Despite myself, I smiled.
He seemed pleased by that as he moved back toward the kitchen. "I was bribed into making dessert, unfortunately, so now I have to finish before my father returns and somehow ruins whipped cream."
I followed him into the kitchen, leaning lightly against the counter while he moved around gathering ingredients with familiar ease. Music played softly somewhere from the living room, low enough to blend into the warmth of the house itself.
"What are you making?" I asked.
"Apple crumble," he said. "Or at least something spiritually adjacent to apple crumble."
I watched him slice apples while continuing a completely unnecessary monologue about the emotional instability of baking measurements. Flour dusted the sleeves of his dark sweater and his curls kept falling into his eyes every few minutes until he pushed them back distractedly with the back of his wrist.
"There's something fundamentally weird," he said, "about instructions that say 'until it feels right.' I'm cooking, not resolving an emotional arc."
A quiet laugh escaped me before I could stop it.
The warmth inside the kitchen settled around me slowly. Bramwell moved around the space with that same unconscious gentleness he carried everywhere around me now, never crowding too close, never reaching for me without warning, always leaving space for me to retreat even when I no longer wanted to.
And suddenly all I could think about was what my therapist had said earlier.
You are allowed to want things too.
"I have something for you," he suddenly said, sounding oddly nervous now.
I looked at him in surprise. His expression shifted into something softer, almost shy beneath the humor. He reached into one of the kitchen drawers before holding out a small cloth pouch toward me.
I opened the pouch slowly.
Inside rested a bracelet made from polished uneven stones connected by dark wire, handmade enough that I could see the tiny imperfections in the shaping. Nothing about it looked expensive or overly delicate. It looked personal. Thoughtful in the quietest possible way.
I touched one of the stones gently with my thumb.
"This one," Bramwell said softly, leaning slightly closer, "is from the riverbank near the north trail where you nearly walked directly into freezing water because you were distracted by moss."
Warmth rose immediately into my face. His finger brushed another stone lightly. "Labradorite. Because it looked dull until sunlight hit it properly, which unfortunately turned into a metaphor before I could stop myself."
Then another.
"Obsidian. Because you glare at strangers like a cryptid defending territory."
A startled laugh slipped out of me. Bramwell went visibly still for half a second at the sound before his expression softened almost painfully.
"And amber," he added more quietly, "because it preserves things."
Something tightened hard beneath my ribs. I slid the bracelet carefully onto my wrist, staring at how perfectly it fit against my skin. The honesty in his voice settled somewhere deep inside me, heavy and warm and terrifying all at once.
"I chose the bracelet because I noticed you never wear necklaces or earrings." He added.
For a while neither of us spoke. Soft music drifted through the kitchen beneath the warm scent of cinnamon and apples while Bramwell returned quietly to the counter, giving me enough space to steady myself around the emotion gathering painfully in my chest.
I watched him move for several long seconds, taking in the patience woven so carefully into everything he did, the quiet care that seemed to live naturally in him now. Even his restraint had become gentle somehow, so effortless in appearance that I sometimes forgot how much intention it probably required, how much work it must have taken to make tenderness look this easy.
My therapist's words returned again before I could stop them.
You are allowed to want things too.
Bramwell was stirring something on the stove now, still speaking lightly about whether cinnamon counted as "an authoritarian spice" when I interrupted him.
"Can I kiss you?"
