Bonus Scene: Love At First Loaf - Ashwood Falls Book 4

Bonus Chapter - Jace

     The first hard snow comes in December, which is late for Alaska. Usually the mountains start holding white by October and the valley floor follows within weeks. This year, the sky kept threatening and not delivering—gray mornings that smelled like cold metal, evenings where the temperature dropped but nothing fell. Gabby said the sky was “edging,” which is apparently a term from a different context that she used without thinking, and then turned the specific shade of red that means she’s said something she can’t unsay.

I didn’t laugh. But I remembered it. I remember everything she says, which is a lot of material to archive, given that she produces more words in an average morning than I produce in a week.

     The snow starts at two a.m. I know this because I’m awake—not for any dramatic reason, just because my body still runs on Hank’s schedule, pre-dawn and post-dusk, and sleep has always been something I do efficiently rather than luxuriously. I’m in the kitchen making coffee when the first flakes catch my eye through the window: fat and slow, catching the porch light and dissolving on the railing like they haven’t committed yet.

By four a.m., they’ve committed.

The trail between our cabins is buried by five. Six inches and climbing, the heavy kind of snow that accumulates with intent. The trees are disappearing into white. The world outside the window is losing its edges, going soft, going quiet in the way that only deep snow can make a place quiet—not the absence of sound but the absorption of it, every noise muffled and rounded and made gentle.

     Gabby is asleep in my bed. She stays here most nights now—not all of them, because she still needs the cabin, still needs her own space, still needs mornings where she wakes up alone and talks to no one but Carl before the bakery opens. But most nights, she’s here. In my bed, in my shirts, taking up approximately twice as much space as a person her size should be able to occupy. She sleeps like a starfish. She steals blankets with a precision that suggests military training. She makes sounds in her sleep—small, soft, complicated sounds that are not quite words, like her brain is still processing the day’s conversations and editing them for content.

     I bring the coffee to the bedroom doorway and watch her sleep because I am allowed to do this now. This is something I’m still adjusting to—the permission. The being-allowed. For years after Hank, the only living thing I watched sleep was Jasper, and Jasper sleeps like he’s been unplugged, flat on his side, legs rigid, occasionally twitching in pursuit of a dream rabbit. Gabby sleeps like she’s negotiating with the mattress. There’s movement. There’s restructuring. There’s the occasional full-body shift that redistributes every blanket in the bed and leaves me with approximately four inches of quilt.

She’s wearing my flannel. The green one, the one that’s too big for me, which means it hangs past her hands and makes her look like a child wearing her father’s shirt. Her hair is everywhere. Her face is pressed into the pillow at an angle that’s going to give her neck pain when she wakes up, and she won’t let me correct it because the last time I tried to adjust her pillow while she was sleeping she said, and I quote, “If you touch my pillow I will end you,” without opening her eyes.

     Jasper is at the foot of the bed. He’s on his back, belly exposed, paws in the air, which is the position he adopted the first time Gabby scratched his belly and which he has maintained as his default sleeping posture ever since. Belly to the sky. Maximum vulnerability. Total trust.

     I sit in the chair by the window—the one I built last month, cherry wood, designed for exactly this: mornings where the snow falls and the cabin is warm and the two creatures I love most are asleep in the next room and I can drink coffee and watch the world go white.

     By six, the snow is a foot deep and the road is impassable.

     The bakery won’t open today. Gabby will realize this when she wakes up and checks her phone and sees the messages from Piper—who is always already up, who texted “SNOW DAY” in all caps at four-thirty a.m. with seventeen snowflake emojis.

     The coffee is warm. The cabin is warm. The snow keeps falling.

* * *

     She wakes at seven-fifteen, which is late for her. She surfaces slowly, blinking, reaching for me on the side of the bed where I’m not, and then sitting up with the bleary confusion of someone whose body hasn’t caught up with consciousness.

     “Snow,” she says, looking at the window. Not a question. An observation. Her first word of the day, delivered in a voice still rough with sleep.

     “About fourteen inches.”

     She blinks. Processes. “The bakery.”

     “Closed.”

     “I need to text Piper.”

     “Piper texted you at four-thirty.”

     She finds her phone on the nightstand. Reads the message. Sets it down. Looks at me where I’m sitting in the chair with my coffee, and her expression shifts from bakery-owner concern to something slower, something that takes in the snow and the warmth and the fact that we are here, together, with nowhere to be and no one expecting us.

     “Hi,” she says.

     “Hi.”

     “Is that coffee?”

     “Yes.”

     “Is there more coffee?”

