How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [98]
“Me, too.” His fingers are brushing my hair from my neck, and then his lips fall there, on my nape, which makes me shudder. He feels it. “Sit up,” he says quietly.
And as if my body belongs to someone else, that’s what I do. I sit up and fall into the crook of his arm, across his lap, and he kisses me. Sweetly at first, full of tenderness. Gentleness. I feel safe here, against his chest, in the dark. His hand is on my face, smoothing over my cheek and chin, my neck.
Light shimmers in the darkness behind my eyelids. I find myself leaning into him more, curling my hand around his neck, touching his ear. We press closer together, and I am dizzy. I reach beneath his shirt to touch his skin, hot and smooth, and his hand circles my waist below the sweatshirt.
At last he raises his head. “Do you remember when I kissed you?” he says. “In your aunt Poppy’s garden?”
“Yes. I thought I would die.”
“Me, too,” he says. His hand moves to my hair. “I thought about you for years, wondering how you were, what you were doing.”
In my back pocket, my phone rings, and I sit up, urgently digging it out. “Hello?”
“Hey, it’s your baker,” Jimmy says. “I’m standing on the other side of the streetlight and don’t want to interrupt anything.”
I laugh and wave at her. “That’s fine. Come on over.”
As I hang up, I stand and hold out a hand to Jonah, relieved in a way that this conversation can be finished. I’m feeling aroused and sad and nervous and giddy and need a little time to sort it out. “That was my baker. That’s her, over there.” I point across the street.
He stands. Bends in and captures my neck and kisses me again. “What happens if you let go, Ramona?”
I only look at him. Even the thought makes me feel faintly ill.
He smiles. “I’ll talk to you soon.”
Business is good. The Sunday morning openings, combined with juicy crowds of tourists flooding the streets—some of them looking for me specifically, thanks to an arrangement of trades I’ve set up with local motels and hotels—have created enough cash flow that I’m starting to feel as if I really might have a chance to hang on to the bakery.
Katie is thriving. She loves the job and loves getting money, although she never spends more than a few dollars, and that is nearly always on flowers. I ask what she’s saving for and she shrugs it away. “I don’t know. I just like having it.”
Which makes sense.
Sofia so fiercely resisted the aunties coming that I gave in and didn’t push it. She’s now eight months pregnant, and as desperately as I had hoped to be there with her when the baby was born, it’s beginning to look like that will not happen.
Every week, Lily, Katie, and I gather together a care package to send her, filled with all sorts of whimsical and delicious and funny things—a Gumby doll I find at Goodwill, a collection of Far Side cartoons, pretty magazines, chocolates from the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. Whatever seems happy and upbeat, to let her know we love her.
There is, beneath everything, a dogged sense of things being out of kilter. It feels as if I must keep my guard up, alert to whatever is coming.
Katie sends her father emails nearly every day, which Sofia reads aloud to him. She brightly assures Katie that it’s helping, although Katie asks me plainly one afternoon why he isn’t writing back to her.
It isn’t a question I can answer.
And there is Jonah. He comes to visit sometimes on these soft purple evenings. We sit on the porch. We drink ginger tea with lemons or pale lager poured into my grandmother’s old-fashioned pilsner glasses frosted with gold leaves. Sometimes we play cards or backgammon with Katie or listen to music. For now he respects my limits. He doesn’t try to kiss me.
He brings me presents. A CD of a cellist named Adam Hurst; a clutch of roses cut from his garden—headily scented flowers in red and pink and white, one with peppermint stripes that smells wildly of oranges; a