Chapter 8 #3
"No. Not today. Today I want to ride my bike and clear my head and call my mama in my head and tell her I sat down at the table.
I will come around the bakery on Monday for a cinnamon roll, brother, and I will sit at the counter and I will eat my cinnamon roll and I will look my sister in the face, and that is going to be the second-hardest morning of my year.
But Wednesday morning was the hardest, and Wednesday morning is past, and Monday will get easier from there. You go to her tonight."
I went to her.
I drove to the bakery. It was past closing.
The CLOSED sign was hanging in the window.
The front of the shop was dark except for the small low light over the back register, and through the front glass I could see her — she was at the back counter, her back to the door, finishing up the dishes.
The light made her hair shine gold at the crown.
The shop smelled, even through the closed door, of the day's bread and cinnamon.
I tried the front door. It was unlocked. She had left it unlocked. That meant she had been expecting me.
I came in. I locked the door behind me. I turned the latch and I flipped the deadbolt, and the sound of the deadbolt made her turn around.
She was in her apron over a t-shirt and jeans. Her hair was up in two braids around her head. She had flour on the front of the apron and her sleeves were shoved up past her elbows, and she said —
"Boone?"
I said, "He came. He came to the farm. We're going to be okay."
She made a small sound. A small relieved sound. She put down the dishcloth.
I crossed the front of the shop to the counter and I came around the back of the counter and I went to her.
She came into my arms. She came hard. She put both her arms around my neck and she pressed her face into the side of my throat, and I held her, and I felt the small shake go through her — the shake of three days of being held together — and she did not cry, and I did not cry, but we stood there in the dim warm bread-smelling back of her own bakery on a Saturday night with the day's flour still in the air, and we held each other for maybe a full minute without saying anything else.
Then she lifted her face.
She kissed me.
She kissed me the way you kiss a person when the worst has passed.
She kissed me with her hands at the back of my neck and her mouth open against mine, and I kissed her back, and the kiss got long and slow and warm the way the kitchen of the farm had been warm three days ago, and her hands came down off the back of my neck and went to the front of my t-shirt and she fisted them there in the fabric and held on, and I lifted her — the bakery had a low shelf at the back of the prep area, hip-height, the one Wren had loaded with cooling loaves of bread earlier in the afternoon and that now held only the last two boules of sourdough still warm in their towels — and I lifted her up onto the only clear stretch of counter, between the bread shelves, and stepped between her knees, and her legs came up around my waist.
The bakery was warm. The oven was still cooling down, that big Hobart, ticking softly to itself in the back.
The light over the register was low gold.
The room smelled like bread and the faint sweet cardamom from the snickerdoodles she had made that afternoon, and the air had the close warm density of a kitchen at the end of a long day, and Harper was sitting on her own back counter with her legs around my waist and her hands in my hair, and she was saying, against my mouth —
"Boone. Boone."
"I'm here."
"I was so scared."
"I know."
"I thought he was going to take this from us."
"He wouldn't."
"He could have."
"He didn't."
I kissed her. I kissed her with three days of what if he doesn't come back to the porch between us, and she kissed me with three days of what if he never speaks to me again between her, and the kiss did the same thing on the back counter that it had done at the kitchen counter in the storm — it got open and slow and hot, and our hands got slow with it, and the apron came off her over her head and landed on the floor, and my flannel came off me and landed somewhere, and her t-shirt came up over her head, and she pulled mine off too, and we were in the dim gold light of the back of her bakery in our skin from the waist up, the warm shelves of bread on either side of us, and I had her face in my hands again, and I kissed her, slow.
I held her. I held her on her own back counter with her legs around my waist and her hands in my hair, and the kiss kept going slow and open until it stopped being slow.
Until the slow kiss broke the way wire breaks — all at once.
Her hands came down out of my hair and went to the front of my jeans, and she worked my belt buckle open with hands that were not entirely steady, and I helped her.
I helped her get the belt open. I helped her get me out of my jeans.
The jeans came down to my boots in a tangle and I did not stop to step out of them because we were past stopping for anything that could be passed through, and her hands were on me, then, with no fabric between her palms and my skin, and the slow careful patience of three days of being afraid let go in both of us at once.
She was still in her jeans. I worked the button on the front of them with one hand while my other hand was at the back of her hair holding her face up to mine, and I kissed her, and her button came open, and I lifted her — she was already on the counter, the lifting was small, an inch off the wood — and pulled her jeans down past her hips and her thighs and her knees and her ankles and off her feet, and they fell behind me on the kitchen tile, and her legs came up around my waist again, and there was nothing between us at all.
The counter was warm under her. The room was warm around us.
The bread on the shelves was still warm in its towels and the air was thick with yeast and cinnamon and the close warm dark of a kitchen at the end of a long day, and Harper was bare on the counter in front of me in the low gold light from the register lamp, her braids coming undone, the line of her throat exposed, her hands flat on either side of her on the wood, and her hands came up to my face, and she said —
"Boone. Now. "
It was not a question. It was the only word I needed.