     “In the kitchen.”

     She doesn’t get up. She pulls the flannel tighter around herself and tucks her knees to her chest and looks at the snow through the window like she’s seeing it for the first time. She’s been in Alaska for six months now and the weather still gets her. Every new season arrives and she responds to it with the specific wonder of a woman who spent thirty-two years in Texas, where the seasons are: hot, hotter, briefly tolerable, and misleadingly pleasant.

     “It’s beautiful,” she says.

     “It’ll be three feet by tonight.”

     “Jace. I’m having a moment. Don’t ruin it with meteorology.”

     I take my coffee to the kitchen. Pour hers. Black, two sugars, in the mug with the chip on the handle that she insists is her mug because she chipped it during our first week and now it’s “personalized.” I bring it back. She takes it with both hands and drinks and makes the sound—the one she makes when the first sip is right, a low hum that vibrates in her throat and does something to my pulse that I have never acknowledged out loud and do not intend to start acknowledging now.

     Except she sees it. She always sees it. That’s the thing about Gabby—she misses nothing. She reads my silence the way I read grain, and the faintest change registers.

     “You’re staring,” she says.

     “You made a sound.”

     “I made a coffee sound. That’s a normal human response to caffeine.”

     “It wasn’t a coffee sound.”

     She looks at me over the rim of the mug. The steam curls between us. Her eyes are dark and warm and knowing, and the smile that starts at the corner of her mouth is not the big smile, not the one she uses when she’s being funny or deflecting. It’s the small one. The private one. The one that’s for here.

She sets the mug on the nightstand.

     I set mine on the windowsill.

     The distance between the chair and the bed is about four feet, and I close it. She reaches for me before I’ve fully sat down—her hands finding the front of my shirt, pulling, and I go because I always go when she pulls, because this woman’s gravity has been rearranging my orbit since the night she arrived in heels and threatened a moose with French bakeware.

     The kiss is slow. Unhurried. Nothing like the first time, which was frantic and dusted in flour and interrupted by reality. Nothing like the workshop, which was urgent and need-driven and partially observed by a dog. This is just us. The snow outside and the warmth inside and her hands on my jaw and my hands in her hair and the specific, devastating patience of a morning with nowhere to be.

     She tastes like coffee and sleep. Her mouth opens under mine and the sound she makes is not the coffee sound—it’s lower, quieter, meant only for the space between us. My hands move to the flannel, which is already half-unbuttoned because she never buttons things properly, and the fabric falls open and she’s wearing nothing underneath it, which she does sometimes—just throws on the nearest flannel without thinking, as if the concept of pajamas is a formality she’s outgrown.

     “Gabby,” I say against her mouth, and her name has become a whole language between us. It can mean good morning or stop talking or I need you depending on the inflection, and right now it means all three.

     She pulls the flannel off her shoulders and she’s bare in the morning light, the snow-light, which is softer than any other kind of light and makes her skin look like something I want to memorize with my hands. There’s the flour scar on her wrist—the one from Carl’s worst day, the day the oven door jammed and she burned herself getting a tray out, a smooth pink line on the inside of her left wrist that she wears like a badge.

     I take her wrist. Turn it over. Kiss the scar.

     The sound she makes undoes me.

     It’s small and broken and surprised, like she wasn’t expecting tenderness, like after everything—after the sex on the flour-covered counter and the afternoon in the workshop—the thing that gets to her is this. A kiss on a scar. The acknowledgment of a wound.

     “Jace,” she whispers.

     I kiss the inside of her wrist again. Then her palm. Then each fingertip—the fingers that knead dough and fix generators and grip the rolling pin and hold my face when she kisses me. I take my time. There is no rush. There is only the snow and the light and the architecture of her hands.

     She pulls my shirt over my head. Her fingers trace the lines of my chest, my shoulders, the calluses on my palms from years of chisels and planes. She touches me like she’s reading me, like I’m a text written in a language she’s still learning but is starting to understand. She finds the scar on my ribs—a woodworking accident from when I was seventeen, a chisel that slipped because I was rushing—and she mirrors what I did. She kisses it. Gently. Deliberately.

     The balance of it. The reciprocity. The fact that she pays attention.

     I lower her back onto the bed. She goes, pulling me with her, and my weight settles over her and she arches up and the contact of skin on skin from chest to hip is enough to make my breathing change in a way I can’t hide.

     “You’re shaking,” she says.

     “No.”

     “You’re lying.”

     “Slightly.”

