Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Girlfriend was a much more permanent word than dating. And Eliot had said it out loud. Had put it on record in the town bakery which might as well have been the town tabloid.
The rain came down steady outside. Eliot had known it was coming. He'd tracked the system since Tuesday morning, had watched the pressure drop. Had understood what the atmosphere was telling him and planned accordingly.
He had not predicted Tristan. Though he should have. Men like Tristan thought the world revolved around them.
Eliot was in danger of his world axis shifting.
Because he was attracted to Dalene Austen.
After spending the night sharing music with her, he had had the best night of sleep in months.
Maybe even years. The moment he finished his broadcast he wanted to see her, to tell her about the weather pattern, to go over his data. She was very quickly becoming his sun.
He was developing feelings for Dalene Austen.
Real ones. The inconvenient, unforecastable kind that had been building since he'd watched her sneak up a stairwell like a clumsy cat burglar.
Now, when Dalene stood up from the table and took his hand without a single glance back at Tristan, Eliot knew he was trapped in the gravitational pull of this woman.
He tucked her into his side, walked her to the exit, and opened the umbrella over both of them in the rain. Once again, she fit against him as though he had been shaped with her in mind. Behind them Tristan made some statement or other about his name, which neither Eliot nor Dalene acknowledged.
"Thank you," she said as they climbed the stairs.
"For what."
"You know for what."
He did. He said nothing. He held the umbrella steady as she unlocked the door to her apartment.
Her apartment was warm and smelled like the morning's baking. Underneath it the faint cedar and rain smell that had followed them in from outside. He closed the umbrella. Set it outside the door, a warning for their unwanted third neighbor that Dalene was unavailable.
The umbrella wobbled as the rain pelted, but it held its position. Just as Eliot realized he wanted to be in the position he was in; the man inside Dalene's apartment, keeping her company, making her feel safe and wanted.
He was in trouble. He'd known it for a while. He was only now admitting the extent of it.
"Hungry?" she asked.
"I could eat."
"You can help me bake some croissants."
He washed his hands at the sink while she explained the lamination process. The butter layers. The folds. Why the dough needed to be cold and why rushing it was a structural failure rather than just an aesthetic one.
"Like this," she said, and showed him the fold. "You're not pressing. You're persuading."
"Persuading dough."
"All baking is persuasion. You can't force it to be something it isn't. You just give it the right conditions and let it become what it's supposed to be."
He folded it the way she'd shown him. She watched and said "good" in the tone of a teacher.
They worked. Side by side at the counter. She put music on low — not Fleetwood Mac, something slower and instrumental. They talked in the unhurried way of people whose hands were occupied and whose guards were down because it was too early and too quiet for anything else.
"Why did you lie? On television. About clouds."
Eliot kept his hands moving. Everyone else had assumed his outburst was how he truly felt. Not Dalene.
"The lady I was interviewing called them cute. And I heard my father's voice in place of hers. I heard every time I'd come inside from that backyard and he'd ask what I'd been doing. I'd say watching the clouds, and he'd look at me like I'd said something embarrassing."
Eliot exhaled, trying to breathe out the bad taste the memory left in his mouth. He hated talking about his father. He hated thinking about his father. But with Dalene beside him, lavender in the air, and the dough giving beneath his fingers, he felt persuaded to say more.
"I didn't snap at her about meteorology. I'd just come from my father's funeral that weekend. I didn't tell anybody he'd passed away. Just went back to work the next Monday. "
He folded. Once. Twice.
"My father was a drill sergeant. At home, he ran things.
My mother, me. Like we were soldiers. He had very high standards.
The problem was — Sergeant Brooks wasn't always clear about his orders.
You'd follow the rules exactly and still get it wrong.
You never quite knew which version of the rules was in effect.
Which meant you were always waiting. Always reading the room.
Trying to forecast something that didn't follow any pattern you could identify. "
Eliot dared a glance at Dalene. She didn't look at him with pity. She looked at him as though she was quietly collecting data to help her understand the pattern.
"Weather follows patterns," he said. "Always.
Even when it looks chaotic, there are systems underneath it.
Pressure, temperature, moisture — it all obeys the same physics, every time.
You can learn it. You can read it. When I was eight, lying in that backyard, the clouds were the first things I'd ever encountered that made complete sense.
The whole system, right there above me, telling me what it was going to do if I just watched and waited. "
"Baking is like that," she said. "There are instructions. They're clear. You follow them and you get the thing you were promised. My grandmother used to say a good recipe never lies to you. It just tells you exactly what it needs and trusts you to listen."
Something moved between them in the warm kitchen air. The recognition of two people who had learned the same lesson from different teachers.
"Just as long as the recipe doesn't include lavender," he said.
She reached for a pinch of flour.
"Don't," he warned with a grin.
She threw it at his forehead, anyway.
"Vivienne would have liked you," she said around one of those endearing snorts. "She always said the best scientists were the ones who still had a little wonder in them."
They were on the last tray. The temperature in the kitchen had risen a few degrees with the oven going. Dalene turned to say something and stopped.
"You have—" She reached up.
He should have moved. He had enough warning — a fraction of a second, enough to step back, enough to deflect with something dry and self-contained that would have returned them to safe ground.
He didn't move. He wanted this, wanted her. Having Dalene's attention was like a drug. He understood why Letterman had wanted it back. Eliot had her so close, and he did not want to let it go. This woman with the constellation of freckles was pure sunshine.
Her fingers touched his jaw. Brushing flour away with light, unhurried attention. Her fingers were warm against his skin. Eliot had stopped breathing with the complete, involuntary certainty of a system encountering a variable it had not modeled.
Dalene stilled. Her fingers stayed where they were for one beat, two. Eliot was very close, and she was very close. He did not step back.
She pulled her hand away first. Slowly. Like a decision made in stages. By the time the timer went off, there was a few inches of space between them.
The last six croissants sat in their neat rows, entirely indifferent to what had just almost happened above them.
"Last batch," she said.
Eliot picked up the tray. He slid it into the oven because his hands needed something to do. She set the timer again.
And because he wasn't ready to leave, he said, "Why don't you get cleaned up and I'll make dinner."