Chapter Fifteen
MILLIE
The Next Day
There is flour in my hair. I know this because Will told me, not with words but with that look he gets, the one where his mouth does something that isn’t quite a smile but is too warm to be anything else.
I reach up instinctively and find a small white cloud of it dusted along my temple.
I make a faint noise of indignation and go back to my batter, because the cake needs my full attention, and Will does not need any more encouragement.
He’s sitting at the kitchen table with his coffee, both hands wrapped around the mug, and at some point, that expectation that he’d leave stopped existing.
He’s just here now, occupying my dad’s kitchen the way he occupies most spaces he walks into, completely and without any apparent awareness of how thoroughly he fills them.
But I don’t mind.
That’s the thing I’ve had to accept, somewhere between last month and now.
I don’t mind Will being here.
But I do mind when he isn’t.
“You’re doing the measuring thing again,” he says.
I look over my shoulder. “What measuring thing?”
“Where you measure the ingredients twice.” He takes a long sip of coffee. “You always measure it twice when you’re thinking hard about something.”
I set the measuring spoon down very deliberately. “I’m not thinking about anything. I’m making a cake.”
“Sure you are, Brightside.”
“Okay, that’s the second time you’ve called me that.”
He raises a brow. “You don’t like it? I think it suits you.”
I smirk. “I like it. I just don’t get it.”
He studies me for a second, deciding how much truth I’m ready for. “You walk into a room, and it changes,” he says finally. “Not in some loud, look-at-me way. Just, things feel different… easier. Like the world isn’t quite as heavy for a minute.”
I open my mouth, then close it again.
He keeps going, his voice roughening around the edges, the words slipping out before he can pull them back. “Most days in my head, everything runs worst-case. That’s how you survive where I came from. Where we live now, you plan for what goes wrong. You brace for it.”
His gaze flicks over my face, then settles. “You don’t. You look at things as though there’s still a good angle buried in there somewhere. As though there’s always another way through it. It’s… annoying as hell.”
I laugh softly. “High praise.”
“It is,” he says, deadpan. Then, after a beat, “You remind me there is another side to things. That’s all. A brighter side.”
Something warm and slightly dangerous settles in my chest.
“So, I’m your emotional coping mechanism?”
“Don’t get cocky,” he says, but there’s a hint of a smile there. “You’re just… the part that makes the rest of it make sense.”
I tilt my head. “That almost sounded like a compliment.”
“It was. Don’t expect a speech.”
“Too late,” I say. “I’m writing it down.”
He huffs a laugh, shaking his head. “Yeah, yeah. C’mere, Brightside.
” And the way he says it this time feels different, less like a joke, and more like something he’s already decided is true as he wraps his arms around me.
I peer up into his eyes, smiling at him as the oven behind me ticks and hums, already heated to the right temperature.
I have been planning this cake for three weeks, ever since Sin confirmed Will’s patch date and the club tradition landed in my lap like a beautiful, slightly terrifying responsibility.
Whoever is closest to the new patch member provides the food. And there was no debate to be had, no moment of uncertainty, because I have always been the one who bakes for this club, and Will has always been the one I do it for most carefully, even when I couldn’t say that out loud.
Chocolate… four layers… salted caramel between each one, because he mentioned it once, offhand, three months ago, and I filed it away for an occasion such as this.
I am not going to analyze that too closely.
The batter is smooth, dark, and smells good, and as I peel away from Will to get back to the batter, folding it in careful strokes, he watches me from the table.
My dad is in the living room with the television on low, the background murmur of the midday news that he keeps for company when he’s reading.
The house smells like coffee and chocolate, with a lingering warmth of morning.
Outside, the neighborhood does what it always does, nothing dramatic, the ordinary soundtrack of a Saturday with nowhere pressing to be.
This is our rhythm now.
We found it without trying, without agreeing to it.
There was no moment where either of us said, ‘This is what we do now,’ but somewhere in the last several weeks, this became what we do.
He shows up, I cook, we talk, or we don’t talk, and both feel equally easy.
He watches me like this, and we both keep pretending we’re still in control of something we gave up control of the second we kissed.
Tomorrow, he gets his patch.
Tomorrow, everything is different.
I don’t know what to do with that yet.
My phone lights up on the counter, and I see Victoria’s name, so I prop it against the flour canister and accept the video call. Her face fills the screen immediately, already animated, her hair piled up in a messy knot, and her cheeks carrying that rosy flush of her sixth month.
“Okay,” she says, without preamble. “The food table.”
I pause my stirring. “Good morning to you, too, Vicks.”
“Good morning. The food table,” she repeats.
“Sin has it against the back wall, and I have told him three times that it needs to be near the door so people can grab food when they come in without having to walk the whole length of the room first. It’s traffic flow, Millie. It’s basic fucking traffic flow!”
From somewhere behind her, and it sounds like he’s in another room entirely, Sin’s voice carries through with an unhurried certainty, like he has no intention of shifting the table. “It’s fine where it is.”
Victoria’s voice flattens. “It is not fine where it is.”
“There’s plenty of room, Wildcat.”
“If I have to walk across that entire room at twenty-eight weeks pregnant every time someone needs the serving spoon—”
“You’re not going to be serving,” Sin snaps. “That’s what the girls are for.”
