Chapter 14 #2
Instead, it’s everything we’ve been refusing to say for days. Anger, want, frustration, fear, and the shock of knowing exactly how she tastes and still being ruined by it anyway.
She makes a sound against my mouth, small and furious, like she resents needing air.
My hand slides from her face into her hair, and the knot gives way under my fingers.
She tastes of sugar and coffee and glaze she has no business making after midnight.
I feel the table behind her, the hard edge where her back meets it, and I use the last clean bit of judgment to shift the bowl of glaze farther away before I lift her.
She lands on the edge of the prep table with a breathless little noise that hits me right in the ribs.
“Careful,” she whispers.
It sounds like a warning, but I take it as permission.
Her legs part around me, and I step in before I can think better of it.
The contact is immediate. Terrible and necessary.
My hands go to her waist, and hers go back to my hair, pulling the tie loose completely.
Heat tears through me so fast I lose track of the room.
There’s only Halston’s mouth, Halston’s body, and Halston’s fingers pulling my hair hard enough to make my control slip another inch.
I kiss her jaw, then move down her throat. The bare place where her shoulder meets the strap of her bra.
It’s not enough, and yet too much all at once.
Her head tips back, and my name leaves her mouth.
The last time we were in this position, she didn’t even know my name. I grip the edge of the table on either side of her to keep my hands from taking more than I should. She notices immediately. “Stop holding back,” she begs.
My forehead drops to her shoulder.
I breathe once.
Twice.
Everything in me wants to ignore the warning.
I can still remember how she felt that night at her place.
I remember how she looked in the lamplight.
How she asked for what she wanted and still looked surprised when I gave it to her.
How she fell asleep against me afterward, warm and trusting, during the few hours neither of us could really process.
I want her again.
All of her.
I want her so badly it’s difficult to think about.
My hand tightens on the table until my palm loses feeling.
Halston’s fingers soften in my hair.
“Hey,” she says, quieter now.
It makes my chest ache. The softness of her voice despite being angry with me.
I lift my head, and she looks at me with swollen lips, dark eyes, and loose hair around her face. Beautiful in a way that makes me feel reckless and protective, yet ashamed of both.
“No,” I say.
She freezes.
I see the heat in her expression fold inward, and the damage is done before I can stop it.
“No?” she whispers.
I step back immediately, her hands falling from my shirt.
“I didn’t mean—”
She hops down from the prep table, tugging her sweatshirt back onto her shoulder. “Right.”
“Halston.”
“No, that’s fine.” She reaches for the bowl. “That’s probably the smart thing, right? The efficient thing. No demand spikes. No emotional specials.”
I close my eyes. “Stop.”
She laughs, but there’s nothing light about it. “Oh, I’m sorry, am I being inconsistent?”
“That’s not—”
“Then what is it?”
I open my eyes.
Her cheeks are flushed, her mouth still marked from mine. Her eyelashes are wet.
“It’s complicated,” I say.
But I know I’m wrong from the second the words leave my mouth.
“Wow.”
“Marley—”
“She’s an adult.”
“She doesn’t want anything to happen. She doesn’t know about this.” I gesture between us and regret it immediately.
Halston looks at the space between us. “This,” she says quietly. “What is this, Warren?”
I don’t answer.
There are too many answers, and each one of them asks something of me that I don’t know how to give.
This is desire. This is respect.
This is an attachment forming when I told myself this would only be temporary help.
Temporary proximity. This is me coming back after closing because I couldn’t stand the thought of her alone with doubt.
This is her anger making me want her more, not because things are easy, but because she’s being honest. This is me standing in one place where I have no business getting comfortable and already knowing everything about her.
This is not simple.
Halston nods slowly, as if my silence confirms everything.“Right.”
“Halston, you’re angry. Let’s—”
“And you’re not?”
I stop.
She laughs again. “Of course you’re not, Warren. You don’t get upset. You’re too practical.”
“That’s not true.”
“Then what are you?”
The question feels loaded.
I’m worried and angry.
I’m still hard from kissing her and ashamed of being hard while she looks at me like I’ve rejected her. I’m jealous of a city that had her before I did, of customers who get pieces of her every morning, and of a bakery that knows where she keeps the best parts of herself.
I’m leaving.
I’m leaving because I always leave. Because staying has never been the plan. Because Maryland is temporary, and Marley needs help only until she doesn’t, and I have spent my entire adult life not building anything in a place I could be asked to leave.
I say the smallest part. “I’m supposed to leave.”
The words feel cruel.
She stiffens, her eyes searching mine like she knew what I was going to say and still hoped I wouldn’t.
“When?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
“But eventually.”
“Yes.”
Her mouth presses together, and she looks down at the table.
When she looks back up, her voice is low. “You keep acting like I’m a mistake you can schedule your way out of.”
Everything stops.
For a second, I’m twenty-eight again, standing in a bakery in Stuttgart after being told I was talented but not the image they wanted out front.
Tattoos covered. Sleeves down. Jaw tight.
Passport in my bag. Already calculating the next city.
The next job. The next place I could leave before it left me.
Then I’m nineteen, looking at Marley asleep on a couch too small for her, promising myself she would never know how scared I was.
Then I’m thirty-eight, standing in Halston’s kitchen, realizing I have spent years calling retreat a plan.
A mistake you can schedule your way out of.
“No,” I say.
She shakes her head. “Yes.”
I step closer, and she steps back.
I stop immediately.
“I don’t think you’re a mistake.”
Her eyes shine. “But you think this is.”
I can’t answer. Not because she’s right, but because I’m afraid she may be.
She isn’t a mistake, and never will be. The timing, the secrecy, Marley caught in the middle and Halston raw from betrayal. I have no plan to stay and no right to let her trust me as if I might.
Her silence hardens, and she nods once. “Okay.”
And as much as I say it, I hate that word coming from her lips.
She turns back to the table, her hands shaking.
“Halston.”
“I have to work.”
“It’s past midnight.”
“I’m aware.”
“You’re upset.”
“Good thing I’m not making macarons.”
“This isn’t—”
She spins back toward me. “No. You don’t get to kiss me like that and turn me into a risk assignment.”
“I’m not trying to hurt you.”
“You already did.” She studies me for a moment before adding, “You need to leave.”
I turn but stop at the doorway. I should say something.
I want to say so many things.
Instead, I say, “Lock the door behind me.”
She laughs, wounded. “Of course that’s what you’d say.”
I close my eyes, then look back at her.
She stands in the middle of the kitchen, arms wrapped around herself.
I want to go back.
“Goodnight, Halston.”
She looks down at the floor. “Goodnight, Warren.”
I go into Saints & Sinners for a moment to breathe. Oliver is behind the bar, closing the register. He looks up, takes one look at my face, and his expression goes flat. “What did you do?”
I stop.
“I stopped.”
Oliver studies me, then sets the cash drawer down with a soft click. “Did she ask you to?”
“No.”
His jaw tightens, and after a moment, he looks toward the wall that separates the businesses. “You know,” he says, his voice soft. “For a man who notices everything, you miss the obvious a lot.”
I look at him. He doesn’t elaborate.
Behind me, on the other side of the wall, Halston is alone in her kitchen because I convinced myself that leaving was safer than staying.
For the first time in years, leaving doesn’t feel like discipline.
It feels like fear.