Chapter 6 #2
But right now, by some miracle of timing, the line was gone. And on the table sat a single loaf. Round, dark-crusted, the kind of golden brown that said it had been baked at the exact right temperature for the exact right time. It sat there like the last soldier standing.
I stepped up.
The proprietor looked at me, looked at the loaf, and laughed. "Just in time," he said, already reaching for a bag. "Another thirty seconds and I was going to eat it myself."
I almost smiled. Almost. Then two people stepped up behind me, close enough that I could feel the shift in the air, the casual pressure of a public space where personal boundaries operated on a different scale than I was used to.
A woman's voice, behind me and slightly to my left. "We're too late." Half to her companion, half to the universe. The tone was light, amused, resigned in the way people are when they've lost a small battle and decided to be gracious about it.
The proprietor bagged the loaf and held it out to me. I took it. The bread was warm through the paper, heavier than it looked, and smelled like something that deserved better than being eaten alone in a hotel room.
I turned to hand it to the women. Some instinct I didn't examine—generosity, or manners, or the particular code my mother had installed in me before I was old enough to resist it, the one that said when two people want the last of something and one of them is you, you give it up.
I turned.
And stopped.
She was—
Dark hair. Long, the kind of long that took years and patience, falling over one shoulder in a way that looked effortless but probably wasn't. Deep brown eyes, the color of bourbon held up to firelight.
Olive skin that caught the morning sun and did something with it that had no business being done at a farmers market.
A body that existed under a flannel shirt and jeans in a way that suggested it existed considerably well under everything and didn't need anyone's confirmation.
But it wasn't the beauty that stopped me. I'd seen beautiful women. Had known a few. Had married one.
It was the look she gave me.
Somewhere between hi and who the hell are you—direct, unafraid, curious in a way that had teeth to it. Not flirtatious. Not guarded. Just—present. The kind of look that said she saw what she was seeing and was deciding in real time what to make of it.
The words died somewhere between my brain and my mouth. They'd been simple words—here, take it—but they evaporated on contact with those brown eyes and left me standing there with a bag of bread in my outstretched hand and nothing useful to say.
"Hi," she said. Then she glanced at the woman beside her—gorgeous too, dark-haired, poised, a ring on her left hand—and both of them looked at the bread, then at me, and asked in near-perfect unison:
"Are you going to keep that?"
I'd forgotten I was holding it.
I looked down at the loaf. Looked back at her. My mouth opened and produced something about being hungry, which was technically true but came out sounding like I'd recently learned the language and wasn't confident in my conjugation.
Behind me, the proprietor made a sound. I didn't need to turn around to know what his face was doing. The sound alone said get it together, man.
"I'll give you half," I said.
Why the fuck did I say that? I didn't want half a loaf of bread. I wanted—I didn't know what I wanted. I wanted to stop looking at this woman and feeling the ground shift underneath a morning that had been perfectly stable five seconds ago.
That was when it hit me.
Not her. Not the brown eyes or the dark hair or the flannel shirt or the way she stood, like she was used to being the smartest person in whatever room she occupied but had learned to wear it quietly.
The vibe.
It was the vibe. Something in the way she carried herself—the self-possession, the warmth that was also a wall, the sense that she was fully formed and didn't need anyone to complete her but might, under the right circumstances, allow someone to try.
An energy I'd felt exactly once before in my life, in a parking lot in Minneapolis, when a woman with dark hair and direct eyes had looked at me and I'd thought that's the one and I'd been right, until I'd been catastrophically wrong.
Rachel.
The name moved through me like voltage. Not the woman herself—she looked nothing like Rachel, not really, not in the specifics. But the feeling. The frequency of standing in front of a stranger and knowing, in the place below thought, that this one could get inside you.
Fuck.
Rachel, who'd stood at the altar and said the words and meant them, or so I'd believed.
Rachel, who'd curled against me in bed and said she loved me, and meant that, too, probably, for a while.
Rachel, who'd stopped wanting me so gradually I didn't notice until the bed was cold and the excuses had calcified into a wall.
Fucking Rachel.
I looked at the bread in my hands. I looked at the woman with the brown eyes and the dark hair and the vibe that was already finding the cracks in a wall I'd spent three years building.
"On second thought," I said, "why don't you take the whole thing?"
I held the bag out. She took it—her fingers brushing mine through the paper, a contact so brief it shouldn't have registered and did—and I saw something cross her face. Confusion, maybe. Or the beginning of a question she didn't get to ask.
I nodded to the proprietor, who was watching with the expression of a man who'd seen a lot of things at his bread stall but never quite this.
Then I walked away.
I didn't look back. That was a discipline I'd learned a long time ago, in places where looking back could get you killed. Different context. Same principle.
The market thinned as I moved toward the exit. The white tents, the voices, the smell of bread and flowers and fresh-cut herbs—all of it falling behind me like a city I was leaving, which I supposed I was, in a way.
The sunlight hit me as I cleared the last stall. Hard and clean, no canopy to soften it.
I walked.
Faster now. The morning's unhurried pace gone, replaced by something tighter—the stride of a man putting distance between himself and something he hadn't expected to encounter. My hands were empty. My chest was not.
Fuck.
Three years. Three years of building the wall, of training myself not to feel that specific frequency, of converting every soft impulse into hard discipline.
Three years of telling myself that the lesson of Rachel wasn't that love was dangerous but that I was dangerous inside of love—that my need to possess, to hold, to keep was the thing that had driven her away, that my intensity was the problem, that a woman who stopped wanting you was a woman telling you something about yourself you weren't brave enough to hear.
And now a stranger with brown eyes and a bag of bread had sent a crack through the whole goddamn foundation in under thirty seconds.
No.
Whatever Charleston was selling, I wasn't buying.
Not that. Not again. Best to deal with the Ethan situation.
Go to Dominion Hall, hear the pitch, and make a decision based on something that made sense—mission, purpose, structure.
The things I understood. The things that didn't betray you if you gave them everything you had.
I pulled out my phone. The address still glowed on the screen.
Dominion Hall.
Fine.
Let's get this over with.