Chapter 58

Kendall

“So you had one of the dads try to take your boyfriends’ business down.” Barbie ticked off one finger. “Had a heart-warming family reconciliation.” She ticked off another. “You’re now the part owner of their company?”

“About that,” Alan said as he tossed our dinner around in the wok, “we need to make some time to sit down and discuss diversifying your income streams. Investing some money and creating passive income would be an excellent way to future proof the business.”

“Ehhh…” Barbie made a rude noise. “Boring! But, and I leave the best to last, Van asked you to marry him?”

“Um… yeah.” But then her eyes dropped down to my fingers and I was forced to curl them up and put them in my lap. “At least I think so. I thought we’d talk about it more, but every time Van tried to bring it up, the others changed the subject, so I’m not sure what’s going on. Was it all a joke?”

“Nope.” Alan sounded completely confident. “Guys don’t do that.”

“Well, then maybe it upset the other two?”

“Have you tried asking them?” Barbie replied. “I mean, it’s gotta be complicated. The bullshit that happened as the government tried to legalise gay people getting married doesn’t give me hope that there will be any changes that will help you tie the knot with the three of them, but…” She searched my face. “Does it matter?”

“Not really.” I shrugged a little too hard. “I mean I dreamed of wearing a beautiful white dress and having a big party like most little girls, but…” I nodded slowly. “If it’s a choice between a frock and them, I choose them.”

“Nah, fuck that.” Barbie slapped her hands down on the kitchen counter then got up to grab her phone. “There’s gotta be a way around this. You’re not the first quint—”

“Quad,” I corrected.

“Whatever geometry word works,” she said with an airy wave. “There’s gotta be a legal precedent somewhere.”

“I can have a friend take a look at the situation,” Alan said. “I know some people who specialise in family law. Maybe not a marriage, but a commitment ceremony followed by a legal agreement to protect all parties.”

“That sounds so romantic…” I said with a shake of my head, right before my phone buzzed. Gage was ringing me so I tapped on the phone to answer it.

“Hey—”

“Can you meet me somewhere?” he asked. The urgency in his voice had me stopping still.

“Sure, what’s going on? Are you OK? Is everyone OK?”

“Everything’s fine,” he replied.

“Oh, OK, well, I’m having dinner with Barbie and Alan, so can I catch you in about an hour?”

“Two!” Barbie called out. “That’s the bare minimum if we’re going to do some wedding planning.”

“Wedding planning…” I hadn’t heard that kind of pain in his voice before, not when Van babbled on about me becoming Mrs Cooper, nor when I’d put tentative feelers out about it. “Um, yeah, sure—”

“Nope.” I collected my keys and shot Barbie a look and mouthed an apology at her and Alan. “Tell me where you are.”

“It’s OK. I should’ve organised this with you beforehand, but I wanted it to be a surprise,” he said.

“What surprise? Gage, what surprise?”

I jumped into the elevator, but he wouldn’t explain further, instead giving me an address just outside the city. I fired up the van and drove to that address, the reason why no clearer when I arrived.

The inner-city suburbs used to have lots of little corner stores and pubs. The massive supermarkets of today didn’t exist back then and people needed easy access to milk, bread and beer. The retail landscape changed though, with big shopping centres created, centralising people’s shopping behaviours and many of the little shops were converted into housing, or some, like this one, were just left to moulder.

It had been beautiful once. There was something about Federation architecture, with all of the decorative elements, that you just didn’t get now. Shops were glass and steel boxes, little more than gigantic display cases for their goods. But this place, even with the boarded-up windows, would’ve been an inviting place to come and shop, which was perhaps why I walked up to the half-open door.

“Gage?” I felt like one of those dumb girls that always gets killed in the slasher films. “Gage? Hey, are you in…?”

The dust was thick, forming a golden haze inside the place. Many, many years of rubbish had been dragged away from the looks of it, the marks of old boxes and crates left on the floor. It made the shop seem curiously empty as I moved forward, just in time for him to appear.

“Hey…” Gage held a spray can in his hand, and I saw now that he’d been placing markings on the floor. Fuzzy white lines criss-crossed the cracked lino.

