Chapter 28 #2
There are guests sitting at two of the tables with coffee cups in front of them. They don’t appear to be waiting for anything. They are just… here. Mid-afternoon, no scheduled service, people are sitting in the restaurant because it is warm, the coffee machine is on, and there are muffins.
Mr. Hoffmann looks up from his newspaper when I walk past. He’s been coming every October for six years, always the same room, the same two weeks, the fleece that has seen better days, and the thermos he fills from the breakfast station every morning without fail.
“Nevan! What a great idea with the muffins. Every year it’s been good.
But this year it’s something else. This…
” he gestures at the coffee machine, the tray, “… this is exactly the kind of thing that makes a place worth coming back to. The little something that makes it feel as if someone actually thought about you.”
“I’m glad you’re enjoying your stay with us, Mr. Hoffmann,” I say, and mean it more than I usually do.
Mabel thinks I can’t run this place alone, even though I do. But I think, for the first time ever, I’m standing in a room that shows what it would look like if I didn’t have to.
I walk up to the server station, pick up a muffin from the tray because it seems rude not to, and take a bite.
Holy hell.
The inside is soft in a way that shouldn’t be possible from a batch made however many hours ago,
“Good, right?” Sydney is beside me out of nowhere, leaning against the server station with her arms crossed and a grin that I don’t think I’ve seen her aim in my direction before. “I think I’ve never had a better muffin in my life, and the lunch sandwiches were just as good.”
“Yeah?” I ask around a mouthful.
God, Lennon knows her shit.
She did all of this.
For me.
She ran breakfast, then lunch, set up the coffee station, made the muffins, put the ingredient card next to them so guests with allergies could check, and cleaned up after all of it. Did every bit of it so I could sleep in.
I take another bite.
Sydney keeps talking. I catch how she’s angled toward me, but I’m not really listening.
What is in this glazing?
“Is she still here?” I ask, licking my fingers clean.
“Lennon?” Sydney’s eyebrow shoots up.
“Yeah.”
“Uh… yeah. She left maybe half an hour ago after setting up the coffee station. Went back to your place, I think.”
“Thanks,” I say, and grab another muffin off the tray on the way out.
I’m halfway down the path when I hear it. Laughing. Her laughing, which I can pick out now from a distance with a reliability that I’m not going to think about. Underneath it is Jasper’s voice, lower and more animated than usual, and then hers again.
I slow down before I’ve decided to.
They’re on the swings.
Lennon is on the left one with her feet dragging slightly through the grass, and Jasper is on the right. They’re in the middle of some conversation that has them animated and gesturing. She throws her head back, laughing at something he said, and he lights up like someone just handed him oxygen.
Jasper doesn’t get that, not really, not from most people.
I’ve missed it myself, more times than I like.
She doesn’t. She looks at him like he makes sense, like everything he says matters.
Like he’s not too much.
Jasper deserves that. He’s deserved it for years.
I’m glad it’s her.
I’m really fucking glad to have her sunshine back.
My mom is in the garden a few feet away, hands moving through the herb bed. Mabel is in the chair beside her, while the afternoon light shines across all of it, and I stand on the path and just look.
Mabel catches my eye over their heads. The look she gives me speaks for itself as she looks at Lennon, then back at me, and the corner of her mouth does the small thing it does.
I look away first and back to my little brother and my chef, a smile spreading across my face as I walk over to them. I come up beside Lennon’s swing and crouch down, bringing myself to her level, and put my hand over hers where it’s wrapped around the rope.
She turns, and when she sees me this close, the laugh is still on her face, caught mid-fade, and her eyes are bright from it.
“What did you do?” I ask quietly.
“Did you sleep?” she asks, at the same time.
“Better than I ever have in my life.”
And that should concern me more than it does.
Something moves through her expression, soft, pleased, and a little smug. “That was the plan.”
“What did you do, you little minx?”
“I had everything under control.” She lifts her chin, the smugness fully committed now. “The coffee station needed to come out anyway. The muffins took forty minutes. The sandwiches were—”
“A phenomenon, apparently.” I take a bite of the muffin. “I got stopped by guests in reception on my way to find you. To yell at you.”
“You were going to yell at me?”
“I was going to be very stern.”
“You’re crouching beside a swing set, eating a muffin.”
“Sternly,” I say around a mouthful. “I’m doing it very sternly.”
Her lips press together. As I finish my muffin, her hand shifts under mine on the rope, not pulling away, just settling and adjusting to the weight of my hand over hers.
“You let me sleep,” I murmur.
No one does that.
“You needed it,” she whispers back.
“You ran my breakfast service.”
“It was fine.”
“Lennon.”
“Nevan.”
I look at her. At the brightness still in her eyes, the pink in her cheeks from the cold, how she’s looking back at me as though she’s waiting to see what I’m going to do with all of it. Like she did a thing, she’d do it again, she’s not remotely sorry, and she wants me to know that.
I lean in and press my lips to her temple before I’ve fully decided to.
Like my body got there first.
“Thank you,” I say, against her hair, quiet enough that it’s only hers.
“You’re welcome,” she says, almost primly, and I can hear the smile in it.
I pull back, and Jasper looks at me over her head with those knowing eyes and says absolutely nothing, which is somehow the loudest thing he’s ever done.
I should get ready for the logging shift, but instead, I drop down onto the grass beside Lennon’s swing and stretch my legs out in front of me.
The ground is cold through my jeans, but I don’t particularly care.
Her swing sways a little when I settle, and I reach up without thinking and wrap my hand around her calf, holding it.
Her hand finds my hair, her fingers moving into it like they did last night in the dark, as if she does it without noticing, as if this is already a habit, and we’re already people who do this.
Like we skipped a step somewhere.
I close my eyes and let that be true for a few moments.
Jasper is saying something about the herb Mom apparently gave her and what it does, Lennon is listening and responding as her hand keeps moving, and I let my eyes close.
Her thumbnail traces a slow line from my temple to the back of my neck, and my whole nervous system quietly dismantles itself. I lean my head more heavily against her leg without meaning to, and to my relief, she lets me.
The conversation continues over my head, Jasper’s voice easy and animated, Lennon asking questions with that quality she has of actually wanting to know the answers while her fingernails keep moving through my hair in these long, slow strokes.
I am aware, from a very comfortable distance, that my heart is doing something it probably shouldn’t, and that there is a warmth low in my stomach that has no business being there.
Still, I don’t move, refusing to think about it.
I stay exactly where I am, cheek against her knee, her hand in my hair, the cold ground under me, and the pale sun on my face. I think about nothing at all for what might be the first time in months.
Then she pulls, a gentle tug at the roots, and the sound that comes out of me is completely involuntary. It’s a low groan that I feel in my chest before I hear it, and she laughs.
“Are you even listening, Nev?”
I open my eyes and look up at her. “What?”
Her eyes are dancing. “We were talking about your birthday.”
“What about it?”
“It’s in two days.” She looks down at me with an expression that is doing several things at once, mostly fond and exasperated. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I shrug, which is difficult to do with my head on someone’s knee. “Wasn’t important.”
It never is.
She pulls at my hair again, a little less gently.
I glare up at her. “Hey.”