Victoria turns back to me, wearing the exact expression of a woman demanding backup.
I’m trying really hard to give it to her without laughing, mostly because Will has looked up from his coffee and is watching this whole thing unfold with way too much interest, clearly enjoying the fact that the spotlight has temporarily shifted off him for once.
“Tell him,” Victoria says. “Tell him the table should be near the door.”
“The table should definitely be near the door,” I say, loyally and immediately.
“It’s fine where it is,” Sin says again from somewhere deeper in the clubhouse, sounding entirely unconcerned.
“Diesel Antonio Moretti, if you say that one more time, I will—” Victoria cuts herself off, already moving, chair scraping softly as she heads for the hall like she intends to finish that sentence in person.
Not dramatically, not with a slam, she just disappears from view, and I stare after her for a moment before looking over at Will, who has gone back to his coffee, his shoulders shaking very slightly.
“Don’t,” I warn him.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
He takes a long, slow sip. “The table is fine where it is,” he says into the mug, and I throw a dish towel at him.
The rest of the afternoon settles into something easier after that.
The first layer of the cake goes in, and the kitchen fills with the warm, dark smell of chocolate.
Will gets up at some point, refills my coffee without asking, and grabs himself a beer.
I set my mug back beside my mixing bowl without comment.
My dad wanders through around two, reads the newspaper at the table for twenty minutes while asking Will about the ceremony logistics, and then wanders back to his armchair. The television murmur resumes.
I am pressing the finished layers together, caramel spreading slowly and golden between them, when the front door opens, and my dad’s voice carries from the hall, distinctly surprised. Then he appears in the kitchen doorway holding flowers.
He’s not holding them the way a guy holds flowers he picked out himself.
He’s holding them the way a man carries something that got shoved into his hands and accepted because fighting about it would have been more embarrassing than just committing to it.
But he’s fully committed now. Standing there with this stubborn, determined look on his face, like he’s decided he’s seeing this thing through no matter how much shit he catches for it.
“Penny,” he says, by way of full explanation.
Will looks up. “She sent a delivery. There were flowers.” He crosses to the counter and sets them down, a small bunch of pale pink and white stems wrapped in paper, with a kind of ceremony that feels more suited to placing evidence into an official record than flowers on a kitchen bench.
“There are flowers now,” he says to Will, gravely.
Will meets this with equal gravity. “I see that, sir.”
My dad nods, satisfied, as if something has been formally confirmed, and returns to his armchair.
I wait until I am certain he is out of earshot before I press my lips together firmly and concentrate very hard on my caramel. The sound Will makes behind me is not a laugh. He would strongly deny that it was a laugh.
“Penny sends him flowers every few weeks,” I tell Will, keeping my voice carefully level.
“That’s kind of her.”
“He accepts them and acts like they appeared spontaneously.”
“Sounds about right.”
I look at the flowers sitting on the counter and feel something tender move through me.
My dad is forty-nine years old, and he carries the whole weight of McClane Mining on his shoulders every single day, and some part of him still has the grace to be charmed by flowers even while pretending he doesn’t know what to do with them.
I love him so much it sits in my chest like an unmovable stone.
The rest of the afternoon rolls by more easily after that.
My dad comes back into the kitchen around four, carrying something heavy inside him, the kind of weight he’s already decided he’s handling alone, whether anybody likes it or not.
He makes coffee, then he puts a hand on Will’s shoulder as he passes through, heading to the counter, and he doesn’t say anything at all.
It’s brief, just one solid squeeze before Dad lets go again, but Will goes completely still for a second after it, caught off guard by whatever landed from that one simple gesture.
My dad doesn’t look back.
He takes his coffee and returns to his chair.
I saw it. I keep my eyes on the counter, the caramel, the cake. I don’t say anything either, because this is not the kind of moment that warrants words around it.
I will remember this.
I already know I will remember this.
By the time evening arrives, the cake is finished, covered, and sitting in the refrigerator.
My dad falls asleep in his armchair, watching something on the television that none of us have been paying attention to, his head tipped back, his breathing slow, and Will touches my elbow, nodding toward the sofa.
We arrange ourselves there the way we’ve gotten good at without discussing it, my feet tucked up and my shoulder against his, his arm finding the back of the cushion behind me, then somehow around me, and the television plays on.
A nature documentary, with a pleasant voice describing something neither of us is listening to.
My dad eventually heads off to bed, moving through the house with the tired heaviness he’s been carrying more and more lately.
Will’s thumb moves in one slow arc along my shoulder, back and forth, unhurried. I am aware of his breathing, the warmth of him, and the absolute ease of being here, in this space, with no performance required and nothing to prove.
Tomorrow is his patch ceremony.
Tomorrow, a two-year road ends, something new begins, and everything in this club, in this life we’ve built up around each other, shifts into a different shape.
I know this.
He knows this.
We have not said it tonight because tonight is not the time to say it.
Tonight is for this.
The darkened house, the warm sofa, the television neither of us is watching, and the peace of being with someone who knows you well enough not to need anything from you except your presence.
His breathing evens out first, going deep and slow beneath my ear.
I stay awake a few minutes longer, listening to it and watching the light from the screen move softly across the ceiling.
Everything is settled, calm, and exactly right.
And in the morning…
It will all be different.