The Extra's Rise - Chapter 742

742: Peace (2) 742: Peace (2) I found Rose in the kitchen with her sleeves rolled and her hair pinned up like a thesis that refused to be summarized.

She had flour on one cheekbone, a constellation of white on her knuckles, and a stack of blank index cards beside her.

Each card had a printed header that said House Favorites in tiny letters across the top.

Beneath, clean lines waited for ingredients and notes.

“You’re early,” I said, because the sunlight still felt like morning and because the apartment was quiet in a way that seemed willing to stay quiet if we didn’t startle it.

“I was hungry,” she said, then added-in the honest way she saves for when it matters-“and I missed this.” The top card read Bread-First Attempt in This Kitchen in her neat hand.

She slid a bowl toward me.

“Water,” she said.

“Warm, not hot.

We’re not interrogating the yeast.

We’re greeting it.” “You realize you’re founding a religion,” I said, testing the tap with my fingertips.

The warmth that makes butter polite.

“If the religion serves lunch, I don’t object,” Douglas said, arriving as though the smell of flour were a private trumpet only he could hear.

He sniffed the air as a horseman evaluates a new mount.

“What’s the plan, Rose?” “Knead until it stops arguing,” she said.

“Rise until it remembers itself.” Douglas looked satisfied as if she’d given the answer he’d hoped for on an exam only he knew existed.

Stella lugged a stool over and climbed it with the gravity of a high priestess arriving at the altar.

“Can I be the salt?” she asked.

“You may be the salt,” Rose said, duly solemn, “and you may decide how much is kindness and how much is regret.” Stella pinched with a care that would make a jeweler feel companionable and scattered the crystals with a flourish.

“Kindness,” she pronounced.

“Regret is for people who don’t have butter.” We mixed.

Rose measured less than I’d expected and watched more.

“Too wet,” she decided after a heartbeat, dusting the surface with a little snow.

She folded the dough over itself, a motion that looked like tucking in a child, then turned the bowl a quarter turn and did it again.

“Fold,” she said.

“Don’t fight.” “Bread and politics,” Douglas murmured, pretending it was witty and succeeding far more than he deserved.

Alice swatted his arm as if he’d tried to cheat at cards.

We found a rhythm that felt like being given back ten breaths we hadn’t known we’d loaned out.

Press, turn, fold.

On the third cycle, my side muttered; it wasn’t the tide, just an unhelpful wave.

Rose didn’t stop to hover.

She switched my task with a little nod: “Oil the pan.

Tear parchment to fit.” No fussing, no commentary.

The care was in the rearrangement.

Aria entered with damp hair and the brittle, hopeful energy of someone convincing herself a long shower changes everything.

She hovered until Rose pointed at the timer.

“When it sings,” Rose said, “we punch it and then we apologize.” Aria’s mouth tilted.

“You make even punching sound elegant.” “We’re civil to dough,” Rose said dryly.

“We live with it.” We washed hands.

Rose turned the tap to that degree that makes skin say thank you, cupped water into my palms, and did not mention that I took slightly longer than necessary.

The yeast woke.

The dough rose.

The room began to smell like patience and late childhood.

While we waited, Rose sorted the blank cards.

“I thought we could write them as we go,” she said.

“So comfort has a place to live on days when memory is not cooperative.” “Comfort looks like butter,” Stella declared with zero respect for metaphor.

“Accurate,” Rose said, and not a millimeter of sarcasm.

The timer ticked.

We punched and apologized.

We shaped loaves with the quiet intimacy of people who have learned each other’s hands by accident and repetition.

We let them rise again, slid them into the oven, and released a wave of heat that made the windows go polite with fog.

“You’re allowed to sit,” I told Rose.

“I am,” she said, and did not move for three seconds.

Then she sat.

We drank water.

Reika drifted through, leaving a small glass at my elbow with the timing of a professional stagehand who never misses a cue.

“Thank you,” I said.

She did not answer aloud; she counted my sips with her peripheral vision and left without anyone noticing she had come, which was of course untrue.

