Extended Epilogue Lance #2
She laughs, and the sound carries across the porch and into the trees, and I think about how not too long ago I was in a cage with blood on my hands and a knife pointed at me by a kid I tried to save, and now I’m arguing about plates with the woman I love while a one-eyed stuffed duck guards the bedroom.
Dr. Chavez would call this progress.
I call it everything.
Genevieve
I wake up to an empty bed, which isn’t unusual.
Lance still runs at four a.m. The nightmares are less frequent now—down from every night to maybe twice a week, but the running stays.
Dr. Chavez says the hypervigilance will fade in its own time.
I don’t push. I just make sure there’s coffee when he gets back, and that the new French press is loaded and ready, because if I have to drink one more cup from that ancient drip machine, I’m committing a crime.
What is unusual is the smell.
Cavall is gone, his bed empty, Virgil abandoned on the blanket. The cabin smells like…
I inhale.
Butter. Toast. Something that might be eggs or potentially a kitchen fire. It’s hard to tell with Lance.
I grab a sweatshirt and pad down the hall.
He’s at the stove.
Shirtless, because he doesn’t own enough shirts and also because he knows what it does to me and weaponizes it daily. His sweats are slung low on his hips. Cavall is sitting at his feet, watching the pan with an intensity that suggests he’s been promised a share.
There are two plates on the counter. He’s arranged toast on them in a way that’s almost geometric, like he’s been thinking about plating the way I showed him.
There’s a bowl of fruit that’s been cut with the precision of a man who learned to handle knives in a very different context. And the French press is full.
“Morning,” he says without turning around.
“Are you cooking?”
“Attempting.”
I lean against the doorframe. “What is it?”
“Eggs…scrambled. Maybe. They were supposed to be over easy, but there was an incident.”
“An incident.”
“The yolk broke.” He frowns. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
I bite my lip to keep from smiling. “Can I help?”
“No.” He points the spatula at me over his shoulder. “Sit down. I’m doing this.”
“Okay.”
“I watched a video.”
“A video.”
“On my phone. At four thirty this morning. A French woman was very specific about the butter temperature, and I’m following her instructions, so don’t intervene.”
I raise my hands in surrender and sit on the barstool. Cavall abandons his post to come press his head against my knee, and I scratch his head and watch the man I love wage war against a carton of eggs.
The result is…not bad.
The eggs are slightly overcooked and could use salt and the toast is a shade past golden, but the fruit is perfect because you can’t really mess up cutting fruit, and the coffee from the French press is actually, genuinely good, and when he sets the plate in front of me with an expression that’s trying very hard to be casual and is failing entirely, my heart does something it’s been doing a lot of lately.
It settles.
Not races or clenches or aches or breaks. Just settles, like it’s found the place it’s supposed to be and isn’t planning to move.
“It’s good,” I say, and I mean it.
“You’re lying.”
“The eggs need salt. The toast needs thirty fewer seconds. But the intent is there, and the coffee is a miracle. And you made it, which means it’s perfect.”
“The French woman said room-temperature butter.”
“The French woman was right.”
He sits down across from me and eats his own plate with the quiet focus he brings to everything, and I watch him and think about all the mornings that came before this one.
The mornings I woke up in my studio apartment and ate alone.
The mornings in Boston, staring at rejection emails and wondering if I’d ever cook for anyone who mattered again.
The mornings in this cabin when Lance was a locked door down the hall and I didn’t know yet that behind it was a man who would rearrange his entire life to give me as many seven seconds as he could.
“Percy asked if he could bring a friend next Saturday,” he says between bites. “Kid from his school. Having a rough time at home.”
“Of course. I’ll make extra.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Lance.”
“Yeah?”
“I want to.” I reach across the table and cover his hand with mine. “That’s the whole point of having a kitchen. You fill it with people.”
He looks down. Then he turns his palm up and threads his fingers through mine.
“My mom never cooked,” he says quietly. “Not once that I remember. Beverly did sometimes when Chef Aaron had the day off. She’d make breakfast, and send us off to school, and…”
He stops. I squeeze his hand.
