Page 19

The touch jolts through me like electricity. Not painful. The opposite. It’s warm and grounding and alive in a way I haven’t felt in three years. My lungs expand without my permission, dragging in air that tastes like sugar and salt and his scent.

I gasp. Choke. Breathe again.

“That’s it.” His voice rumbles against my back. “In. Out. You’re not dying.”

“Feels like it,” I manage.

“You’re not.”

We sit there on the bakery floor, his arms around me, my back pressed against his chest. The tile is cold beneath me. The overhead lights hum. Somewhere in the back, the walk-in fridge kicks on with a mechanical groan.

Normal sounds. Normal things.

Except nothing is normal anymore.

“That night,” I say. My voice comes out thin. Reedy. “In my kitchen. You didn’t just take my grief, did you?”

His chest rises and falls against my back. One breath. Two. Three.

“No,” he says finally.

“What else?” I turn my head, trying to see his face. “What else did you take?”

“Everything.” The word is barely a whisper. “Your loneliness. Your exhaustion. The empty years you spent kneading dough in the dark while the world moved on without you.” He pauses. “I drank it all.”

My stomach clenches. Not with nausea. With something else. Something that feels dangerously close to relief.

Because he saw it. All of it. The hollow spaces inside me that I tried to fill with flour and water and the endless rhythm of knead and fold and shape. The mornings I woke up and couldn’t remember why I bothered. The nights I stood in this kitchen and wished I could disappear into the ovens.

He saw all of it.

And he took it.

“But you gave me something,” I say. The realization is forming slowly, like dough rising. “Mariska said I’m carrying your strength. That you fed me.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“But you did.”

I press my hand against my stomach again. Feel that pulse, that warmth, that wrongness that shouldn’t exist. “That night, I felt... full. For the first time in years, I felt full. Not empty. Not hollow. Full.”

“Yes.”

“That was you.”

“Yes.”

The pieces click together. The feeding wasn’t one-sided. He took my grief, my loneliness, my exhaustion. But he gave me something in return. His essence. His strength. His hunger.

And somehow, impossibly, it created this.

I should be horrified. Should be screaming and running away.

Instead, I’m leaning back against him, letting his heat soak into my spine, letting his arms hold me up when my own body won’t.

“I hate this,” I whisper.

“I know.”