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Back when he’d been a student grinding out his chemistry degree between parties, Harper had rarely gone to sleep before the sunrise, too high on youth and cocaine to regret any of his choices. Now, Harper woke up with the sun or before it, rolling himself out of bed while still half-asleep at a few minutes to five in the morning, before his alarm even had a chance to ring.
The Harper of old would have been amused, in that way Harper still got when he was trying to cover up how horrified he was with a quip. But the Harper of now had already spent the blank check of his twenties and learned through them that even mild legal stimulants were a bad idea before eight in the morning. He trooped down to the kitchen, sanitized all of the counters, and had the dough for the morning rolls proofing in large bowls in front of his not-quite-commercial-sized oven completely on autopilot before the coffee cravings even kicked in.
By the time the little brass bell over the entryway door chimed for Harper’s first visitor, he had a latte and a tablet in front of him at one of the little round tables where his customers liked to sit and eat their morning pastries, a little ways off from the full display case of croissants and doughnuts.
Still half in the entryway, Mark raised an eyebrow at him and ran a hand through his dark, slicked-back hair. “How do you always look like you just got up?”
Harper smiled, deliberately not watching the way Mark’s forearm flexed, exposed by Mark’s habit of rolling up the sleeves of his uniform even in winter. “It’s one of my many talents,” he said.
Mark snorted and pulled out a chair at the table next to Harper’s, slouching sideways into it. The way Mark sat was what had given him away as a cop to Harper the first time they’d met; regrettably, Harper had found it as charming then as he did now, but he just kept drinking his coffee, even as Mark leaned over enough to rest one of those nice forearms on Harper’s table. “I always thought you’d be more of a tea guy,” he said, “but it’s been a year since you moved here and all I ever see you drink is coffee.”
“Tea is a drink for when you’re at home or at a subpar cafe,” Harper said. “Coffee is a drink for when you’re at a bakery with excellent coffee.”
“Uh-huh.” Mark rolled his eyes. “Maybe get me some of that excellent coffee, then.”
Harper did, and a croissant besides, so flaky and buttery that part of its first paper-thin layer fell at the first press of Harper’s tongs against it.
Mark muttered a quiet thanks when it was placed in front of him, keeping his left hand under the croissant to catch any more snowflake-fine crumbs while he lifted it to his mouth with his right. He took surprisingly small bites for such a tall man, and he smiled after each one, taking his time to really taste it instead of rushing through his meal.
Harper didn’t even pretend not to watch him - if pressed he could claim it was out of pride for his craft, and that was part of it; he was gratified that Mark liked his baking so much. But the way the corners of Mark’s eyes creased with happiness at each bite affected him more than it felt safe to admit.
Mark looked up suddenly, before Harper could look away, and the directness of his gaze made Harper swallow, feeling caught. But Mark had caught him looking before. Harper did what he always did - he turned it into a bit of banter, something harmless that didn’t leave him so exposed. “There’s no need to ask if you liked it,” he said.
“I always like it,” Mark said, still looking at Harper.
But Harper had already wriggled free; he just smiled and raised his own mug to his lips again. “Like I told you, love,” he said, “it’s a gift.”
The bell rang again a moment later, and Harper looked up with some interest to see if it was someone he’d have to eventually get up for. Bourzon was a small enough town that he knew all of his customers by name and order, but he was still a bit particular about who he let rifle around his display case just for hygiene reasons. All of those years in a lab had stuck with him in unusual ways.
But it was just Kanya, ripping a woolen beanie off from on top of her dark hair as she strode in, her boots leaving little snowmelt footprints across the wood floor. “Eight in the morning and it’s already snowing like this,” she sighed. “Sometimes I miss Laos. Zero days of snowfall a year.”
“You’d never have let your brother leave without you,” Harper said, putting his coffee cup down long enough for Kanya to give him a brief hug on her way to the counter, something that always made Mark scowl for some reason.
