Last Call, First Kiss

I come through the kitchen door with the door swinging hard enough to bang the wall, and I don't even care. There's flour on my cheek. I know it because I wiped my hands on my apron about ten times and never once thought to check my face. Ross is mid-pour at the bar, filling a pint for Varian, and his head comes up before I say a single word.

"What happened," he says. Not a question, really. He already knows something happened. He's known me for two years, and the man can read me across a room.

"Nothing happened," I say, and I'm grinning so wide it probably looks stupid. "Nothing happened except I won."

"Won what?"

I'm twenty-three years old and I have never won anything bigger than a raffle at my cousin's baby shower, so I figure I get to drag it out a little. I come around the end of the bar and lean my elbows on it. The front door is propped open because it's late spring and warm enough that the whole block smells like somebody's grill. Keri is at her usual stool, second one from the door, working on her second glass of wine at seven o'clock like it's her job.

"Say it, Lyla," Keri says. "You're about to pop."

"The Copper Kettle sourdough," I say, "is this week's spotlight loaf on the Midtown Fork blog."

For a second Ross just looks at me. Then he sets the tap handle back like it's made of glass and comes around the bar without going around the bar, which means he hops it, which means he's already forgetting there are customers. He grabs my face in both hands and kisses my forehead, flour and all.

"You won," he says. "The actual blog. The one with readers."

"Four thousand readers, Ross. Maybe more."

Varian puts his pint down. He's sixty, retired from kitchen work, and he holds opinions on bread the way some men hold opinions on baseball teams. "Spotlight loaf," he repeats. "That's the one they photograph?"

"That's the one they photograph."

"Then I've been drinking free beer in a bar with a famous baker in it." He raises the pint at me. "Congratulations, kid."

"I'm not a kid, I'm twenty-three."

"You're a kid with a famous loaf."

Keri is already out of her stool and hugging me, which means I get wine smell on one side and flour on the other. "I knew it," she's saying. "I helped, sort of, I handed you things, I'm taking partial credit."

"You handed me things twice and then ate the test batch."

"Partial credit," she says again, and goes back to her stool looking extremely pleased with herself.

Ross hasn't let go of the moment yet. He's got that look, the one where he's watching me instead of the room, and I feel it even with Keri talking and Varian making jokes. He reaches under the bar and comes up with the good whiskey, the one he keeps for birthdays and emergencies, and pours two fingers into two glasses.

"On the house," he says. "House rule I just made up. Baker wins a prize, bartender buys."

"That's not going to hold up," Varian says.

"It's my bar."

"It's half your bar. Doug's going to hear about free whiskey."

"Doug can hear about it at the meeting on Thursday." Ross slides one glass across to me and keeps the other. We clink over the bar top, glasses clicking, and he says, quiet, just for me, "I'm proud of you."

I take the drink. It's good whiskey and it goes down warm, and I look at him over the rim of my glass and try to act like someone who wins things all the time. It doesn't work. I can feel my face doing the grin again.

"Okay, tell me the actual details," he says, and he props his forearms on the bar so he's at my height, which is how we end up talking when the room lets us. "When did you find out?"

"Email came at four. I was proofing dough. I read it four times because I thought it was a promo thing, you know, one of those sponsored spots."

"But it wasn't."

"It wasn't. It was the real weekly pick. There's a paragraph about my crumb structure, Ross. A paragraph. About my crumb." I hold up my hand like I'm reading off an invisible page. "Open, irregular crumb with a deep amber crust. Deep amber crust."

"She's quoting her own review," Keri tells Varian.

"I'd quote it too," Varian says. "I never got a paragraph about my crumb structure in thirty years of cooking."

"You did get a health code violation paragraph once," Ross says, and Varian points at him like that's fair.

The night keeps going the way nights do here. I go back to the kitchen and pull the next day's dough, because winning a blog spotlight does not excuse me from feeding the starter, and Ross works the bar, and the regulars drift in and out. Every twenty minutes or so I find a reason to come out front for something I don't need. Clean glasses. A rag. Checking the special board even though I wrote the special board. Ross never says anything about it, but every time I come out he's already looking up, like he's got some kind of timer going.

Around nine the place is half full and warm in that way the Kettle gets when the door's open and the talk is loose. Keri has moved on to her third wine and is telling anybody who'll listen about the famous loaf. I'm wiping down the pass when she comes back to lean on the doorway.

"You two are disgusting," she says. "You know that, right?"

"Excuse me?"

"The eyes. All night. He looks at you, you look at him, neither of you says anything. It's adorable and it's disgusting and I want it to stop, or I want it to keep going, I honestly haven't decided."

"There's no eyes," I say. "We're coworkers."

"We're coworkers," she repeats, and does this awful face. "Eight months. You've been making eyes at him for eight months and you still giggle when he walks in."

"I do not giggle."

"You're doing it right now."

I throw my rag at her. She catches it and laughs and goes back out front, and I stand there in the kitchen doorway for a second longer than I need to. And when I look out, Ross is looking at me. Not the bartender look, not the is-somebody's-glass-empty look. The other one. The one that makes my neck go hot. He doesn't look away when I catch him, either, which is new, and I have to turn back to my dough before my face gives the whole thing away.

* * *

By eleven the crowd is down to Keri, Varian, and two guys playing darts badly. I've got tomorrow's loaves shaped and in the walk-in and my hands smell like salt and flour. Last call is at eleven thirty on weeknights. Ross rings the little bell and does his spiel, and the dart guys drain their beers, and Varian takes his sweet time because Varian always takes his sweet time.

"Congratulations again," he says at the door, fishing for his keys. "Famous loaf. I expect it free now."

"You will not get it free."

"I'll pay half," he says, and the door swings shut behind him.

