Deirdre Sokolowska

They ate spiced chicken stew with chervil, thyme, and apricots. It tasted like sunshine, like the memory of summer while snow lay thick outside and the year crept farther into darkness.

"Are there flowers that hold significance for you?" Hannibal asked.

The dogs had laid themselves out on the rug near the table. They didn't beg. Will wouldn't have tolerated it, but in any case they'd all learned that if they were patient Hannibal would have something for them when the humans were done eating. Will watched the snow fall outside, specks of white that blurred and vanished into the dark.

"Jasmine," he said. "Honeysuckle. Clover. Butterfly weed. Stuff that grew wild. Not really stuff you have at a wedding."

"We shall see what may be done," Hannibal said.

Will felt like he should argue or disclaim. Just get whatever. Get what you want. He'd never even thought he'd get married, let alone care about the flowers. Those were all summer flowers anyway, summer memories baked in the steam heat of his childhood. But he didn't quite say it. Instead, he said, "Where do you want to have the ceremony?"

"In the woods," Hannibal said promptly.

Will blinked. "The woods? Those woods?" He waved in the direction of forest behind the house.

"Indeed. Those woods. Your woods. Do you object?"

Will stared at him. He felt almost as poleaxed as when Hannibal had proposed. "I thought it would be a—a venue. I don't know. A golf club or something."

"I believe you would hate that. Wouldn't you?"

Will nodded slowly.

"And I asked myself what you would not hate."

Will tried to imagine their guests tramping out into the forest some wet spring day. It was the first thought he'd had about the actual event that had made him smile. "Who are you inviting?"

"The cream of Boston society," Hannibal said with the hint of a smile. "Of course. As well as Jack and Alana."

"You're going to get all your fancy opera friends to trek out in the woods?"

"It will do them good. And they will talk about it for years to come."

Will pictured the ruined leather loafs, the hems of dressed ragged and muddy. "Yeah, probably."

"And your guests?" Hannibal said.

"Beverly. I guess if I'm inviting her, and you're inviting Jack and Alana, we have to ask Price and Zeller too." He thought for a second. "That's it."

Hannibal nodded, as if there was nothing weird about having, maybe, one friend on planet Earth. Will still wasn't sure if Beverly counted. But he sort of hoped she did.

"Perhaps two dozen guests at the outside," Hannibal said. "A small ceremony in the woods, a reception at the house."

"It rains in the spring. Sometimes it snows."

"I am familiar with the local weather patterns."

"Wet leaves. Mud. Rain dripping down everyone's collar. Are we wearing suits? Do they go with hiking boots?"

Hannibal swirled his pinot around his wine glass and looked at Will over the top of it. "You dislike the idea?"

"I think it sounds pretty good."

"Then let me worry about the details."

Will did. Occasionally, Hannibal asked him questions. What were his preferences between this fabric and that, this color or that, how did he feel about a priest as an officiant.

That one made Will raise his eyebrows. "You want a priest? Hannibal Killing Must Feel Good to God Lecter? With your church collapse scrapbook?"

"It is not a scrapbook."

Hannibal had shown it to him one evening as they sat in front of the fire at Hannibal's place. They drank dessert wine from France and ate homemade tiramisu and paged through a leather bound volume that had been old before Hannibal was born. Each page had a different newspaper clipping, some with photos, some without. Many had handwritten notes, and Will had watched the penmanship evolve from a hasty scribble, almost feverish in its need to get the words written down, to a more controlled script, to the flowing elegance that Hannibal wrote with today. It was definitely a scrapbook.

"We're not religious," Will said. "I'm not. I've been assuming you're not." The church collapse thing pointed more to raised-Catholic-turned-atheist, although that didn't seem quite right for Hannibal either.

"I am not religious in the ordinary sense, no."

"Just in the church collapse scrapbook and priest at your gay wedding sense."

"I want God to see our union. And a priest as an officiant is more elegant."