Slate's cackling made her flush bright red with embarrassment, her ears swiveling downwards in shame as she realized how utterly stupid and helpless she was. Everyone else could do it, they made it look so easy, why couldn't she??
She braced herself fully for his jeering, waiting for him to call her a dolt and ask how she even remembered to breathe or something, but it never came. Her shoulders relaxed a little as the other Kulshedra wrapped his hand carefully around hers and she watched, fixated with full concentration on the motion and the amount of force he applied to it.
She was determined to get this right, she couldn't possibly fuck up a second time. She was used to being praised for everything she did, not the opposite, so she was fully focused on fixing this.
She flicked some drops of egg into the pan, the sizzling sounds loud in her ears as she pucked up the third egg and grimaced a little. Right, okay, gently now...
She tapped it lightly against the edge of the pan, and while a small hairline crack appeared, it apparently wasn't enough to open it. Holding her breath as she concentrated, she tapped it again, just slightly harder, and as soon as the crack appeared she lurched to keep the egg suspended over the center of the pan so half didn't end up in the fire again. She coaxed her carefully maintained nails into the edges of the seam and split it; it didn't come clean into two perfect halves like Slate's had, but the egg plopped successfully into the pan with no eggshell bits in it!
She pulled her arms back, setting the empty shell with the others and was beaming. Okay, that wasn't so hard! She'd just been a little too eager to be fast like the others, was all!
"You didn't answer my question." She said, looking up at him with her triumphant smile still plastered on her face.
"And do you know how to cook other stuff?"
It occurred to her then that while they knew each others' personalities like they knew their own scales, she didn't know a whole lot about him past what she'd observed in the years he'd been in the tribe. How he interacted with the others, the kinds of faces he made, what kinds of jokes he liked, the food he didn't eat and even a rough idea of his sleep schedule (but to be fair she knew all that about most of the other tribe members too, there weren't many of them.)
She wanted to know other things about him, maybe even things the others didn't know--and she didn't know why that made her heart skip a beat.