Noor sings to the dough. Not loud, and not in any language I recognize, just a low hum-mutter while she folds, and for eight months I have been trying to work out whether she knows she does it.
I work the night crew at Fennimore’s, which means I get to the bakery at eleven when the street is empty and the windows are black and the only light on the block is ours. There are four of us on the schedule. Two are men who mostly talk about fantasy football and then disappear into the walk-in to be sad. That leaves Noor and me, the two women who actually make the bread. She does laminated dough and the croissants. I do the long ferments, the sourdoughs, the big country loaves. Between two and five in the morning, when the mixers are running and the ovens are throwing heat at us like a punishment, it’s just the two of us and about a thousand pounds of flour.
I should say I am not good at this. I’m good at starter and hydration percentages. I am not good at saying a thing aloud to a coworker I’ve been staring at since the spring.
That night was a Thursday going on Friday, the kind of night where the ovens had been going since midnight and my shirt was stuck to my back. The men had left at three-thirty, one with a stomach thing and one with “a thing,” and Noor and I had the whole place to ourselves. We were both a little giddy from it. She was shaping croissants at the steel table, her braid pinned up under her cap, flour all down her forearms. I was weighing out the morning’s rye.
“You keep looking at me,” she said, without turning around.
“I don’t.”
“You do. I can feel it on the back of my neck. Like a heat lamp.”
“That’s the oven.”
“It’s not the oven, Dell.”
I put the scoop down. I’d love to tell you I said something smooth. What I said was, “I’m weighing flour,” in a voice an octave too high.
She turned around. She had a smear of butter on her chin and a dusting of white on her cheekbone, and her eyes were doing something I’d been trying not to name since March. “Dell. Do you want to kiss me, or do you want me to keep guessing?”
The mixer bowl was spinning behind me. I could hear it grinding. I could hear the proofer humming and the compressor kicking on in the walk-in and my own pulse, which was louder than all of it.
“Yes,” I said. “I want to kiss you. I want that very much. I’ve wanted it since you taught me the lamination fold and put your hands over mine.”
“That was in April.”
“I know when it was.”
She laughed, a bright surprised laugh, and wiped her hands on her apron, which just moved the flour around. “Okay. Okay, good. I was worried it was only me. I’ve been making excuses to bring you the proofing trays for months. I don’t even need to bring you the trays.”
“You don’t need to bring me the trays?”
“They go on the rack by the door!”
We were both laughing now, helpless, the kind of laughing that has nerves in it. She crossed the floor and stopped in front of me, close enough that I could smell the butter and sugar and warm skin under her sweat. She tipped her chin up.
“Ask me,” she said.
“Can I kiss you?”
“Yes. Please.”
I did. Her mouth was soft and slightly salty and she kissed like she folded dough, deliberate, patient, unhurried, with a certain pressure at the edges. A little sound escaped her. One of her floury hands came up and landed on my jaw. When we broke apart, I had white fingerprints on my face, and I could tell because she was grinning at them.
“You’ve got flour,” she said.
“You put it there.”
“I’m going to put a lot more.”
“Door,” I said suddenly. “Noor. The back door.”
“It’s the delivery guy at five.”
“It’s three-fifty. The dough has forty minutes.”
She looked at the proofer clock. She looked at me. Then she walked to the back door, threw the deadbolt with a very satisfying clunk, flipped the little sign hanging on the knob to Receiving, Knock, and came back with her hands on her hips like a woman with a plan.
“The dough has forty minutes,” she said. “I have been waiting eight months.”
“Is that your pitch?”
“It’s the whole pitch.”
I grabbed the front of her apron and pulled her in and kissed her properly, no questions left in it. She backed me up until my hips hit the prep table, the big stainless one, cold even through my pants, and I made some indecent noise into her mouth. Her hands were everywhere. They went up under my shirt, warm and a little rough from the work, spreading across my ribs, and my breath stuttered.
“Is this okay?” she said, her thumb against the band of my bra.
“God, yes. Keep going. Tell me what you’re doing.”
“I’m going to take your shirt off,” she said, close to my ear, “and I’m going to get flour on your whole chest. Is that stupid?”
“It’s the least stupid thing anyone’s said all week.”
She peeled the shirt over my head. My hair was a ruined mess and I didn’t care. She looked at me for a second with her whole face open, and then she scooped a handful of flour off the table, white and soft as powder, and sifted it down over my collarbone. It tickled. It was ridiculous. I started to laugh, and her mouth followed the flour, pressing a trail down the center of my chest, and the laugh turned into a whine.
“Your skin’s so warm,” she murmured. “It’s like the dough. It’s like when it’s ready.”
“Don’t say dough things. I’m trying to be sexy.”
“You are being sexy. You’re sexy and you smell like rye.”
“I do smell like rye.”
“It’s my favorite smell. It’s been my favorite since April.”
