Page 104 of Claimed By My Biker Daddies

“We would have wanted everything that came with you.”

“I know that now,” she says. “But knowing late is not the same as knowing early.”

We let the fire talk for a few beats. The note sits between us like poor manners.

“Say the competition out loud,” I tell her, because a person can drown in one subject if you let them. “What do you plan?”

Her mouth tilts.

She looks like I handed her a towel in a storm.

“I should remake the loaves. The storm jostled them. They rode with babies and blankets and my dignity. The glaze is fine, but the crumb could be…more itself. They were meant for delivery yesterday. The judges will taste next week. I can do a new batch, give it two days, brush it with rum and orange blossom water and pretend that is enough time for the magic to happen.”

“No,” I say, in the voice people take the first time and the last time. “You do not touch those loaves.”

Her brows go up. “Because.”

“Because stollen is a time instrument,” I say. “It is not a show pony. The best of it is age and patience. You brush it with butter, you powder it like a small snowstorm, then you set it where the air is cool and it learns the song it was meant to sing. A week on a mature loaf is a gift. A week on a new loaf is a compromise. You will not serve compromise with your name on it.”

Her shoulders loosen. I see relief in the bones and pretend I do not. “I know that,” she says. “I just wanted to hear someone tell me anyway.”

“You are hearing me,” I answer. “Deacon staged them in the cold room, not the walk-in, the stone pantry with the spring line. Forty-eight to fifty-one degrees. The butter will finish its work. The crumb will settle into the candied orange like a good marriage. The sugar crust will tighten. You will slice clean and the judges will ask if you let the dough “ripen.” You will say yes and watch them pretend they knew to ask.”

She smiles. It gets me like always. “You talk like you lived in a bakery.”

“I lived in a house that respected rituals,” I tell her. “Bread is one of them. Coffee is another.”

“Cold brew is a third,” she says, just to watch my left eye twitch.

“Get out,” I say without heat. “Or stay and be educated.”

She comes around the table and sits across from me, knees bumping the bench.

She goes quiet.

The air changes back to the thing it was at the start. If I circle the point any longer, I am a coward.

“I cannot hold you,” I say. “If you want to run, we will not stop you. The door will be open. My heart will not be. This only works if you choose it with both feet planted, not with one hand on the knob.”

She flinches like the words are knives and I want to pick them out of the air.

I keep going because softening at the wrong time breaks more than it mends.

“If you leave, the boys do not go without,” I say, and my voice deepens, the part of me with a patch and a vote stepping forward. “You do not carry this alone. We will provide. Formula, diapers, doctor visits, a fund in a bank you can hate and still use. We will make sure your work stands, your roof holds, your car runs. You do not owe us a bed to earn any of that. You do not owe us your mouth or your calendar. You owe us only the space to be in their lives, to hold them at two in the morning when they decide the moon is an insult, to teach them how to fix a hinge and stretch a line and ride a road that is not on anybody’s map. You owe them the chance to know their fathers, however the blood in their bodies decided to arrange itself.”

Her eyes go wet.

She exhales like a person puts a crate down.

“I am not offering,” I say. “I am telling you a fact.”

“I do not want to run,” she says, and there is a spark in it that sounds like the version of her who laughs with her whole chest. “I want to be brave. I want to not have to look at every door and decide if it is easier to be the one who opens it.”

“Then stay,” I say, stupid and simple.

She looks at my mouth and then my hands. Her fingers start to lift then fall. “And if I cannot yet? If I still need to decide without an audience?”

“Then you decide,” I say. “I will be where I am supposed to be when you are done.”