Kiss Her Once for Me (61)

“You could get help.”

She scowls, like help is a disgusting word, but a minute ago, her face lit up like a child’s on Christmas morning. “Why baking?”

Jack raises her shoulders up to her ears defensively. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, why baking? How did you get into it?”

She looks uncertain about answering this question on an abandoned street corner as dusk begins to settle around us. “Oh. Well, I used to help my mom cook all the time as a kid. It was something we started doing together around the third grade, when I started sucking at school. My mom thought it would help me develop concentration skills or something, to have to follow recipes and measure everything out. I didn’t care very much about learning how to cook miyeok guk, but there was this place we discovered when we spent our summers in France—”

I roll my eyes, and she smiles self-deprecatingly and adds, “Yes, we summered in France. My parents have a place in Saint-Macaire, this little village near Bordeaux, where one of my grandmas was born. Most summers, my dad would stay inside and work the whole time, and my mom would take my brother and me to explore nearby towns. But every morning, my parents would hand my brother a fistful of euros and we’d go down the street to this patisserie.”

Jack smiles faintly at the memory, her white scar twisting into a fishhook again. I take a step closer to her on the sidewalk. “The woman who ran the patisserie was this masc, Trunchbull-looking woman who would yell at us about our poor French pronunciation, but she also made the most delicate baked goods you’ve ever seen. Fruit tarts and chocolate croissants and macarons, and it was the first time I saw someone who looked like me creating such beautiful, delicate things. It made me feel like I could care about making things pretty and still be me, and I just became obsessed with baking after that. And what are you doing?”

I’d drifted even closer to her, pulled in by her vulnerable words and by that swooping scar that makes me feel like a string is tied around my insides, tied back to her. She’s so beautiful, and not just because of her hair and her freckles and her eyes—not just because of her long limbs and her strong thighs and her lovely neck—but because of the messy shape of her heart, which beats wildly for macarons and pie.

And I just have to fucking kiss her.

I tilt my face up toward hers, and Jack understands. Her hand comes up to cup my chin, cold fingers against the burning blush of my skin. I need something to hold onto. I find the narrow of Jack’s waist beneath her khaki jacket. Then I close my eyes.

Jack’s mouth is softer than I expect. Sweet. The lingering taste of her praline mocha and maple bacon donut. But her hands are just as strong as I imagined, anchoring me until I feel elemental. My feet are deeply rooted beneath me, solid and unmoving, but when her tongue gently presses against the seal of my lips, I feel entirely capable of blowing away in the winter wind like the flakes that drift around us. The tip of her tongue presses against my lips until I open for her, like I’ve opened for her all day.

My skin is made of fire and my bones are made of water at the feeling of Jack’s mouth and Jack’s breath and Jack’s body beneath my hands, beneath her clothes, arched with wanting. This loud, brash cyclone of a woman goes quiet and still in my arms, kissing me like it matters too much.

We break apart to breathe, and our glasses get stuck on each other until we carefully pry them apart. Then we burst into laughter. “You didn’t make me wait long,” Jack says, her voice somehow both rough and tender. I want to open Clip Studio and find the right color to capture the feeling of Jack’s voice. Cerulean like my scarf, maybe. Umber like her eyes.

I shake my head, marveling at the snowflakes in her hair. “No, I didn’t. What’s it called?”

Jack eyes me. “Kissing…?”

“Your bakery.”

“Oh.” Her strong hands are still on my body. “Uh. I’m thinking about calling it… the Butch Oven?” She squints one eye and bites her bottom lip. “Is that a stupid name?”

“Of course not.”

“It’s supposed to be a pun. Like on Dutch oven.”

“I get it, Jack.”

She presses her forehead to mine. We’re touching in so many places. Touching has never felt this easy to me. “But butch and Dutch are an imperfect rhyme. They look like they should fit together, but they don’t actually sound the same, so I’m worried people won’t get it.”

I wrap my arms around her waist until my fingers hook together in the back. Her nerves have nothing to do with the name. “You could do it, you know. You could turn this place into something truly special.”

She folds herself in closer, until we’re two perfectly aligned pieces, slotted together in the snow. “I’m not like you, Elle. I don’t make ten-year plans. I don’t have a bullet journal filled with life goals I’m checking off one by one. How would I ever open a bakery by myself?”

I reach out for her hand again, stitching our fingers back together. “Maybe you don’t have to do it by yourself.”





Chapter Sixteen


Thursday, December 22, 2022

“Why did I have to find out about my daughter’s engagement from Instagram?”

I wake up to the lingering smell of cinnamon and cloves in my hair, the buzzing of my phone on the bedside table, and my mom’s grating voice in my ear. “Hello, Linds,” I grumble, half-asleep and completely annoyed.