Note: This is really a continuation of "In the Dirt of the Day" more than a sequel. Thanks so much for all the comments!

-1-

The first time she came into his house it smelled of roasting vegetables and herbs. “You cook,” she said, hanging her coat by the door. His was there, patched brown leather. Her fingers caught a fold.

“Gotta eat,” Mal said. One of his hands crept around her waist, his mouth in her hair. Inara smiled. “Guess you got someone to do that for you though.”

“Well I can hardly cook for thirty people,” Inara said, turning in the circumference of his arm. Their breaths mingled. He tasted of earth now, of things deeply planted.

“Can I have a tour?” she asked. He broke away, shrugging.

“Not much to see.”

The big house next door he and Zoe had built a few years ago to accommodate a growing boy, a couple farm hands. Room enough for him, Zoe had said, but he liked to stay apart, liked his solitude. Privacy, he called it. Inara looked around at the dusty corners of the room. When they first settled, they’d lived in two rooms, he and Zoe and little Wash. Jayne, luckily for all of them given the space, had just been called away to his sick mother. All the money, what little they had, had gone into the farm. On warm nights, Mal used to sleep on Serenity just to get out of the cramped space. Now it was only him though, the front room for cooking and eating and living, and a side room for sleeping. Inara wandered through without asking, peeking into his bedroom. Strange to recognize things: a chair, his worn bedspread.

“Tain’t much,” Mal said stiffly, eyes on her.

“But it’s yours,” Inara replied softly, turning back to him. One of her hands rested on the frame of the door, the wood he had harvested and cut and planed, its grain rough and real.

“Suppose so.” He gave nothing away, she thought, even now. In her bed he had smiled like a younger man, time erased from their skin by the sun through the window. He stepped toward her, said, “We better eat ‘fore it