While the oven breathed, I leaned against the counter.

“What was the first thing you learned to cook?” “Tea,” Rose said, immediately.

“Badly.

I burnt water by scarcity of attention.” She smirked at herself and then shrugged one shoulder.

“Then there was a pastry chef at my mother’s house who saw me poking at dough like it was a debate opponent.

She said, ‘It has a center like you do.

Learn to feel where it is.'” “And did you?” “I learned to pretend convincingly for a long time,” Rose said.

She looked at the oven like it was a person with opinions she was willing to respect.

“Today feels less like pretending.” The timer was technically still ticking, but I had counted minutes without her and didn’t feel obligated to count anymore.

“Dance with me,” I said, because the kitchen had become a square of sunlight and it seemed like a shame to waste it.

“In front of a child?” Rose teased, mouth curving.

“I am blind,” Stella said, solemnly closing one eye and then peeking with the other.

We didn’t waltz.

We did that quiet sway adults do when the timer will save them from making decisions.

Her hand found the back of my neck.

My palm fit at the bow of her apron.

Somewhere in the three steps we took and the two we didn’t, I remembered the feel of her shoulder under my cheek from months before, and it was exactly the same and not the same at all because kitchens make all things human.

The timer ticked-one minute early-and we stopped together on a breath.

The bread came out looking like small suns.

Alice had a butter packet open before the loaves had the decency to cool; the knife glinted and made threats at any hand that might disrespect crumb structure.

Rose waited as long as was reasonable.

Then we broke and tore and steam rose and Stella made a sound that any baker anywhere would call church if they were feeling honest.

“Don’t cut it wrong,” Douglas warned, a brave and foolish sentence.

Three women looked at him.

He retired from the field with dignity intact.

We didn’t cut.

We tore.

Rose buttered the first heel and handed it to me without looking up.

It was not ceremony; it was muscle memory.

I bit into crisp and heat and a sweetness that belonged to nothing but flour left alone long enough.

I handed her the next piece.

She bit it like someone who trusts the bread.

Stella had butter on one cheek and used the heel of her hand to try to deal with it, smearing joy across her face.

“More than kindness,” she announced.

“This is extra kindness.

This is kindness with a cape.” “You’re inventing metrics,” Douglas said, delighted.

“Bread invites metrics,” Rose murmured, wiping flour from her cheek with her wrist and transferring it to her temple.

We ate onion soup that tasted like afternoons that stretched and nothing urgent happening.

Reika timed water refills with the elegance of someone who can make the world feel easier in increments of four ounces.

Cecilia wasn’t here; this day belonged to quiet, and that was fine.

Douglas quizzed Rose about things that would never matter on paper and matter terribly in homes.

“Butter knives,” he said.

“Serrated or not?” “Serrated for crust,” she said.

“Not for butter.” He nodded like she’d passed another of his ridiculous exams.

Stella wrote “Bread” on a new House Favorites card in a handwriting that had ambitions to be neat and settled for enthusiastic.

Rose took the pen, and under the title wrote in small, careful letters: when we remember to breathe.

Then she added ingredients in tidy rows and a note at the bottom that said Be patient.

It matters.

“Too earnest?” she asked me, tapping the card with the pen as if it were a tuning fork.

“Exactly earnest enough,” I said.

“We’re allowed sincerity when the room smells like this.” After the second loaf went in, Rose rinsed the bowl with the attention she usually spares for complex systems.

I dried.

It’s possible to stand side by side and do very small things and feel like you’ve made the best choice of the year.

She bumped my shoulder with hers in a punctuation that meant approval.

“You were careful,” she said.

“I’m learning,” I said.

She glanced at the card box.

“Me too.” We took the first loaf to the balcony because the city had decided to be lovely for free.

Avalon’s glass was still pale and the air found us without dragging its feet.

We tore bites and ate standing up, which made the butter taste like delinquency.

