Epilogue
KIERAN
SIX MONTHS LATER
The sign I carved hangs over the door of the busiest room in Crimson Hollow, and I built every table under it.
Opening night. Snow coming down soft on Birch Street, string lights blurred through the steamed front windows, and inside, every seat in Bianca's restaurant is full.
The walnut sign over the door catches the light.
Below it, her menu, her abuela's recipes folded into whatever the mountain grows, half the town packed in to eat food they've been hearing about for six months.
She's behind the pass in her whites, hair tied back, calling tickets, and watching her run a kitchen is doing something to my chest I've stopped fighting.
Bishop slides onto the stool beside me at the little bar she let me build along the back wall.
"Town's full of people who used to cross the street when they saw you coming," he says. "Now they're eating short rib forty feet from you and nobody's scared."
"They're scared. They're just hungry too."
He laughs. Declan's two stools down working his charm on a woman who isn't buying it. Renata flew in from Denver for the week and has appointed herself front of house, seating people with the confidence of a woman who has never once doubted herself.
Her text from this morning is still on my phone.
Mountain man. She's happy. Like sunlight happy. You did that. Don't let it go to your head (okay maybe let it go to your head a little).
I let it go to my head a little.
Six months ago I talked myself out of this woman over math.
Now there's a drawer that's mine in a house we share down the hill, a side of the bed that smells like her, a dog who's decided she hung the moon.
The quiet I used to hide in turned into quiet we keep together, which is a different animal entirely.
A guy at table nine has had two glasses too many and keeps catching Bianca's wrist when she does a pass through the dining room. Third time, his hand lands at her waist and lingers.
The bar goes very still around me. Bishop puts a hand on my shoulder.
"Easy, killer. She's got it."
She does. Bianca peels the hand off her with two fingers and a smile that could freeze the snow off the roof, says something low that drains the color out of the man's face, and keeps walking like he's furniture.
Then she finds me across the room, raises one eyebrow, and mouths down, boy, because she knows exactly what I was about to do and exactly that she didn't need me to do it.
I sit back down. Bishop's still laughing when I order another whiskey.
The night winds down slow. Last table leaves near midnight, full and loud and promising to be back.
Renata steers the staff out the door with hugs.
Declan herds Bishop home. The lights drop to half, the snow keeps coming, and then it's her restaurant, gone quiet, smelling of garlic and woodsmoke, and the two of us.
She comes around the pass untying her apron, flushed from twelve hours on her feet, and walks straight into me.
"We did it," she says into my chest.
"You did it. I built furniture."
"You built the furniture, talked the bank into a woman with no credit history up here, and stood in my doorway every single night so I'd remember I wasn't doing it alone." She tips her head back to look at me. "Don't shortchange the furniture guy."
I kiss her. She tastes like the wine she snuck during service, and her hands fist in my shirt, and six months in she still pulls a sound out of me I don't make for anyone else.
"Lock's already turned," she murmurs against my mouth. "Renata flipped the sign."
"Did she now?"
I lift her onto the prep table she watched me sand last spring, and she's already pulling her chef whites over her head.
I get the rest off her fast, snow light blue through the windows on her bare skin.
My mouth finds her nipple, and her head drops back, and her thighs fall open for me with no hesitation left between us.
"Been watching you boss that whole room around all night," I say against her breast, dragging two fingers through her, finding her wet already. "Drove me out of my mind."
"You liked it."
"I loved it." I work her clit slow, then faster, while she rocks into my hand and grips the edge of the table. "Now you're gonna be quiet for me. Whole town just left. Don't need 'em coming back."
"Make me."
So I drop to my knees on her kitchen floor and put my mouth on her until she's biting down on her own fist to stay quiet, thighs locked around my head, coming on my tongue with a muffled cry that's worth every cold night I spent thinking I'd lost this.
Then I'm on my feet, freeing my cock, dragging her to the edge of the table and sinking into her in one stroke.
She wraps her legs around me and holds on.
I fuck her slow and deep against the table she'll plate a hundred dinners on tomorrow, one hand spread at the small of her back, the other cradling her jaw so she has to look at me.
Her nails dig into my shoulders. The table creaks.
Her whole body climbs toward it again, and I feel her start to clench, and I tip my forehead to hers.
"Mine," I tell her. Not a question. Never a question with me.
"Yours," she breathes back, and that's what sends her over.
She drags me with her, buried deep, my groan swallowed against her throat, both of us shaking in her dim quiet kitchen while the snow piles up on Birch Street.
After, she's draped over me in the one good chair, wrapped in my flannel, half asleep, while I rub the soreness out of her feet because she's been standing on them since dawn.
"Color," she mumbles, teasing, eyes shut.
"Green," I tell her. "All the way green."
There's a thing I've been working on up at the shop, late, after she's asleep.
A small box. Burl walnut, dovetailed, no nails, smooth enough to read in the dark with your fingers.
Inside it, when it's done, there'll be a ring I had a buddy in Denver set, because the one thing I can't carve is a diamond.
I'm not ready to give it to her tonight.
The restaurant gets to be hers alone for a while first. But I know how I'll do it.
Quiet. Up the mountain, just the two of us and the dog, no festival crowd this time, because she already taught me how to do the brave thing in front of a whole town and now I get to do the soft one where only she can see.
For tonight, I carry her out to the truck through the snow, settle her in, and drive us home down the mountain road we've worn smooth between us.
A summer girl who was supposed to leave at the end of a month.
She never did get on that plane.
Best thing I never let happen.