My shoulders drop, and tension I didn’t even realize I was holding leaves my body. I kiss her again, deeper this time, and feel her body responding despite how recently we finished fucking.
“Again?” she asks, breathless.
“Again,” I confirm. “We’ve got ten horrible days to make up for.”
She laughs, and the sound fills every empty corner of the cabin.
This time we make it to the bed.
A Year Later: Christmas Day
SASHA
For the first six months, we live in two worlds.
I drive up the mountain every Friday after closing the bakery, stay through Sunday, then drive back down with flour still under my fingernails and Red's scent still on my skin. He comes to town once a month, too uncomfortable in crowds but trying—for me, always for me.
We learn about each other slowly. How he likes his coffee. How I need morning conversation before silence. The way his nightmares come in cycles, and how my presence helps. The way my doubts creep in late at night, and how his certainty grounds me.
By month seven, I've moved half my closet to the cabin.
By month nine, Beth's running the bakery more than I am.
By month eleven, Red asks if I want to move in properly. Not as a grand gesture, but as a quiet question over morning coffee: "Will you move in already?”
So, I do.
Now it's been a year since that first Christmas. A year since I knocked on his door in a too-short Santa dress and accidentally fell in love with a grumpy mountain man who didn't want to be saved but let me love him anyway.
Snow falls thick again this Christmas, as soft as powdered sugar over the pine trees outside the cabin window. I watch it from the kitchen, my fingers sticky with icing, flour on my sleeve, and the oven humming behind me.
Red sits at the table, his sleeves rolled up, focused on the sugar cookie in front of him like it’s a mission. He decorates a snowman with the kind of concentration most men reserve for battle, entirely too much red gel bleeding across the white surface. Bear lies flat on his side by the fire, snoring like he’s been on guard duty all week.
“Is that supposed to be Santa?” I ask.
Red grunts. “Obviously. Can’t you tell?”
I squint at the cookie massacre. “It looks more like a drunk elf that lost a bar fight.”
He lifts an eyebrow, then reaches across the table and swipes a streak of icing across the back of my hand. “Careful, or I’ll start decorating you next.”
I lick the icing without breaking eye contact. “Promises, promises.”
He leans back in his chair, watching me with that look he gets sometimes—like he still can’t believe I’m here.
Of course, I am.
Now I’m in his kitchen, barefoot in flannel pajama pants and a sweatshirt that used to be his, running my own bakery out of town and learning how to build a life that’s mine, and his, and ours. And Bear’s, of course.
Beth still calls me Cookie, even though the bakery has that name now.
Cookie’s.
People come in from all over for our peppermint fudge bars and cranberry pistachio knots. She says I should franchise. I say she’s drunk on nutmeg.
Red built me a worktable out of reclaimed barn wood for my birthday. It lives in the bakery kitchen now, worn and solid and right—just like him. He still disappears into his tiny workshop sometimes, but he can’t stay away for long.
“You’re staring again,” I murmur, crossing to the table and setting the next tray of cookies down between us. “Are you thinking about that Santa revenge plan?”