Rose leaned her elbows on the railing and licked butter from her thumb with the concentration of a scholar and the lack of self-consciousness of someone who chooses where and when to be elegant.

“I like the way your mother tells stories to food,” she said.

“As if the food will remember it.” “It will,” I said.

“She taught it to me that way.

I tell stories to my weapons when you’re not looking.” She laughed.

A clean, warm sound with no politics in it.

“I suppose everything we keep near us wants to be spoken to kindly.” “Everything worth keeping,” I said.

We drifted back inside when the second loaf announced itself by filling the kitchen with ambition.

The door closed with that whisper that makes rooms feel lived in.

Rose set the second loaf on the rack, tapped the crust once, and nodded to herself as if it had answered correctly.

She wrote Bread-Second Attempt on a new card and left the rest blank on purpose.

Aria reappeared with a jar of jam she was not willing to declare a favorite yet.

“Trial period,” she said.

“If it behaves, it stays.” “We can write probationary on its label,” I offered.

Rose immediately wrote probationary on a piece of tape and stuck it on the jar.

Aria gazed at it like seeing her own sense of humor printed out had rearranged her bones into better formation.

We ate again because bread exists to be a bad influence.

Stella collapsed on the floor with a book and a slice and made small whale noises of contentment.

Douglas borrowed my newspaper and pretended to read while obviously calculating the longitude of the second heel.

Alice told an entirely dignified story about me burning water at age twelve that I would deny under oath.

When the plates were stacked and the knives were lying obediently on towels, Rose sat with the cards once more.

She slid the first one into the box and then, as if thinking better of it, took it out and wrote a second line in the margin: save the heel for tomorrow.

It felt like a sentence addressed directly to the future with instructions to be kind to itself.

“Will you keep this box here?” she asked, glancing around the kitchen like she was quietly measuring it for permanence.

“Here,” I said, tapping the counter where sunlight makes a rectangle certain hours of the day.

“It looks like it wants to live there.” She set it down exactly where I’d indicated, then rotated it a quarter turn so the grain lined with the counter’s seam.

It became one of those ordinary objects that pulls a room into alignment by existing where it belongs.

“Dance again?” I asked.

The timer had nothing to do now and seemed less helpful without employment.

The room was warm.

Being human felt, briefly, like a straightforward job.

“Only if Stella continues to be partially blind,” Rose said.

“I am blinder,” Stella reported from the floor, a smear of jam on her nose now to mirror the butter on her cheek.

We did not dance.

We stood very close.

Rose pressed the tip of her flour-marked finger to my temple like a benediction and wiped the tiny white constellation away.

The intimacy was small and ridiculous and exactly what I wanted.

Later, when evening settled into the corners as if it had rented them by the month, Stella taped a second picture under the first on the photo wall.

The second caught four faces in the kitchen-me, Rose, Stella mostly blur because she can’t not, and Reika in the background pretending to be a ghost and failing because the camera likes her.

There was a butter thumbprint in the corner because we live honestly.

Under it, in Rose’s hand: Bread-First Attempt in This Kitchen.

“Needs a second attempt,” Douglas said, eyeing Tomorrow like he intended to negotiate.

“Tomorrow,” Rose said, agreeing without giving him jurisdiction.

“Or the day after.

We have time.” We ended without declaring it an ending.

Dishes dried in neat diagonal ranks.

The oven cooled, deciding not to be dramatic anymore.

The city outside drew its evening eyebrows and made itself presentable for night.

Rose put the pen down parallel to the box because that’s where it wanted to be.

As she passed me, she pressed a kiss to my temple in a motion so unassuming I nearly missed its importance.

“Good night, baker,” I said.

“Good night, hungry man,” she answered, and for once hunger was a good thing that had everything to do with bread and nothing to do with longing.

The kitchen kept the heat in its bones.

The card box sat in its bright rectangle, ready to teach us how to remember what comfort looks like when we forget again.

And in the living room, the little crooked photo titled HOME watched the second one settle beneath it, the two of them making a simple argument for staying.