10. Bryson
brYSON
Later, after the crew has scattered and the cupcakes are decimated and Ty has sent approximately forty-seven text messages about the kiss, I carry her cupcake trays to her car.
All four, stacked in one arm, because they're light and because I like the way she watches me do it—the slight widening of her eyes, the way she bites her lip, the flush that creeps up her neck when my forearm flexes.
I set the trays in her back seat and close the door.
She's standing on the curb, looking up at me with those blue eyes and that smile that I spent weeks pretending didn't level me, and my other hand finds the small of her back.
Right at the base of her spine. Right where she's warm and soft and exactly the right height for me to guide, to hold, to protect.
"Come to dinner tonight," she says. "I'm making cupcakes."
"You just made seventy-two cupcakes."
"These are different cupcakes. These are Tuesday cupcakes. They're smaller and uglier and they're just for you."
She's ridiculous. She's the most ridiculous person I've ever met.
She drives a yellow Beetle and wears sunflower dresses and names her cupcakes after days of the week and she looked at me—me, the silent, grumpy, emotionally unavailable wall of a man that the entire station walks on eggshells around—and decided I was worth smiling at.
I press my mouth to her forehead. Then to her temple. Then to the tip of her nose, which makes her scrunch her face in a way that nearly stops my heart.
"I'll be there at seven," I say.
"Bring wine."
"I'll bring wine."
She goes up on her tiptoes and kisses my jaw—the closest she can reach without me bending down—and gets in her yellow Beetle and drives away with a wave, and I stand in the Station 7 parking lot and watch her go and I think about the first day she came here.
Cupcakes sliding, hands full, sunshine energy at maximum wattage, and me in the corner pretending I wasn't already gone.
I wasn't pretending. I just didn't have the words yet.
I have them now. Not many—I'll never be the man with speeches and poetry and the right thing at the right time.
But I have the ones that matter. The ones I say with my hands and my time and the door I hold and the coffee I refill and the draft I invent.
And now the ones I say out loud, to her, in the dark, when no one's listening but us.
I pick up the wrench from where I dropped it. I go back to Truck 7. And for the first time in four years, I work with a smile on my face.