“Okay,” I say. Seven pastries. A laminate she’s pushing down like it personally wronged her. She’s building as a way to not have to feel.
I’m not good at this. Workshop work responds to pressure. People don’t. Gabby is not predictable. Gabby doesn’t respond to anything the way you’d expect. I walk in expecting her to be down about the competition and she’s just channeling all her feelings into laminated dough.
I think about what Trace said to me yesterday. The best things I ever built were the ones I was afraid to start. He was holding his beer, looking at my face like he could read something on it I couldn’t see myself. He was right. He’s always right about things that matter. And this matters. She matters.
So I do something I have never done before. I attempt humor.
This is a mistake.
“Why did the sourdough go to therapy?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer. She’s frozen with her hands in the dough. It’s a silence that tells me she’s about to be surprised by something, and not in a good way. I’m already regretting this, but I’m committed.
“Because it had deep-seated issues,” I finish.
The silence that follows is the most honest silence I’ve ever participated in. She stares at me like I’ve committed a crime against comedy itself. Like I’ve personally murdered humor and left the body on her kitchen counter.
“That was bad,” she says.
“Really bad,” I agree.
“The worst joke I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“Yeah.”
I stand there while she processes this joke. While she realizes that I, someone who works with wood and precision and things that hold their weight, have apparently attempted a pun. A pun about bread. About her disaster.
And then she laughs.
She suppresses it. Her hands go to her mouth. The sound breaks through anyway, building until her shoulders shake. She laughs until her shoulders shake. She laughs until she has to lean against the counter for balance. She laughs until tears come out and I can’t tell if they’re from the joke being terrible or from yesterday or from something bigger that’s been sitting in her chest all morning.
Maybe all of it. Maybe none of it. Maybe the joke was just permission.
She wipes her face with a floury hand, leaving streaks across her cheeks. Her laughter shifts. It becomes something different. The tears keep coming but the laugh sound changes into something that might be crying. I’m not sure. The transition is seamless.
“I’m sorry,” she says, but she’s still laughing. “This is not?—”
“It’s okay,” I say.
“That joke was objectively the worst thing I’ve ever heard, and I’m losing it like it’s the funniest thing in the world, and I don’t know which is the actual problem.”
She sits down on the stool by the counter. She’s laughing and crying at the same time now. Her hands are shaking. The flour dust around her is like a physical manifestation of everything that went wrong yesterday.
“That was objectively the worst,” she says, and she’s still laughing, still crying. “Why would you—like, you’re smart. You could make a good joke. Why that joke?”
I step closer. “Because you weren’t laughing.”
She stops laughing. I’ve said something too true, some version of the thing I meant to keep hidden. The bakery is quiet except for the hum of the oven. The flour dust moves through the light. Everything stops.
She looks at me, and I look at her, and there’s a moment where the ground shifts. Where everything before now is thebefore, and everything after this is the after, and we both know it. No words for this.
I kiss her.
It’s tender because she’s tender right now, broken open by bad jokes and public failure and the particular terror of wanting something when you’ve already lined up a future that doesn’t include this. Her mouth tastes like butter and cinnamon and the thing she’s been too scared to say. I kiss her like my body knows what my mouth can’t say.
She tastes like salt. She tastes like tears and laughter and the person she’s been becoming since she got to Ashwood Falls. I kiss her like I’m trying to hold something fragile. Like I’m trying to say: This matters. You matter. I know you’re terrified but I’m here anyway.
Her hand comes up and grabs my shirt. Not pulling away. Holding on. Like she needs something solid to grip while everything else is shifting.