Sure enough, there was a frown on his face as he watched Kanya’s back retreating towards the kitchen in the back. Harper shook his head. He understood why Mark didn’t particularly like him, but Kanya was fiercely kind once you got to know her, and Mark had had plenty of time to get to know her. It really was beyond him.
Harper turned back to Mark, but it was like a spell had broken; he was scowling down at his plate as he ate his croissant like he couldn’t even taste it. “You’re not going to check on what she’s doing back there?” He asked. “You won’t even let me look through those doors.”
“Kanya’s the only person other than me who’s allowed back there without a warrant,” Harper said with a smile, but the joke fell flat in the face of Mark’s sudden unwillingness to play ball. “But maybe I will. Excuse me.”
All that Kanya was ‘up to’ was checking on the lower oven. She’d swung the large door open and half-laid upon it as she inspected the back of it. “Is this one still giving you trouble?” She asked. “I can get Sua to pick you up another one the next time we drive into the city. Large deliveries are his thing anyway.”
“If I replaced the oven every time it gave me trouble, Sua would have to do twelve six-hour drives for me a year, and then he’d strangle me,” Harper said. “It’s still perfectly fine, I just use the top one for anything that needs really precise temperatures. And put a hairnet on before putting your head in any other appliances, please.”
Kanya scoffed but backed out of the oven, leaning against the door instead. Harper realized his mistake when she cast a judgmental look towards the front of the shop. “Speaking of things giving you trouble…”
“He doesn’t give me trouble,” Harper said, deliberately pitching his voice low in the hopes that Kanya would copy him.
Kanya gave him a look, but obliged him, coming closer to whisper, “we’ve been friends since you moved here, but even though I like a donut in the morning too, you only started opening at eight when Mark started coming around before his shift. Don’t you think it’s time to say something? It’s been a year.”
Harper itched to run for the exit, but it was no use. Kanya knew where he lived - exactly one floor above where they were standing. “You only come around every month or so,” he protested weakly. “Mark comes every day; of course I’d open earlier for a regular customer.”
“Hmm,” Kanya said. “Why do you think he comes every day, Harper?”
Harper had nothing to say to that and Kanya knew it. She swaggered out to the front victoriously, and Harper followed along in her wake.
He’d expected Mark to already be gone, but they must have just caught him as he was leaving - he was standing up, wallet pulled out to leave some money on the table. He looked surprised to see them, like he’d thought they’d take longer even though he had to know Kanya had deliveries to make.
“Thanks for breakfast,” Mark said, shoving his chair back in. To Kanya, who had ducked behind the counter to pilfer the display case, he said, “be careful out there. It’s supposed to be a bad one tonight.”
“Of course it is,” Kanya sighed, taking a vicious bite from her donut.
They left at the same time, which Harper briefly thought would end badly. But Mark held the door for Kanya like it was instinct, and through Harper’s frosted door he saw them walking together and - he thought - talking normally, though it was hard to tell as they got farther away and their shapes got indistinct.
Maybe he’d got it wrong and Mark didn’t dislike Kanya at all - he just disliked Harper being around her.
That was a depressing enough thought that Harper actually got out the broom to calm down before returning to his now-cold coffee and article. Well, that was one of the perks of running a bakery - free refills.
He was back in his normal spirits by the time more customers started trickling in, about half an hour later. And then his morning dissolved like usual into a flurry of bagging pastries and making cappuccinos, busy enough that he blinked and two hours went by, and then two more.
And then, just as abruptly, the wind picked up and the normal flow of people stopped.
When Mark had said it was supposed to be a bad one, he hadn’t been kidding. The wind went from annoying to alarming quickly enough that Harper barely had time to secure the locks on the front door before the wind got bad enough to throw it open. He looked out the window again to see if anyone was on the road, but all he could see was white.
“That’s not good,” he muttered.
Before moving to Bourzon, Harper had spent most of his life in Sydney, which saw about as much snow as Laos. But five minutes into the storm howling its fury at his door, Harper had heard enough to realize that no one was going to come in for the rest of the day.