I lifted her hips just enough to fit my body to hers — my hand at the small of her back, her arms around my neck — and I came into her standing between her knees on the back counter of her own bakery, and the first stroke was slow.
I made myself make it slow. Three days of being afraid had made me want to hurry and I would not give her the rushed version, and I came into her careful, deep, watching her face.
She made a long held breath let out against my mouth, and her hands fisted in the hair at the back of my neck, and she said —
"Yes. Yes. There. Boone."
I moved.
I moved different than I had moved on the quilt under the tin roof.
The quilt had been slow and the first time and the long careful learning.
The bakery was need. The bakery was three days of fear letting go in both of us at once, and we did not move slow, neither of us.
The rhythm we found between us against her own back counter was urgent in a way I had not been urgent with a woman in years, and she met me.
She met me. Her hips rose against me with every stroke, her hands at the back of my neck pulled my mouth down to hers, her teeth grazed my lower lip, and she said my name — Boone, Boone, Boone — into the warm dark of the kitchen, and the shelves of bread on the wall behind her rocked a little against the brick with the rhythm of us, and the loaves in their towels nodded gently in their cradles like a small congregation of approving witnesses.
I laughed once into her shoulder. Half a laugh, breathless, between strokes. She laughed back. The laugh broke into a sound that was not a laugh anymore.
I caught her around the small of her back and bent her backward an inch so I could put my mouth on her throat.
On the soft round of her shoulder. On the place above her collarbone where her pulse was hammering.
She gripped the back of my neck with one hand and the edge of the counter with the other, and the rhythm got faster, and her breath got short, and I could feel the tight low pull building in her — feel it in the way her body gripped me, feel it in the catch of every breath, feel it in the way her thighs tightened around my hips.
"Boone—"
"I have you."
"I'm—"
"Let me have it. Let me have it, honey. Right now. Right here. Let me feel you."
She broke.
She broke fast and hard against me on the counter of her own bakery.
She arched up off the wood and her hand at the back of my neck tightened and her other hand left the counter and gripped the front of my shoulder hard enough to bruise, and she came apart around me in a long sharp wave that rolled through her whole body, and she said my name — once, sharp, into the warm dark — and I felt every second of her release like a string pulled taut and snapped, her body pulsing around mine, and I held her through it with my hand at the small of her back and my mouth at her throat.
The moment she eased I followed her. I followed her hard.
I came into her with my forehead pressed against her temple and my whole body shaking against hers and her arms tight around the back of my neck, and I let go of three days of being afraid, and I let go of six years of holding the line, and I let go of all of it into her on the back counter of the only bakery on Main Street between the flower shop and the hardware store, and Harper Kincaid held me through every shake of it with her face pressed against the side of my throat and her arms locked around me like she was never going to let me go.
We did not move for a minute.
Maybe two minutes. The kitchen ticked around us — the oven cooling slow, the refrigerator humming, the bread shelves settling back against the brick wall — and our breath was the loudest thing in the room.
It slowed down together over the course of it.
Her forehead came to rest against my collarbone.
Mine came to rest on the top of her head.
I held her against me with my arms wrapped all the way around her back, and the warm bread on the shelves cooled slow on either side of us, and somewhere across the room the small clock above the back door clicked over to the next minute.
I told her, with my mouth on the top of her head, every thing I had been holding back for six years and three days.
I told her I was sorry I had waited so long.
I told her I was sorry for the porch. I told her I was sorry for the flour on your nose .
I told her I was sorry for the morning at the kitchen table.
I told her I was sorry for every Christmas dinner.
I told her I loved her. I told her I loved her again.
I told her I was going to keep telling her.
She held my face in both her hands. She said it back. She said it back, every piece of it.
When we were done — when we were both done, both finally, both at the same long slow moment — she stayed there with her forehead pressed against my collarbone and our breaths slowing down together in the warm air, and she said, very quiet, into the hollow of my throat —
"We christened the bakery."
I laughed. It came up out of me low and surprised.
I said, "Best bake you have ever made."
She punched my arm.
She punched it the way she had punched it on a counter twenty days ago when I'd said something dumb, and the punch landed soft, and she laughed against my collarbone, and I held her in the dim gold light of her own kitchen and I felt — I want to put this down — I felt every stone in my chest set down.
The line was gone.
There had never, in fact, been a line. There had been a story I had told myself about a line for six years, and there had been a story Harper had told herself about a line for six years, and Cade — without knowing he had given us anything, without meaning to — had given us, by walking across a hayfield with me on a Wednesday morning and coming back to a porch on a Saturday afternoon, the only permission we had ever actually needed, which was the permission to put the story down.
I held her on the back counter of Kneaded until the bread on the shelves was cool, and then I pulled her shirt back over her head, and I pulled my own back on, and I locked the back door behind us, and I drove her home to my farm, and we went to bed under my grandmother's quilt, and we slept like two people who had set down everything they had been carrying.
In the morning I made her eggs.
The next day was Sunday, and Sunday was for the rest of our lives.