     She smiles—the private one, the small one—and pulls me down and kisses me deep and slow, and her legs wrap around me, and I can feel her heartbeat through her ribs, rapid and real and present.

     We move slowly. Everything about this morning is slow—the snow, the light, the way I undress her fully and then stop to look at her because looking at her is its own act, its own intimacy, and she lets me look without deflecting, without joking, without covering herself with words or humor. She lies there in the snow-light and lets me see her.

     When I touch her, she says my name. Not loud. Not performative. Just my name, spoken into the air between us like it’s something precious and she’s placing it carefully. My hands know her now—the places that make her breath catch, the places that make her laugh, the places that turn her quiet. I find them all, taking my time, because we have nothing but time today.

     “Please,” she says, and the word is so simple and so honest that it strips the last layer off something I didn’t know I was still protecting.

     I move into her slowly. She inhales—a sharp, sweet sound that hitches at the top—and her hands grip my shoulders and her eyes open and she looks at me. Right at me. Not away, not closed, not hiding. At me. Like she wants to see my face when we’re this close. Like my face is what matters.

     We find the rhythm together. Slow, deep, matching the pace of the snow outside—patient and accumulating, building toward something inevitable.                          She’s quiet in a way she’s never been quiet, and the silence between us is not absence. It’s fullness. It’s the sound of two people who have said everything they need to say and are now saying it differently.

     Her breath changes. Her body tenses. My name leaves her mouth fractured—”Jace”—and the sound of it, broken open like that, breaks me open too. The release is simultaneous, which has never happened before, and the surprise of it makes her laugh—a breathless, stunned laugh that turns into something that might be crying, or might be joy, or might be the specific emotion that exists in the space where those two things overlap.

     I stay inside her for a long time after. My forehead against hers. Her hands in my hair. Our breathing coming down together, settling, like a house after a storm.

     “That was—” she starts.

     “Yes.”

     “I was going to finish the sentence.”

     “You didn’t need to.”

     She laughs again. Softer this time. She pushes my hair back from my forehead—a gesture so domestic, so ordinary, so devastating in its tenderness—and says, “I’m happy.”

     Two words. She says them like they’re new. Like she’s trying them on for the first time, checking the fit.

     “Happiness still surprises you,” I say.

     She nods. “Every time. Like I keep expecting someone to take it back.”

     “Nobody’s taking it back.”

     “Promise?”

     “I leave you fish every morning. That’s a promise.”

She laughs—the real one, the full one, the one that lives in her belly and fills the whole room—and I kiss the laugh off her mouth because I can. Because she’s here and I’m here and the snow is falling and nobody is going anywhere.

* * *

     We stay in bed until noon.

     This is unprecedented. I haven’t stayed in bed past six since Hank was alive and made me take a sick day when I had the flu, and even then I got up at seven to check on a glue-up. But Gabby insists, and Gabby insisting is a force of nature more powerful than snow or moose or cast iron ovens with personality disorders.

     We eat toast in bed. We drink more coffee. She reads to me from Edna’s journal—the passage about the first snow Edna experienced in Ashwood Falls, how she’d stood on the porch in bare feet and cried because it was so beautiful and so foreign and so far from the Texas heat she’d grown up in. Gabby’s voice gets thick when she reads it. She doesn’t comment. She doesn’t need to. The parallel writes itself.

     Jasper has migrated from the foot of the bed to the space between us, claiming the warm valley between our bodies as his sovereign territory. He’s on his back, belly up, paws in the air, which is where Gabby finds him when she reaches for my hand and encounters seventy pounds of dog instead.

     “He’s between us,” Gabby says.

     “He’s always between us.”

     “In a cute way or a concerning way?”

     “Yes.”

     Gabby snorts. She reaches across Jasper to find my hand and our fingers interlock over the dog’s belly, and this—this specific configuration of woman and man and dog under a quilt while the snow falls—is something I didn’t know I was building toward. Every table, every bench, every piece of wood I’ve shaped in this workshop was practice for this: building a life that can hold the weight of the people in it.

     At twelve-thirty, Gabby lifts her head and looks toward the window.

     “Jace.”

     “What?”

     “If Morris shows up at this window, I’m filing a restraining order.”

     I follow her gaze. Through the bedroom window, which faces the clearing behind the cabin, there is nothing but white. Snow on the ground, snow in the air, snow on the branches of every spruce and birch in sight. No moose. No movement. Just the deep, holy silence of a world that’s been covered over and made new.

     “He would eat the paperwork,” I say.

     She laughs. The sound catches me the way it always does.

     The snow keeps falling.

     We stay.