7. Brenna
brENNA
Iwoke up warm.
Not the surface warmth of blankets or sunlight or a room with good insulation. This was deeper—structural—the kind of warmth that came from another body pressed against yours through the night, radiating heat into your bones while you slept.
Gabriel’s arm was across my waist. Heavy, deliberate, his hand spread flat against my stomach like he’d anchored himself there in his sleep.
His chest rose and fell against my back in a slow, steady rhythm, and his breath moved across the nape of my neck in soft intervals that made the fine hairs there stand up.
I didn’t move.
Not because I didn’t want to—I needed to use the bathroom and my left arm was tingling from being pinned at an awkward angle—but because the second I moved, this became something we had to talk about.
The second I shifted and he woke up, last night would transition from something that had happened to something that was happening, and I wasn’t ready for that yet.
His T-shirt was twisted around my torso.
I’d put it on at some point during the night—I remembered that vaguely, stumbling to the bathroom in the dark and grabbing it off the floor because the apartment was cold.
It smelled like him. Not the smoke from the call—that had faded—but underneath it, something clean and warm.
Soap, maybe. Or just skin. Just Gabriel.
The morning light was coming through the window above the bed, landing in a stripe across the sheets. I watched it move. Slow and steady, creeping toward his hand where it rested on my stomach, and I had the absurd thought that when the light reached his fingers, I’d have to face this.
His fingers twitched. Then his breathing changed—a deeper inhale, a pause, the slight tension of a body transitioning from sleep to consciousness. His hand pressed against my stomach, a reflex, like he was checking I was still there.
I was still there.
“Morning.” His voice was rough with sleep. Low and unhurried, vibrating against my spine.
“Morning.”
His thumb moved. One slow stroke across my stomach, back and forth, through the cotton of his shirt. An absent, intimate gesture—the kind of thing a man did when touching a woman felt as natural to him as breathing.
That was the thing that scared me. Not the sex. The sex had been… I didn’t have a frame of reference for what the sex had been. I’d never done this before, never had a man’s hands on me, never felt what it was like to come apart under someone and trust them to hold the pieces.
But the physical part I could categorize. I could file it away as desire, as chemistry, as two people who wanted each other badly enough to do something about it on a kitchen table.
The thumb on my stomach. The arm across my waist. The hand that had pressed flat in his sleep to make sure I hadn’t left. Those things didn’t fit in any category I knew how to manage.
“You think loud,” Gabriel said.
I almost laughed. “What?”
“I can hear you thinking. Your breathing changed about five minutes ago.”
Five minutes. He’d been awake for five minutes and hadn’t moved, hadn’t spoken, had just lain there holding me and letting me spiral in peace. That was either the most generous thing a man had ever done for me or the most dangerous. I wasn’t sure there was a difference.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“I didn’t ask.”
“You were going to.”
“No. I was going to ask if you wanted coffee.”
I rolled over to face him, and the full impact of Gabriel Hall in the morning hit me without warning.
His hair was flattened on one side and sticking up on the other.
There was a pillow crease on his left cheek.
His eyes—that sharp, assessing green I’d gotten used to—were softer than I’d ever seen them.
Unguarded. Like he hadn’t remembered to put the walls back up yet.
He was looking at me like I was the first thing he wanted to see today.
Not with heat—though that was there, banked and quiet underneath—but with something simpler.
Something that looked like contentment. Like waking up next to me was exactly where he’d expected to be and he felt no need to explain it.
My chest tightened.
“Coffee would be good,” I said.
He leaned forward and kissed my forehead. Not my mouth—my forehead. Then he got up, and I watched him walk out of the bedroom in his boxer briefs, and I lay there on my back staring at the ceiling with my heart doing something I couldn’t define.
I heard him in the kitchen. Cabinet doors opening, the faucet running, the click of the coffeemaker. He moved through my apartment like he’d been there before—not tentatively, not politely, but comfortably. Like the space had expanded to include him.
I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. His shirt fell to mid-thigh. I looked down at it—dark navy, the fire department logo faded from a hundred washes—and ran my fingers over the hem.
I could do this. I could walk out there and drink coffee and be normal. I could be the kind of woman who slept with a man and woke up next to him and didn’t immediately start building an exit strategy in her head.
Except I’d never been that woman. Every good thing I’d ever had, I’d held at arm’s length.
The bakery was the first thing I’d let myself want completely, and it had caught fire.
Before that, culinary school—I’d graduated top of my class but spent the entire ceremony waiting for someone to tell me there’d been a mistake.
