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Penny leans against the kitchen counter, looking beautiful in sweatpants with her curly hair pulled into a loose bun. It’s his birthday today, and she’s baking him a cake. He can’t even remember the last time he had a cake on his birthday. Elementary school, maybe, when they were living in San Antonio.
He considers her question and finds he has no preference, other than the fact that he likes the sound of the word velvety on her lips.
“Both?” he ventures.
It’s the wrong answer, he discovers when she lets out an adorable little huff of vexation. “They’re mutually exclusive,” Penny says, absently waving a measuring cup as she speaks. “Creaming the butter and sugar together creates air bubbles that are expanded by gases from the leavening agents, producing a taller, light-textured cake. Alternatively, you can use the two-stage method to blend the butter and dry ingredients together, which allows the fats to coat the proteins, preventing gluten development for a tender, melt-in-your-mouth cake.”
Somewhere in the middle of this impromptu lesson on the chemistry of cake baking, Caleb decides he’s going to marry this woman.
The sudden intensity of his resolve leaves him a little breathless.
He’s loved her for a long time. For months, he loved her from afar, silently and without hope. He learned to live with the longing the way you live with a broken rib: trying not to breathe too deep or move too fast.
But now, improbably, she is standing in the kitchen of the apartment they share, it is his birthday, and he doesn’t have to pretend anymore. He is going to spend the rest of his life with her.
Penny lifts her eyebrows, obviously waiting for him to speak.
His mouth opens. “Huh?” he says eloquently.
She shakes her head fondly, and a strand of hair breaks loose and falls across her forehead. “Did you hear anything I said?”
“I got distracted somewhere in the middle.”
She brushes the flyaway curl out of her face with the back of her hand. “Where exactly did I lose you?”
“When you said the word creaming.”
He watches the blush spread up from her chest and into her cheeks. He adores that blush. Making it appear is one of his top five joys in life.
Penny’s full, pink lips press together as her eyes sparkle with amusement. “You’re incorrigible.”
“Not me,” he says. “I’m as corrigible as they come.”
He’s never proposed before, although he and his last girlfriend had negotiated an informal understanding. She would follow him when he went to medical school, and in return, one day, he would make her a doctor’s wife. It wasn’t something he wanted so much as something that was expected. Marriage, like medical school, felt like an obligation. A trap that was closing around him.
It was a relief when Heather called things off just after Christmas. He’s not sure he would have had the courage to do it himself—but he should have.
He’d already taken notice of Penny by then. He noticed her on his very first day of work at Antidote. How could he not? With her sunny demeanor and warm, friendly manner, the whole place seemed to get a thousand watts lighter as soon as she walked into it.
Everything about her was bright: her red hair, her floral dresses, her brightly colored lips and nails. He’d been living in the black and white part of The Wizard of Oz, and Penny was in full Technicolor. But his fate was truly sealed the moment she smiled. The first time he saw her lush lips curve, pinking the apples of her cheeks and making her hazel eyes shine, he was a goner.
He never used to be someone to believe in love at first sight, but he has no other explanation for it. Something in her spoke to something in him, from the very moment she walked into his life.
But he had a girlfriend. A plan that had already been laid out for him. Commitments.
He tried to ignore the unsettling new feelings Penny awoke in him. He tried to ignore her, because it was too difficult to do anything else. She represented all the things in his life he wanted but couldn’t have. Passion. Self-determination. Hope.
He started volunteering to work doubles on Mondays when he knew she came for her knitting club, so he’d be able to see her twice in one day. He couldn’t help himself. The dopamine rush he got around her was the only time he felt alive.
Now he gets to feel that rush every minute of every day. How did he ever get so lucky?
He watches Penny now as she turns her attention back to her baking, frowning over her food scale. “I feel like a chocolate cake should err on the side of density,” she decides as she reaches for the cocoa powder.
She insisted on baking a cake for his birthday. He told her it wasn’t necessary, but secretly he’s pleased. It feels like he’s had to take care of himself his whole life, so he’s still getting used to having someone in his life who wants to take care of him. He will never, ever take it for granted.
His parents aren’t exactly shining role models for marriage and family. Caleb grew up watching his father suck the joy out of every life around him while his mother performed her role with the glassy-eyed cheerfulness of a marionette. He and his brothers were raised in an emotional wasteland where empathy was nonexistent, weakness was met with cruelty, and affection was a sham. His two brothers leaned in, adopting The Colonel’s twisted ideas of masculinity and honor as they clamored for paternal approval.
Caleb never took to the indoctrination. Whether because he was the eldest, or because he’d just been born that way, he was more sensitive than his brothers, and more stubborn—to his father’s perpetual disappointment. To protect himself, Caleb grew extra-thick armor and retreated so far behind his walls that he forgot the way out.
