Page 60 of Spiced!

“Your hair is remarkable.”

“It does what it wants.”

“Right now, it appears to have abandoned its usual limits entirely.”

He smiled, took another sip, then leaned against me and crooned, “Come back to bed.”

He said it simply, without performance or strategy or thought. It was a brief sentence, in that low morning voice, from a man who meant it.

I looked at him, at his hair, at his coffee, and at the sleep still clouding his features. Puck sat between us on the counter like an extremely opinionated moderator. I genuinely wanted to crawl back under the covers with this man and his ferret. God, I wanted to.

Instead, I said, “I have to make bread.”

Brendan’s eyes opened, and he stared at me, unblinking.

“I’m serious. Doña Carmen opens at six. The first dough needs to be shaped by five-thirty or the whole morning falls behind.”

He glanced out the window. It was still dark outside. “It’s four twenty-three, maybe four twenty-six now.”

“I know.”

“In the morning.”

“The bread doesn’t know that,” I said. “The bread only knows the schedule.”

He was quiet for a moment, then he said, “That is the most Adrian thing you have ever said.”

“It might be the truest thing I have ever said.”

Something moved across his face. It was warm and quiet and not quite a smile, but it was definitely in the neighborhood of one, then he drank his coffee and looked at me over the rim of his mug with those steady blue eyes.

“Will you come back?”

I knew he didn’t mean to bed.

Just—back.

It was the sentence underneath the sentence.

I thought about a parking lot in Ybor where I’d sat with eight pounds of beagle and replayed a two-second moment. I thought about, “Hey,” sent at 6 a.m. with flour on my hands, because I couldn’t find anything more honest to say. I thought about driving past a building on a street in South Tampa and finding a name on a mailbox and convincing myself that my pseudo-stalking was for entirely legitimate reasons.

“Saturday,” I said. “Barbacks.”

“I know Saturday,” he said. “That’s not what I’m asking.”

“I know it’s not.” I set my cup in the sink and turned back to him. “Yes, I’ll come back, Brendan.”

He nodded. It was one small nod, the kind that meant he’d received something valuable and was keeping it somewhere careful.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay,” I replied.

Mofongo was still curled into himself in his carrier, still completely unbothered by the hour, a dog of simple needs and excellent sleep hygiene. I picked up my jacket, the carrier, and my keys.

At the door, I turned around. Brendan was leaning in the kitchen doorway with his coffee and his extraordinary hair, which was the kind of thing that made me want to stay—and was exactly why I needed to leave before I did.

“I’ll text you,” I said.