Before that, every friendship, every tentative connection, every person who’d gotten close enough to matter—I’d kept one foot out the door.
Not because I wanted to leave. Because I’d learned early that the leaving was coming whether I wanted it or not, and it hurt less if I saw it first.
Gabriel wasn’t going to leave. I knew that the way I knew how long to proof dough—not because someone had taught me, but because I’d watched him.
The way he showed up. The way he sat across from me at Bev’s and didn’t fill the silence with reassurances.
The way he’d stood in my hallway last night and said I couldn’t not come, like the pull toward me was something he’d stopped trying to resist.
He wasn’t going to leave. That was the problem.
Because if he stayed—if this was real, if the man in my kitchen making coffee in his underwear was actually choosing me, not just the version of me that was easy to want in the dark—then I had to choose him back. All the way. With no exit strategy, no arm’s length, no foot out the door.
I didn’t know how to do that. I’d never done it. I’d spent twenty-three years being the kind of person who kept herself just useful enough to matter and just distant enough to survive the inevitable moment when I didn’t.
And now Gabriel Hall was in my kitchen, and he’d slept with his hand on my stomach all night, and he’d kissed my forehead instead of my mouth because the forehead was the one that meant I’m not going anywhere.
I pressed my palms against my eyes and took a breath.
“Brenna.” His voice from the kitchen. Calm, easy. “Your coffeemaker takes forever. Just so you know.”
“It’s temperamental,” I called back. “You have to talk to it.”
“I’m not talking to your coffeemaker.”
“Then you’re not getting coffee.”
A pause. Then, so quiet I almost missed it, “Please make coffee. Thank you.”
I dropped my hands from my face and smiled. It hurt. Not the smile itself, but what it meant—that I was already in this, already tangled up in a man who talked to my coffeemaker because I told him to, and the fall was going to be devastating if I hit the ground.
I stood up and walked out of the bedroom.
Gabriel was leaning against the counter with his arms crossed, watching the coffeemaker like it was a structural problem he could solve with patience.
He looked up when I appeared, and his gaze moved over me—his shirt on my body, my bare legs, my hair wild from sleep—and something in his expression shifted.
Not dramatically. Just a slight softening around his mouth.
A breath he took and held for half a second longer than necessary.
“Looks better on you,” he said.
“Everything looks better on me.”
The words came out before I could filter them—pure bravado, the kind of deflection I’d been perfecting since middle school. But Gabriel didn’t laugh. He just looked at me with that steady, unhurried gaze and nodded once, like I’d stated a fact and he was confirming it.
The coffeemaker gurgled and sputtered. I walked over and pulled two mugs from the cabinet—the mismatched ones I’d picked up at a thrift store when I’d first moved in—and set them on the counter.
Gabriel’s hand found the small of my back as I reached for the sugar.
A light touch, easy, like he’d been doing it for years.
I stiffened. Just barely—a micro-flinch that I covered by reaching higher into the cabinet—but he felt it. His hand stilled. Didn’t pull away, didn’t press harder. Just stilled, waiting.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“I know.”
But he’d noticed. He noticed everything—the way I flinched at loud noises, the way I deflected compliments, the way I’d just gone rigid under a touch that should have felt natural.
He was cataloging all of it, filing it away in whatever internal system he used to read people and situations, and the thought of being that known—that seen—by anyone, let alone by this man, made my pulse climb.
I poured the coffee. Added sugar to mine, left his black. Handed him the mug and stepped back, putting the counter between us. Not running. Just getting some breathing room.
Gabriel took the coffee and drank. He didn’t close the distance I’d created. He didn’t ask what was wrong. He just leaned against the counter on his side of the kitchen, drank his coffee, and looked at me with an expression that said I’m right here whenever you’re ready.
That was the most terrifying thing anyone had ever communicated without speaking.
We drank our coffee in a silence that should have been uncomfortable but wasn’t.
The morning light moved across the kitchen floor.
Outside, Main Street was waking up—I could hear a truck idling somewhere and the distant bang of a dumpster lid.
Normal sounds. Morning sounds. The kind of sounds that meant the world was still turning even though everything had changed.
“I should go check on the shop,” I said finally.
Gabriel nodded. “I’ll walk you down.”
“You don’t have to?—”
“I know.”
He set his mug in the sink and went to get dressed.
I stood in my kitchen wearing his shirt, holding my coffee, and I felt the fault line running right through the center of my chest—the fracture between the woman who wanted to let him in and the woman who’d spent her whole life learning that the safest place to stand was alone.
Both of those women were me. I just didn’t know which one was going to win.