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“Knox.”

“Lucy.”

“There’s no meeting. There’s no agenda. It’s Thursday night and my bakery is closed.”

“I’m aware.”

“So why are you standing in my kitchen?”

“Because I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

The sentence landed between them, stripped of the control he usually kept on his words. He hadn’t planned it. It simply arrived, unrehearsed and true.

Lucy’s chin lifted. Her eyes searched his face the way she searched for imperfections in her work with the absolute commitment of someone who refused to accept less than the real thing.

“That’s not a meeting agenda item,” she said.

“No.”

“That’s not a budget projection or a vendor analysis or a line item.”

“No.”

“That’s just you. Standing in my kitchen. Telling me you don’t want to be anywhere else.”

“Yes.”

She crossed the space between them in four steps. Her hand came up to his chest, flat against his shirt, right over his heart. He could feel his pulse under her palm, fast and loud and completely beyond his control.

“It’s racing,” she said.

“I know.”

“Is that me?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t smile. She stood there, her hand on his heart, her eyes on his, and let the silence do what silence did when two people stopped hiding.

“You told me once that you don’t know another way to say things,” she said.

“I don’t.”

“Then don’t say anything.” She rose on her toes and her mouth found his.

The kiss was not tentative. Lucy didn’t do tentative. It carried the same direct, uncompromising certainty she brought to everything. She kissed him like she was solving a problem, except the problem was him and the solution was closer.

His hands came up to her waist. Her fingers threaded into his hair. The kiss deepened, and the kitchen fell away. There was only her mouth and her hands and the sound she made against his lips, small and involuntary, that reordered something behind his ribs.

“Upstairs,” she said against his mouth.

“Yes.”

She took his hand and led him through the dark bakery. Her hand was steady. His was not. His pulse beat high and fast.

The stairs were narrow, the light dim. She didn’t let go of his hand.

Her apartment was small and warm and smelled like cinnamon and clean laundry. A kettle on the stove, books stacked on every surface, a photo of her family on the windowsill, the same one from the bakery, the same four faces under the same red awning.