast picnic in a cemetery from the book I just finished, Lips Touch: Three Times by Laini Taylor. Jack Husk and Kizzy, the picnic-ers come from the first short story, Goblin Fruit.

She went with him to the little garden in the corner, and Jack Husk laid out his checked blanket behind some stone urns overflowing with ivy and scant alyssum blossoms left over from summer. They settled down and he opened his picnic basket and produced from it a loaf of golden bread and a round cheese with an artisan’s stamp on its thick rind. Things like that, cheeses signed like artworks, were unknown in Kizzy’s house, where they had either salty lumpish cheese her mother made or an army-feeding slab of impossibly orange stuff from the superstore.

Tucking her dress around her knees, Kizzy watched Jack Husk lay out purple linen napkins and a real silver knife with just a hint of tarnish on it, and then a footed silver bowl of chocolates wrapped in foil, and she was wide-eyed with the elegance of it. If she had ever though to dream up a cemetery picnic, the cemetery would have been a different, better one — in Paris or New Orleans, somewhere with moss and broken statues — but the picnic would have been just like this.

“Nice,” she murmured inadequately. Jack Husk smiled at her and he was so beautiful it almost hurt. A wave of skepticism swept over her, not for the first time. Why, she wondered. Why me?

“Silly girl –” she heard or imagined her grandmother hissing in her ear.

“Chocolate first,” said Jack Husk, the raspy edge of his voice erasing the faint, ghostly one. “That’s my only picnic rule.”

“Well, okay,” Kizzy said, feigning reluctance and unwrapping one of the chocolates. It was so dark it was almost black and it melted on her tongue into an ancient flavor of seed pod, earth, shade, and sunlight, its bitterness casting just a shadow of sweet. It tasted . . . fine, so subtle and strange it made her feel like a novitiate into some arcanum of spice.

The cheese was the same, so different from anything she’d tasted she could scarcely tell if it was wonderful or terrible. They nibbled it with the bread, and Jack Husk asked Kizzy if she thought it was too early in the day for wine, which he produced from his basket and poured into dainty etched glasses no bigger than Dixie cups. It was as earthy and dark as the chocolate and Kizzy sipped it slowly, softening and softening, stretched out on one elbow, her hip full as an odalisque’s hip, a lush hummock of apple green for Jack Husk to lay his head on, and he did, and closed his eyes while Kizzy lightly teased the ends of his unruly hair.

After a little while he sat up and reached one more time into his basket. He took out an apricot, which he cupped in his hand, and a peach, which he handed to Kizzy. She took it and held it. Its skin was as soft as the velvet of Jack Husk’s jacket and the scent . . . she could smell the honey sweetness of it even through the skin, and she lifted it and took a deeper breath. Nectar, she thought dreamily.