Chapter 20
1567 Words
I texted him at eight-fifteen on a Wednesday.
Not strategically. Or — not entirely strategically. I was genuinely at the bakery finishing a new recipe and I genuinely needed a taster and Renee had genuinely left at six and those were all true things that had nothing to do with the phone call three nights ago that I had replayed approximately forty times since Sunday.
Ava: Still at the bakery. Testing something new. You interested?
I set the phone on the counter and went back to the stove.
The reply came in four minutes.
Marcus: What are you testing?
Ava: Brown sugar bourbon tart. New for the winter menu.
A pause. I watched the caramel reduce and told myself I was not watching my phone.
Marcus: I'll be there in twenty.
He was there in fifteen.
The bakery at night was a different place entirely.
During the day it belonged to the neighborhood — the morning rush, the regulars, the casual browsers, the Thursday ritual. At night, with the front lights dimmed and the street outside quiet and the kitchen the only fully lit space, it contracted into something more private. More itself. The smells were more concentrated — butter and sugar and the particular warmth of ovens that had been running all day, the air thick and close and sweet.
I heard his knock at the back door — I'd texted him to come around — and let him in.
He stepped into the kitchen and stopped.
Looked around at the low light, the copper pots, the cooling racks, the organized beautiful clutter of a working kitchen at the end of a long day.
Then he looked at me.
I was in my kitchen clothes — dark jeans, a fitted black long-sleeve, hair pulled back with a pencil still through the knot from when I'd been writing notes. No apron. No professional distance.
Just me, in my kitchen, at night.
Something shifted in his expression. Subtle. Significant.
"You look different," he said.
"This is what I actually look like."
"I know." His voice was quiet. "That's what I mean."
I put him to work.
Not because I needed the help — I'd been running this kitchen alone since before he'd heard of it — but because there was something I wanted to see. Whether Marcus Calloway, who was composed and deliberate and controlled in every observable context, could hold onto any of that when handed a whisk and directed to stand next to me at a prep counter.
The answer, it turned out, was: partially.
He followed instructions well. He was precise the way I expected him to be precise. He whisked the brown sugar mixture without oversplashing, which was more than I could say for some professional staff. But he was also close — the kitchen was not large and I had not moved to the far end of it — and every time I reached past him for something or corrected his angle on the whisk or leaned in to check the consistency, the air between us did something that had nothing to do with the recipe.
"More wrist," I said, adjusting his grip.
My hand over his. Both of us very still for a moment.
"Like this?" he said, his voice low.
"Exactly like that," I said, and stepped back before I did something the brown sugar bourbon tart didn't require.
We ate at the prep counter.
Not the window table — the kitchen, on stools, the finished tart between us still warm from the oven, the rest of the bakery dark and the city outside quiet and the overhead light making everything feel close and amber and private.
He tasted it with the focused expression I had catalogued into memory.
Then he looked at me. "The bourbon."
"Too much?"
"Not enough." He looked at the tart. "You held back."
"I did not hold back."
"You did." He met my eyes. "You always hold back a little on the thing that would make it perfect. Like you're afraid of committing too far."
I stared at him.
"That's a lot of psychological projection onto a tart, Marcus."
"Is it wrong?"
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
He watched me with the expression he had when he already knew the answer and was giving me time to catch up.
"Add ten percent more bourbon," I said finally. "We'll test it again Thursday."
"I'll be here," he said, quietly.
The words landed differently at eight-thirty at night in a dimly lit kitchen than they would have at ten in the morning across a window table. Everything landed differently here.
I picked up my fork. He picked up his.
We ate in silence for a moment — the comfortable kind, the kind that didn't need filling.
Then he said: "Can I ask you something?"
"You usually do anyway."
"What do you actually want, Ava?" He turned on his stool to face me fully. "Not — from the bakery. Not from the expansion. From —" He paused. "From all of this."
The question was broad and specific at once and we both understood which part of it mattered.
I set my fork down.
Turned to face him.
We were close on the stools — knee to knee almost, the prep counter at our backs, the amber kitchen light between us.
"You know what I want," I said.
"I want to hear you say it."
"Why?"
"Because," he said, very quietly, "I want to know if it's the same thing I want. And I need to hear you say it first because I don't trust myself to say it first and then stop."
The kitchen was completely silent.
I looked at him — the grey eyes, the careful honest face, the man who was trying very hard to be good and finding it harder every Wednesday night in a warm kitchen in Brooklyn.
"I want you," I said. Plainly. Completely. "I have wanted you for four years. I want to stop sitting at opposite ends of tables and across counters and in cars outside buildings and feeling the distance between us like something I could reach across if I just — stopped being careful."
He held my gaze through every word.
When I finished he was very still.
Then he reached up and pulled the pencil out of my hair.
My hair fell down around my shoulders and his hand stayed at the side of my face, warm and deliberate, thumb tracing my cheekbone in a single slow line that was so precisely, carefully intentional that I felt it everywhere.
"Marcus —" My voice came out lower than I intended.
"I know," he said. His forehead dropped to mine. Eyes closed. Both of us breathing in the amber kitchen, the tart going cold on the counter, the city entirely elsewhere. "I know what this is. I know what happens after. I know all of it."
"And?" I whispered.
His hand slid into my hair. His thumb traced my jaw. He tilted my face up — barely, the smallest degree — and I felt the warmth of his breath before his lips, and every single careful thing I had built over four years of discipline leaned toward him like a plant toward light, helpless and completely without apology.
He kissed me.
Not like the Sunday phone call. Not like the almost-moments at family dinners or rainy bookstores or December sidewalks.
Like a man who had been deciding for months and had finally, finally stopped deciding.
Slow at first — careful, learning, the way you kissed someone when the kiss had been four years in the making and you intended to do it properly. Then less careful. His hand tightened in my hair and I grabbed the front of his shirt and the prep counter pressed into my back and the brown sugar bourbon tart sat completely forgotten between us on the counter.
When we broke apart we were both breathing differently.
He rested his forehead against mine again. His hand still in my hair. Both of us very still, the way you were still after something that couldn't be undone and weren't sure yet whether to be terrified or grateful.
"The tart," I said, somewhat breathlessly.
"Forget the tart."
"I spent two hours on that tart."
"Ava." He pulled back just enough to look at me, and the expression on his face — the unguarded completely undone version, the one I had been collecting for years — was everything I had ever wanted to see there. "I don't care about the tart."
"You should. It's very good."
"Add the extra bourbon," he said. "We'll test it Thursday."
I looked at him. He looked at me.
And then I laughed — genuinely, freely, the kind that came from somewhere that had been held tight for a very long time — and he smiled, the full devastating version, and the kitchen was warm and close and entirely ours for this one night.
Outside, Isabelle Ferreira was in London.
Inside, we pretended — just for this hour, just for this kitchen, just for the amber light and the cooling tart and the pencil he was still holding — that the rest of the world was very far away.
It wasn't far away.
We both knew it wasn't far away.
But for now — for right now — it was far enough.
- Writer