Keri is slower. She puts on her jacket one arm at a time and looks between us like she's watching a tennis match. "I'm going to go," she announces. "Allegedly to my apartment. Really to my apartment, but I'm saying it loud so you two know the coast is about to be clear."

"Keri," Ross says.

"Coast. Clear. Think about it." She's out the door before either of us can answer, and I hear her heels going down the sidewalk, quick, like a woman making an escape.

Then it's just the two of us and the hum of the cooler and the chairs upside down on three of the eight tables because I never got to the rest. Ross locks the front door and flips the deadbolt and stands there a second with his hand still on it. The streetlight through the glass puts a stripe across the floor between us.

"So," he says.

"So."

"Four thousand readers."

"Maybe more."

He comes around the bar slow, wiping his hands on the towel he keeps tucked in his apron, and stops close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him. He looks at my cheek, where I know the flour still is, because nobody reminded me.

"You had this on your face all night," he says, and brushes it off with his thumb, gentle, like he's done it a hundred times and wants to do it a hundred more.

"Nobody told me."

"I liked it. It looked like you'd been working." He's quiet a beat, and then he says, "Lyla. I've been trying to figure out all evening how to say this without making it weird, and I can't, so I'm just going to say it. I don't want to drive you home tonight. I mean I do want to drive you home. But I want it to be the kind of driving you home where I come inside and stay."

My heart does something complicated. "That's a lot of driving for one sentence."

"Yeah, it got away from me."

I look up at him. Two years of coming out front for rags I didn't need sits right there in my chest, and eight months of giggling, which I absolutely do not do, and I can feel myself getting ready to say yes before my mouth has even caught up. But I make him wait one second, because I want to see him sweat just a little.

"What's Doug going to say about the whiskey?" I ask.

"Lyla."

"Because if we're doing this, we should probably settle the free whiskey thing first."

"Can I kiss you?" he says. "Please. Before you bill me for it."

"Yeah," I say. "You can kiss me."

He kisses me soft at first, which lasts about four seconds. Then his hand slides into my hair and the kiss turns hungry, and I make a noise into his mouth that I'll be thinking about at three in the morning. My hands fist in his apron and pull him closer, and he walks me back two steps until my shoulders hit the walk-in cooler door. It's cold through my shirt and he's warm everywhere else and that contrast does something to my brain that I don't have words for yet.

"Okay," he says against my mouth, breathing a little rough. "Okay, wow."

"Yeah," I agree.

"We should probably talk about the whiskey thing."

"We probably should."

He doesn't move away, though. Neither do I. His thumb is still at my jaw and my fingers are still twisted in his apron and the cooler is humming against my back like it's got an opinion.

"Kitchen," he says. "Come on. I was going to do this with more ceremony and I clearly blew it."

He leads me by the elbow into the kitchen, and I laugh because it's ridiculous. We've worked this kitchen together for two years. There's nothing to sneak into.

"I have to tell you something first," he says, "before this goes any further. I wrote the blog guy a note last month. Told him to come try your sourdough."

I stand there with my arms crossed over my apron. "You did what?"

"I told him the truth, that the best bread in this city comes out of a kitchen the size of a closet. He agreed with me. That's all it took." He shrugs like it's nothing, and it isn't nothing, and he knows it, and he shrugs anyway because that's how Ross handles it when he's done something big and doesn't want the fuss. "I wanted you to win it clean. No favors from the guy you work next to."

"It's not a favor, Ross. It's a tip. There's a difference."

"I know that now." He looks at the floor. "I'm learning some things this year. Slowly."

* * *

Now my back is against the walk-in again, and he fills two coffee mugs with water at the sink, because he's the kind of man who thinks about that after a night of whiskey and wine, and hands me one. We drink standing there in the middle of the kitchen.

"To the loaf," he says again, quieter this time.

"To the loaf." I drink my water. He drinks his. Then he takes the mugs out of both our hands and sets them on the pass, and looks at me.

"Tell me to slow down if I need to slow down," he says. "Because I've been patient for two years, and tonight I don't have a lot of patience left in the tank."

"Two years isn't patient. Two years is a medical condition."

"Then I've got it bad. I've been in love with you for all of it."

The cooler hums. My face does something I can't control. "Two years."

"Give or take. Since the week you started and burned your first batch of rolls and swore at the oven in front of customers."

"They were black, Ross. Completely black."

"They were. And Doug wanted to let you go and I told him give her a month, and you know why?"

"Because I'm a good baker."

"Because you swore at the oven and then fixed the problem by yourself and brought in a perfect batch the next morning and didn't say one word about the first batch. I thought, that's somebody I'd like to know." He steps closer. "Turns out I was right."

"Ross."

"Yeah."

"Are you going to kiss me again or keep making speeches?"

He kisses me again. This one isn't quick. His hands find my waist and then the small of my back and he presses me into the cooler door and I make room for him without thinking about it, one of my legs hooking behind his like my body made the decision before I did. His mouth goes to my neck and I say his name and it comes out lower than I meant it to.

"My place or yours," I say. "Whichever."

"Mine's closer. It's also got the world's worst couch."

"I don't care about the couch."

"I want to be sure," he says, and pulls back enough to look at me, his forehead nearly touching mine. "Lyla. Once. Tonight, once, and then we talk about it in the morning like adults. Because I don't want this to be a thing that happened after whiskey. I want it to be a thing we did on purpose. And your job, the kitchen, none of that is part of this. It's yours whatever you say tonight or tomorrow."

"I know that. And it was two fingers of whiskey six hours ago and a mug of water just now, you big idiot. I'm not drunk. I'm barely buzzed, and I'm sure."

"I know. I'm asking anyway."

And that right there, that asking, is the reason I've been giggling for eight months and lying to Keri about it. "Yes," I