“You’re not her,” he says. “I know that. I just—sometimes the wires cross. Safety and someone taking care of me. It’s still new.”
“It can be new for as long as it needs to be.”
He lifts my hand to his mouth and presses his lips to my knuckles. Holds them there. And I count.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
“Thank you,” he says against my skin. “For the coffee maker. And the plates. And the organized fridge. And for teaching me how to make a roux even though I burn it every time.”
“You’ll get it.”
“I won’t.”
“You will. Butter and flour and patience, remember?”
“And you. Butter and flour and patience and you.”
Cavall barks once, like he can understand us, and we both look down to find him sitting between our chairs with Virgil in his mouth.
“And Cavall,” Lance amends.
I laugh. He smiles. And the morning stretches out around us, unhurried, and soft, and ordinary in the way only extraordinary things can be.
Later, after the dishes are done and the cabin is clean and Cavall is asleep on the porch in a patch of sun, Lance pulls me into the bedroom by my hand.
“It’s ten in the morning,” I say.
“I’m aware of the time.”
“We have things to do.”
“Name one.”
“I have prep for tonight’s service. And you have a meeting with Paxton about the training program at two.”
“That’s four hours from now.”
He kisses me, and the protest dissolves on my tongue. His hands frame my face, thumbs brushing my cheekbones, and he takes care of me the way he does when he’s not rushing. It’s slow, and thorough, like he’s memorizing the shape of my mouth.
“I want to take my time with you.” His voice drops, low and rough. “No rush. No one waiting. No cage match at midnight or best friend knocking on the door. Just you and me and however long it takes.”
The heat that rolls through me starts at my scalp and works its way down to my toes.
“However long it takes,” I repeat.
He pulls the sweatshirt over my head, and then he grins and pushes me gently back onto the mattress.
He starts at my ankles. Kisses the inside of one, then the other, his mouth warm and slow.
He works his way up—the curve of my calf, the bend of my knee, the inside of my thigh where the skin is thin and every press of his lips sends electricity up my spine.
“I want to take care of you the way you take care of me. That’s the deal, Half-Pint. You teach me to cook. I give you the mornings you deserve.”
My eyes sting. He sees it and presses his mouth to my hip bone, then the soft skin below my navel, and then lower, and every thought in my head dissolves into white noise.
He takes his time. His mouth on me, his hands holding my hips, his fingers gripping me with exactly the right pressure, and every time I get close, he slows down, pulling me back from the edge until I’m shaking and gripping the sheets and saying his name like it’s the only word I know.
“Patience,” he says against my skin, and I can feel him smiling. “Isn’t that what you tell me? Butter and flour and patience?”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“You can try.”
When he finally lets me fall, it’s slow, the kind of orgasm that starts deep in my core and radiates outward until my whole body is trembling and I can’t see straight and his name tears out of me loud enough to wake Cavall on the porch.
He crawls back up my body, kissing every inch of skin along the way, and when his face is level with mine, he’s smiling like a man who just won something he didn’t know he was competing for.
“Good?” he asks.
“You know it’s good.”
“I’m confirming.”
I pull him down to me and taste myself on his mouth, and he groans and settles his weight between my thighs and I can feel how hard he is against me.
He gives me a moment to catch my breath, but I’m greedy for him.
“Your turn, Champ,” I whisper.
He pushes inside me with a steadiness that makes my back arch and my breath catch and my fingers curl into the muscles of his shoulders.
And then he moves, slow and deep, and we find the rhythm together—the one that belongs only to us, in this bed, in this cabin, in this life we’re building out of stubbornness and seven-second memories.
The morning light pours through the window. Cavall barks at something outside. The French press sits empty on the counter, the dishes are drying in the rack, and there’s a list on the fridge in my handwriting that says Prep: saffron, lobster, cream, call Papa.
And Lance is looking at me the way he did the very first time, like I’m the center of something he didn’t know how to orbit.
“I love you,” he says.
“I love you, too.” I press my hand to his face. “Now stop talking.”
He laughs. I laugh. And somewhere beyond the window, past the mist and waterfalls, the Lady of the Lake smiles.