“Say it again.”
I brush her hair back from her face. “I love you.”
Rhianelle lays her head back on my chest and listens to my heartbeat. She doesn’t speak for a while. I can’t tell what she’s thinking.
“When this war ends,” she murmurs at last, “I think I’ll need a second oven for our future bakery.”
I glance down at her. “You’re already expanding?”
“The first one won’t be enough,” she says, utterly serious. “If I open at dawn, there will be a line. I don’t want anyone turned away.”
I imagine her there, flour dusting her hands, arguing with an oven that won’t heat evenly.
My wife wants another oven.
Hel, I’d build it myself. One with stone hearth and iron door. Something that holds heat properly.
I could set up a forge nearby, next to her bakery. Take commissions for fixing ploughs or mending blades.
It wouldn’t be a bad life. The thought stops me cold.
What the fuck am I doing?
I know better than this. Hope is for fools who haven't learned yet. I buried that weakness years ago, crushed it under every broken promise and every time I reached for something and watched it turn to ash.
And yet here I am, building bakeries in my head. Imagining a forge with my name above the door. Letting myselfwantthings.
It's pathetic.
Whatever we have tonight—it’s nothing more than just borrowed moments before everything goes to shit again.
I should know better.
But when Rhianelle talks about her bakery with that light in her eyes and plans for a future like it's something we're owed… I want to believe her. I want to believe in morning crowds and the smell of fresh bread and a life where the worst thing that happens is an oven running cold.
It's a stupid, reckless kind of hope.
Rhianelle shifts against me, oblivious to the war in my head. Her fingers trace idle patterns on my chest, slow and drowsy. She's growing heavier in my arms, her breathing evening out.
"You're quiet," she murmurs, voice thick with sleep.
"Just thinking."
"About ovens?" There's a smile in her voice.
"About you." I press my lips to the top of her head.Always about you.
She hums contentedly and burrows deeper into my side. Her leg hooks over mine, claiming more of me. The fire burns lower. Shadows lengthen across the cottage walls.
Her breathing slows further, deepening into the rhythm of sleep. I think she's gone until she mumbles something against my chest.
"...needs more butter...
I still, listening.
"The dough," she breathes, barely coherent. “Too dry... add honey... maybe cinnamon..."
Even in her dreams, she's there. In that bakery that doesn't exist, building a life we might never have.