“What is this?” I stepped around the blocks he’d drawn and then came closer. “Is this a new renovation you guys are working on? You don’t usually do commercial property, do you?”

“No, not usually,” he replied with a nod, going to wipe a smudge of dust off his nose, but his hand was even dirtier. I reached up and brushed it away for him. “We’re doing this for a special client.”

“So you’ve started on a new job already?” They were close to finishing the job they’d been working on when we reconnected and had planned on taking a week off to recover, so I glanced around, seeing the place with new eyes. “Who for?”

“Well, you see there’s this girl.” I turned around and frowned, but he just smiled and moved closer. “This really amazing girl.”

“Have I said I am not cool with you calling other girls amazing?” I replied. “Because I’m not, just so we’re clear.”

“That’s cool because I’ve got no intention of describing any other woman that way.” He reached up, hesitating when I glanced at his dusty hands, then he set the spray can down and wiped them clean on his jeans. “Just you.”

“I don’t understand…” I took in the peeling paint on the walls, the ancient flooring and all I could see was neglect.

“One of the agents I work with to find properties to renovate suggested this one to me,” he explained as he glanced around the shop. “While he was telling me how easy it would be to get this rezoned as residential, all I could think of was this.” He pointed to one spray painted rectangle. “A display case full of your creations there.” His finger shifted to another. “A coffee machine. A bunch of tables there.”

And out of the air, he created miracles.

The space was transformed from grimy to gleaming, the entire shop transformed to meet my requirements. Every thought I’d had about the way the different bakeries I worked for came rushing up.

“The display case would need to be closer to the window,” I said. “Probably running this way.” I demonstrated it running at right angles from the window, deeper into the shop. “You could have people looking straight at your offerings as they walked past, bringing them in.”

“Nice…” he said. “We could line that up with the doorway so there’s an easy walkway between the oven and the display cases.”

“It would need to be pretty wide,” I said. “Lots of people working behind the counter and…” I frowned, suddenly realising what we were talking about. “So…” My eyes searched his face. “Did you buy this for me?”

“I don’t have a ring.” Gage’s smile faded and he looked somewhat embarrassed by that. “I went and looked at some jewellery places, but… I don’t know what kind of ring you’d want to wear, but this? It’s gonna take some time to get done. The shop needs a lot of structural work completed before we can even start on the interior, but as soon as I walked in, I could see it. A future, for you, for me. I know it’s not real romantic, but this made sense to me in a way a ring didn’t.”

“Why… do you need a ring?” I asked.

“Van fucked it up, just blurting things out, but that’s what he does.” Gage shook his head. “But I wanted to do it right. Get you a ring, propose properly.”

My heart thudded way too loudly in my ears as I watched Gage sink to one knee.

“Will you marry me, Kendall? I don’t know if you want a gold, or silver, or platinum band, but this I see so damn clearly. When you finish your apprenticeship, you can run your own bakery. I’ll get up early with you, go for a run once I’ve dropped you off at work, and you can spend the quiet hours of the morning making beautiful things for people to eat. I wanted to just work on this on the sly, get it all done for you, but…”

He shook his head, which had me taking a few steps towards him.

“I knew that you’d want to be here, making decisions the whole way through. Working together to make it just the way you want it and…” He raised his hand and offered me a key. “Us building a future together. That’s what I want, what I’m trying to say. Do you—”

“Yes.”

I rushed forward and kissed him hard because it was either that or burst into tears. I hated ditching Barbie, but this… The big, beautiful man. My big, beautiful man, I realised as I pulled back.

“You know I was always going to say yes, and I don’t need a ring.” A little growl from him made clear maybe that wasn’t the way it would work. “You could get me one of those plastic ones that come from a bubble-gum machine, if that’s what you wanted. I just want…”

I couldn’t put it into words, not while I stared into his strong, proud face. He was so fucking beautiful, the symmetry of his face somehow enhanced by the dust.

“This is perfect. You’re perfect.”

“We’re perfect,” he corrected, standing up and pulling me close. “So what do you think? You want to build a future here? It’ll be tough work.”

“I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”