“Morning.”
His thumb moved. One slow stroke across my stomach, back and forth, through the cotton of his shirt. An absent, intimate gesture—the kind of thing a man did when touching a woman felt as natural to him as breathing.
That was the thing that scared me. Not the sex. The sex had been… I didn’t have a frame of reference for what the sex had been. I’d never done this before, never had a man’s hands on me, never felt what it was like to come apart under someone and trust them to hold the pieces.
But the physical part I could categorize. I could file it away as desire, as chemistry, as two people who wanted each other badly enough to do something about it on a kitchen table.
The thumb on my stomach. The arm across my waist. The hand that had pressed flat in his sleep to make sure I hadn’t left. Those things didn’t fit in any category I knew how to manage.
“You think loud,” Gabriel said.
I almost laughed. “What?”
“I can hear you thinking. Your breathing changed about five minutes ago.”
Five minutes. He’d been awake for five minutes and hadn’t moved, hadn’t spoken, had just lain there holding me and letting me spiral in peace. That was either the most generous thing a man had ever done for me or the most dangerous. I wasn’t sure there was a difference.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“I didn’t ask.”
“You were going to.”
“No. I was going to ask if you wanted coffee.”
I rolled over to face him, and the full impact of Gabriel Hall in the morning hit me without warning. His hair was flattened on one side and sticking up on the other. There was a pillow crease on his left cheek. His eyes—that sharp, assessing green I’d gotten used to—were softer than I’d ever seen them. Unguarded. Like he hadn’t remembered to put the walls back up yet.
He was looking at me like I was the first thing he wanted to see today. Not with heat—though that was there, banked and quiet underneath—but with something simpler. Something that looked like contentment. Like waking up next to me was exactly where he’d expected to be and he felt no need to explain it.
My chest tightened.
“Coffee would be good,” I said.
He leaned forward and kissed my forehead. Not my mouth—my forehead. Then he got up, and I watched him walk out of the bedroom in his boxer briefs, and I lay there on my back staring at the ceiling with my heart doing something I couldn’t define.
I heard him in the kitchen. Cabinet doors opening, the faucet running, the click of the coffeemaker. He moved through my apartment like he’d been there before—not tentatively,not politely, but comfortably. Like the space had expanded to include him.
I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. His shirt fell to mid-thigh. I looked down at it—dark navy, the fire department logo faded from a hundred washes—and ran my fingers over the hem.
I could do this. I could walk out there and drink coffee and be normal. I could be the kind of woman who slept with a man and woke up next to him and didn’t immediately start building an exit strategy in her head.
Except I’d never been that woman. Every good thing I’d ever had, I’d held at arm’s length. The bakery was the first thing I’d let myself want completely, and it had caught fire. Before that, culinary school—I’d graduated top of my class but spent the entire ceremony waiting for someone to tell me there’d been a mistake. Before that, every friendship, every tentative connection, every person who’d gotten close enough to matter—I’d kept one foot out the door. Not because I wanted to leave. Because I’d learned early that the leaving was coming whether I wanted it or not, and it hurt less if I saw it first.
Gabriel wasn’t going to leave. I knew that the way I knew how long to proof dough—not because someone had taught me, but because I’d watched him. The way he showed up. The way he sat across from me at Bev’s and didn’t fill the silence with reassurances. The way he’d stood in my hallway last night and said I couldn’t not come, like the pull toward me was something he’d stopped trying to resist.
He wasn’t going to leave. That was the problem.
Because if he stayed—if this was real, if the man in my kitchen making coffee in his underwear was actually choosing me, not just the version of me that was easy to want in the dark—then I had to choose him back. All the way. With no exit strategy, no arm’s length, no foot out the door.
I didn’t know how to do that. I’d never done it. I’d spent twenty-three years being the kind of person who kept herself just useful enough to matter and just distant enough to survive the inevitable moment when I didn’t.
And now Gabriel Hall was in my kitchen, and he’d slept with his hand on my stomach all night, and he’d kissed my forehead instead of my mouth because the forehead was the one that meantI’m not going anywhere.
I pressed my palms against my eyes and took a breath.
“Brenna.” His voice from the kitchen. Calm, easy. “Your coffeemaker takes forever. Just so you know.”
“It’s temperamental,” I called back. “You have to talk to it.”
