Chapter 19: Slow Morning

On Sunday I woke up without an alarm, and I did not know what to do about it.

Sun came through the bedroom curtains in a slanting yellow bar and lay across the quilt.

Lark was asleep on her stomach with her face turned toward me, one arm flung over my pillow.

Her braid had come loose in the night and lay in a long red-brown rope along my ribs.

Below us the bakery was silent, with no ovens ticking and no mixer.

In six years of living above it, I had never heard it quiet on a Sunday.

I lay still, afraid to move.

The clock on the nightstand said 8:40.

Nobody had texted, and no delivery truck was backing into the lane.

The dough for the cardamom buns was rising in a covered bowl downstairs, left from the night before.

I could go down and shape it.

I could also stay exactly where I was.

Lark opened one eye.

It was very green in the morning light.

"You're thinking about work," she said, into the pillow.

"I'm not."

"You're making your work face."

"I have a work face?"

"A tiny line. Here." She touched the space between my eyebrows with one sleepy finger. "It's been there since I met you. It's gone now."

"It is not."

"It's less."

She hooked her arm around my waist and pulled me down against her.

The bed was warm, and her skin smelled like my soap, and I stopped arguing.

She kissed my shoulder, then my collarbone, then the hollow of my throat, without hurry.

Nothing she did had a deadline.

I realized I was smiling at the ceiling.

"You have a freckle here," I said, and found it with my mouth, below her ear.

"I know."

"And here."

"I know."

"There's one I haven't found."

"There's about four hundred you haven't found."

"Then I'll need the whole morning."

"You have the whole morning," Lark said. "Your mother ordered it."

I laughed and rolled on top of her, and the springs squeaked.

The curtain moved in the breeze, and the yellow bar slid across her chest.

In daylight I could see everything, the pale skin, the pink in her cheeks, the small scar on her knee from a mooring cleat.

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