Romance short. A woman sometimes takes a moment to watch a baker at work on her morning commute.
870w, F/F. Just a little slice-of-life and crushing on a stranger!
It’s early in the morning, not even four o’clock, and the cold air is bitter on the bare bits of Denise’s skin — she can feel it threatening to chap her lips, making her eyes sting when the freezing wind cuts underneath the brim of her hat, cutting at her cheeks and the top of her neck where her scarf is folded over and can’t quite be tight to the skin. There’s the barest little patch of skin bared when her sleeve rides up and her gloves aren’t quite long enough to protect her whole wrist, and when she lifts her hand up to check her phone the wind catches her right up the sleeve and makes her shiver on the spot as the breeze goes right up to her elbow under her jacket.
It’s fucking miserable and she can’t wait for the winter to be over, most of all because she’s traipsing on frosty ground and it feels like the middle of the fucking night, dark and deep and never-ending.
It’s become a habit of hers as she goes to start her four-thirty shift — it’s the bakery on one side and the deli on the other. Before it was a bakery, this was a pizzeria, and they decided to keep the big glass front windows and the display lights just the same as they kept the huge woodfire oven.
She stands on the pavement for a second, taking a sip from her thermos flask as she looks through the window and watches one of the bakers work. She’s a big woman, tall with plump cheeks and huge, toned arms, and it’s no wonder they’re so fucking toned with the way she kneads dough — Denise imagines she can hear the thundering slap of it hitting the floured board as she drops a big ball of it onto the counter and begins to work it. Denise allows herself to watch for a few moments, to see the flour that’s spattered and sticking to the baker’s strong fingers, the back of her hand, up her wrist to her forearm.
Her skin is pink and scattered all over with freckles underneath the flour, but except for a few bare smatterings of white powder, the front of her white tunic is extremely clean, not stained at all even on the red fabric of her apron.
She’s utterly concentrated as she works, her lips pressed together, a sheen of sweat showing on her cheeks and her forehead, enough to shimmer but not to drip, and there’s this gorgeous furrow that appears between her eyebrows, a matching one just above her lips because of how they’re pursed. Denise knows from having seen her look over her shoulder and laugh at other bakers’ jokes, and sometimes seeing her smile in satisfaction at her own work as she looks it over, that she also has dimples when she smiles.
The thought makes Denise feel sort of fluttery — she doesn’t know what it is about girls with dimples, but they really do make her feel.
Denise’s gaze drops down to the baker’s arms, to the shift and movement of the muscles in them, to the sheer work of them. She’s pretty sure this woman lifts or does something else other than baking, and Denise wonders for a second how much she benches, if she could bench Denise.
She almost laughs out loud at the thought, it makes her so fucking giddy — the movement must catch the baker’s attention through the glass, because she looks up and meets Denise’s eye through the glass, smiles at her, gives her a wave. She calls something behind her shoulder to one of the other bakers, and Denise wonders vaguely what it is, if it’s about her, but it’s another twenty minutes’ walk, and she needs to go.
Her boots crunch on the frost as she starts up the path again, and the door opens to the deli, a young man also scattered with freckles — he bears a passing resemblance to the baker — waving frantically at her.
“Hey! My sister says you stop and look in the bakery a lot, but you always go past way before we open. Here.”
Denise takes the bag, feeling the weight of it, feeling the warmth of it.
“Fresh doughnuts,” says the kid, stepping back. “Enjoy. A gutn tog!”
Denise laughs breathlessly as the deli door closes, and she looks at the card stapled to the front of the bag — it has the name of the deli on, and a little note that says, “Hi, I always see you walking by in the morning. You should come by some afternoon and say hello. : ) Come in for coffee sometime. Chana xx,” and then there’s Chana’s phone number, written out in neat handwriting.
Denise looks to the window. Chana winks at her, and Denise’s hand comes up to cover her mouth automatically, even as the giggle comes out of her mouth, almost unbidden.
Her cheeks burning with heat that makes her almost forget the wind chill, Denise fishes a doughnut out of the bag to bite into as she keeps up her pace into work, and figures she’ll have time to drop Chana a text before she clocks in.
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