I pulled her face up and kissed her again, hard, and unhooked her apron and tossed it, and her shirt came off too, and she wore a plain black bra under it, nothing fancy, and I loved it more than any lace in the world. I put my mouth on her throat. I tasted salt and sugar. She gasped and arched her neck and said, “Dell, God, do that again,” so I did, and I felt her knees give a little.
“Up,” I said. “Sit up on the table.”
She hopped up onto the steel, her legs apart, the edge of the table pressing the backs of her thighs. I stood between them and kissed her breast through the bra, and then she reached back and unhooked it herself and I forgot every word I knew.
I took my time. I was careful with her, and also I wasn’t, because she kept making these little demands in my ear, harder, there, yes, no, softer, there, and I was learning her in real time, like a recipe I wanted to memorize. When her nipple hardened against my tongue she grabbed the back of my head and said my name like it was a swear.
“I want to taste you,” I said. “Can I? Tell me if I shouldn’t, we can slow down.”
“Don’t slow down. Dell. Please.”
Her work pants were the loose kind, drawstring. I undid them, and she lifted her hips so I could pull them off along with her underwear, and then I knelt on the tile floor and looked up at her. She was sitting on the steel table in the glow of the oven light with flour on her thighs, her hair half out of its braid, watching me like she couldn’t believe it.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.” She was grinning and shaking. “Hi. Oh my God.”
I kissed the inside of her knee. Then higher, along the thigh where the flour had stuck in the soft hairs, and I tasted it, plain and dry and sweet. She laughed, breathless, and then I put my mouth on her and the laugh broke into a long sound.
She tasted like warmth. I licked slowly and took my cues from the way her hands tightened in my hair. She told me what she liked in half-sentences, there, that, yes, slower, and I followed every one. Her thighs trembled around my shoulders. I got my fingers into it, one and then two, curling them forward as I licked, and she said, “Oh, fuck, Dell,” and a second later one heel dropped against my back and drummed.
“Is that good?” I said, mouth against her.
“It’s so good it’s embarrassing.”
“Don’t be embarrassed.”
“I’m going to be loud.”
“Be loud. It’s three-fifty in the morning. The ovens are louder.”
She was loud. She was gloriously loud. She came with her head thrown back against the shelf of bread tins, a rattle of metal and a sharp cry, her whole body clenching around my fingers. I kept going through it, gentle, until she tugged at my hair and said, “Stop, stop, too much, come up here.”
I came up. She hauled me in by the belt loops and kissed me, tasting herself on my mouth, shaky and laughing and wrecked. “My legs,” she said. “I can’t feel my legs.”
“I did that.”
“You did that.” She kissed me again. “My turn.”
“Noor, we’ve got twenty minutes.”
“Plenty of time. Turn around.”
I turned, and she pressed up behind me, her arms around my waist, her chin on my shoulder. Her hands slid down the front of my pants. I made a sound I had never made at work.
“Is this okay?” she whispered.
“Yes. Yes. Don’t stop.”
I braced myself on the table with both hands, flour sticking to my palms, and she worked me with a slow expertise that I’d bet money she learned from laminating butter. Two fingers, steady, circling, her mouth on the back of my neck. She kept asking small questions in my ear, like that? faster? here?, and I kept answering with half words. The oven door was glowing. The proofer ticked. I looked down and saw our two sets of floury handprints on the steel.
“Noor,” I said. “Noor, I’m going to.”
“Do it. I’ve got you.”
I came leaning into the table with my forehead against my own forearm, a deep, shuddering release that went right down my legs. She held me up. She kissed my shoulder blade. When I could breathe again I turned around in her arms and we just stood there, two half-dressed women covered in flour, breathing against each other.
“We have flour on literally everything,” she said.
“There’s a handprint on your ass.”
“That’s yours.”
“I’m very proud of it.”
The timer on the proofer went off with a shrill beep. We both jumped like we were caught, then laughed so hard we had to hold each other up. She got her clothes on, mostly backwards, and I wiped the table with a wet rag and a straight face, and when I turned the deadbolt back and flipped the sign, I realized I was humming.
“You’re humming,” Noor said.
“I’m not.”
“You are. You’re humming the dough song.”
“I don’t have a dough song.”
“You do now.”
At five the delivery guy knocked and I opened the door with my hair in a plastic cap and a streak of white across my cheekbone, and he looked at me, looked at Noor, looked at the immaculate steel table, and said, “Rough night?”
“Best one in a while,” said Noor, cheerfully.
We bagged the rye together. Her hip bumped mine at the rack. She slid a croissant, still warm, onto a sheet of paper and tore it in half, and fed me a piece, and said, “Come to my place after. I make better coffee than this place. I’ll put on something that isn’t the radio.”
“I’d love that.”
“Bring the rye starter. I want to see where it lives.”
“That’s a big step.”
“I’m a big-step kind of baker,” she said, and kissed the flour off my cheek, quick and unembarrassed, while the sun came up pink and gray over the empty street.
