She cleared her throat and tried it.
"Aye." He didn't move back. "Like that."
They stood like that for a moment — her working the dough, him standing close enough that the warmth between them had become its own thing, the kitchen quiet around them, the crackling of the fire the only sound.
"Ye've done this before," she said.
"Me maither made bread. I was in the kitchen constantly. She complained about it."
She glanced at him sideways. Something in her face shifted—not quite a smile, something quieter. "She sounds like Marta."
"Perhaps." He turned his attention back to the dough.
She pushed, folded, pushed again. Her elbow shifted and caught his forearm, leaving a white smear of flour across it. She stared at it. So did he.
"Ye did that deliberately," he said.
"I was adjusting me grip."
He watched her. She had fixed her gaze on the dough with the studious attention of someone who was absolutely not thinking about him, and the corner of her mouth had gone tight in the way that meant she was fighting something.
He reached past her and picked up a pinch of flour from the table. Let it fall onto her hair.
She went very still.
"That," she said, with great dignity, "was uncalled fer."
"Ye started it."
She turned her head and met his eyes fully for the first time since he'd walked in and they were closer than she'd apparently calculated, because she stopped. The kitchen went quiet in a different way. His arm was still near hers on the table. Her face was upturned. There was flour in her hair and a smear on her cheek and her eyes were very steady, and the distance between them was the length of a decision
"The dough's ready," she said.
His eyes dropped to her mouth. Just for a moment. Just long enough.
"It isnae," he said.
"It looks ready."
He looked back up. "Matilda. The dough isnae ready."
She held his gaze. Then she reached deliberately into the flour on the table, picked up a pinch, and dropped it onto his arm.
The next thirty seconds were not his most dignified. The air filled with flour and the sound of her retreating around the table and his following, and when it was over they were both breathing harder than the situation warranted and the kitchen looked like it had been visited by a particularly chaotic weather event.
She was laughing
Not the pressed-lip version he'd been watching her suppress for a week. Not the almost-laugh she deployed when something caught her off guard. A real one––open, startled, her head tipping back with it, flour in her hair, cheeks flushed, entirely unguarded for one unrepeatable moment.
He stood across the table and watched it happen and did not move and did not speak and did not examine what it did to him to see it. Some things he had decided to take one day at a time, and this was one of them.
She gathered herself. Looked at the flour everywhere. Looked at him.
"Marta is going tae be furious," she said.
"Aye. She is."
A beat. She was still flushed. Her hair was a disaster. She looked, he thought, like she should look. Not the composed version she wore in the hall, not the careful version she deployed when she was managing a room. Just her. Standing in a ruined kitchen at four in the morning, dusted in flour, looking at him.