50. Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty
ELLA
He’s crossing the barn toward me.
I don’t take my eyes off him. The emptying floor, Evelyn’s lights, two hundred people funneling out to the barbecue smoke, and Ben Callahan walking straight at me with his jaw set. My heart climbs into my throat and sits there.
He stops in front of me. Opens his mouth.
“THE CAKE.” Faith arrives like a thrown cat, skidding on the waxed floor, eighteen years old and white as the frosting in question.
“The cake. The cake is still at the bakery. It was on the list under flowers, and I totally forgot to pick it up. The caterer says cake cutting is in ninety minutes and I only just, oh my God, I’ve ruined a wedding. Reverend Naomi is going to—”
“Faith.” I catch her by both shoulders. “Breathe. Nobody’s ruined anything.”
“The cake, Ella.”
“Ninety minutes is a lifetime.” The coordinator voice is back, thank God.
“It’s boxed in the walk-in, I have keys, it’s twenty minutes each way.
” I’m already calculating the light, the cattle guard, the tier boxes.
There’s only one person on this ranch I’d trust to drive a wedding cake down a valley road, and he’s standing right in front of me with whatever he wanted to say still on his face.
“My truck’s blocked in,” I say to him. Which is true. It’s also not the reason.
“Mine’s not.” He’s already moving. “Faith. Tell the caterer ninety minutes means ninety minutes. Tell nobody else anything.”
“What do I say if people ask where you both went?”
“Supply run,” we say together, and Faith looks between us. Even mid-crisis, one eyebrow goes up, because this family misses nothing, ever.
The drive to town is silent, and it’s the loudest silence I’ve known.
He drives with one hand on the wheel, and I sit a bench seat away with my hands folded and my whole body aware of him.
The bench this morning. The look across two hundred heads.
The walk he was making when Faith arrived.
The words are all there, sitting on the tip of my tongue.
I promised myself no controlling, no speeches, his timing.
So I hold my tongue, watch Tennessee go by, and nearly die with impatience.
The bakery’s dark and smells delicious, even without the ovens on. I turn on the lights, prop the door. The cake’s in the walk-in where Mom boxed it, three tiers, white buttercream with pressed pansies and one ring of piped blue forget-me-nots, because Mom knows what she’s doing.
We move in sync.
He builds a nest of moving blankets in the truck bed while I stage the boxes.
He takes the base tier, I take the middle, nobody says be careful because neither of us needs saying.
It’s the drawer and the plane. The oak and the stretcher.
The machine of us, running sweet as ever, in a dark bakery on the biggest night of the year.
We’re done in a few minutes. Plenty to spare.
And then we’re standing in my mom’s bakery with nothing left to carry, the counter between us. The silence crackles.
“Ella.” His voice is low. “Back there. Before Faith. I was coming to say…”
I turn around, and the sentence dies. He’s looking at me the way he looked in the storm barn, helpless and done pretending. And I am done, so entirely done, with waiting.
I don’t know which of us moves. It doesn’t matter.
We meet in the middle of my mother’s bakery, his hands in my hair, my fists in his good shirt.
The kiss is nothing careful, nothing polite.
Four days of silence and everything we haven’t said.
I make a sound against his mouth that’s embarrassing, but he doesn’t care.
He walks me back into the counter. Lifts me onto it like I weigh nothing, steps between my knees, and kisses me until the room tilts.
Jaw, throat, the corner under my ear. His hands grip my hips hard.
My heel hooks behind his thigh to drag him closer, and the want comes off both of us like heat off a July road.
“I missed you,” I get out, voice cracked. “God, Ben, I missed you, I have so much to say to you.”
“I know.” His mouth is at my throat. “Me too. All of it.”
His hand slides up my back. Mine are under his shirt now, flat on his hard muscles. He makes a low sound and presses in. We are two grown adults about to lose our minds on a bakery counter with a wedding cake waiting in the truck.
It’s my phone that saves civilization. It buzzes on the counter, buzzes again, insistent, and we surface like divers, foreheads together, both of us breathing as if we’ve run the valley road on foot.
Faith: WHERE IS THE CAKE?
Faith: people are asking
Faith: I panicked and said supply run and now MAGGIE knows something
Ben starts laughing first. Quietly, his forehead still against mine. Then I’m laughing too, tangled up on my mother’s counter. It’s the creek bank all over again, the two of us undone in the wreckage of a plan.
“That child,” he says, “has interrupted me three times this summer.”
“She’s consistent.”
“She’s a menace.” He eases back, sets me on my feet, and smooths my hair down with both hands. The laughter fades from his face into something older and steadier. His thumb rests on my cheekbone. The mud-wipe spot. “Ella.”
“We haven’t resolved anything,” I say. Because it’s true. “One kiss doesn’t. There’s a conversation we owe each other. It’s long. Some of it is going to hurt, and I need you to know that I know that. I’m not trying to skip to the end.”
“I know you’re not.” He holds my face in his hands. “There’s time. Later. You’re worth the wait.”
The words go through me like the first warm day of the year.
Worth the wait. Me. From this man, in this room, after everything I did and didn’t do. I have to press my hand flat against his chest and just breathe for a minute.
“Later,” I manage.
“Later. First, we deliver a cake, because if that reception falls apart, Dinah will find us, and if I’m honest, that woman terrifies me.
” He hands me up into the truck like a courtship, closes my door, and we drive back up the valley at fifteen reverent miles an hour, three tiers of buttercream riding behind us like a dignitary.
And the banter comes back. That’s how I know, more than the kiss, more than anything. Somewhere past the creek bridge he says, “You realize the cake chaperoned us better than Dolly ever managed.”
“The cake has one job, and it’s doing it.”
“We should get it something. A corsage.”
And we’re laughing again, in a truck full of sugar, everything still unsaid riding along patiently in the back. For the first time in a week, my stomach isn’t in knots.
Ben carries in the base tier like it’s the ark, I stack the rest, Mom’s pansies get a round of applause on sight, and the caterer nearly weeps on us both.
Word travels in the way of this town, cake crisis solved, twenty minutes flat, did you hear, and by the time the cutting happens, Something Blue has somehow gotten the credit.
The venue where nothing goes wrong. Maggie is telling a table of Chattanooga cousins that this operation could cater a state funeral in a hailstorm.
Naomi cuts the cake with Dinah’s hand over hers. The blue handkerchief makes another appearance. Faith, redeemed, eats two slices and starts a rumor that she saved the wedding, which, in fairness, she halfway did.
Ben finds me after, two plates of cake in his hands and gives me one. We stand surrounded by fiddle music, side by side, an inch of light between us, watching the town dance in my grandmother’s barn.
“We still make a good team,” I say.
“Never stopped,” Ben says.
And later sits between us, patiently waiting for the dancing to end.