He still procrastinated on properly closing up for as long as he could. He checked the seals on all the windows and filled the bathtub with water, but he left all the baked goods in their display cases. It wasn’t as if he could eat them all himself if no one else came in anyway.
But he gave himself a break anyway, going upstairs with his laptop to read the latest biochemical research instead of staying seated at one of the bakery tables. They were comfortable enough to eat a pastry at, but if he was off the clock, he’d rather read in bed.
When he’d left Australia with a chemistry degree and enough sense to realize he didn’t quite fit in anywhere, Harper had seen himself joining a research lab somewhere. (Somewhat more realistically, Harper had seen himself joining a meth lab somewhere.) Instead, it had only taken a few years of wandering for him to more or less fall into life at Bourzon, and while he couldn’t bring himself to regret it, he still wondered sometimes how the hell it had happened.
And he still liked to keep up, scientifically. Baking might have been mostly chemistry, but it wasn’t exactly cutting-edge stuff.
The storm kept getting worse and worse, enough that after a few hours Harper gave up on reading and put on a movie, and then another one. Finally he decided he’d let the croissants get stale enough and it was time to dump them - though maybe he’d freeze some, just in case the storm was bad enough for there to be an evacuation before he had time to bake something new. But he’d barely managed to put half of them in a bakery box to wrap and freeze when he heard a loud, irregular thump against his door.
“That doesn’t seem right,” he muttered to himself, but it came again, slightly more regular this time and thus more recognizable as knocking.
Was some idiot actually out in this weather? Harper dropped everything in his haste to make it to the door and unlock everything.
When he did, the icy wind immediately blasted him in the face, just barely broken up by the shape of another man in front of him. “Thanks,” Mark said, and stumbled inside, letting Harper close the door - and the cold - behind him.
“Mark?” Harper said, eyes wide. Mark’s uniform was soaked through from the snow and his normally slicked-back hair was a mess, plastered wetly to his forehead. For once, his sleeves had been rolled down - probably hastily mid-shift. Normally he looked untouchable, but right now, shivering on Harper’s floor, he looked…
Harper flushed and looked away. Mark needed help, not Harper’s useless fixation on him. “Let me get you some clothes,” he said. “I think the shower’s out, unfortunately, but we can at least get you dry.”
“Thanks,” Mark said again, his teeth chattering.
Harper raced up the stairs, heart pounding. He absentmindedly selected some clothes, wondering how the hell Mark had gotten so soaked. Like Harper, he’d moved to Bourzon later in life, but from Chicago - Mark should know how to handle the snow by now.
But questions could wait. First, Harper made his way back downstairs, where Mark had come in from the entryway to strip right there in the front room.
“Um - ” Harper, who had always prided himself in having a witty retort to everything, suddenly felt struck absolutely speechless.
Mark looked up at him as he started unbuttoning his pants, his blue eyes looking electric over the smooth skin of his naked shoulder. “Sorry,” he said. “I know it’s not hygienic, I was just cold.”
“Hygienic?” Harper repeated before remembering that he ran a bakery. “No, no, it’s fine. Here - ”
He fumbled and dropped the clothes, turning his back before he tortured himself with the sight of Mark bending down to retrieve them.
Several rustles and a zipper later, Mark was fully dressed, if still somewhat frozen-looking. His hair was still a little damp even after he scrubbed it with the towel and his hands looked too stiff, but he looked much more at ease, sitting in Harper’s front room in Harper’s clothes. They looked right on him, even though the shirt stretched tight over the broadness of his chest and shoulders.
Harper cleared his throat and looked away. “Let me get you something to eat,” he said. “You’re fortunate that you’re my only customer today; there’s a big selection. Ham and cheese croissant? It’s a bit more filling than having it plain, at least.”
“Whatever you’ve got,” Mark rasped. “Thanks again.”
“Of course,” Harper murmured, getting up to grab that for him, and some tea for good measure.
Mark thanked him again for both, but he only awkwardly lifted the croissant in one still-stiff hand for a bite before setting it back down. “Maybe I need to defrost more,” he said with a grimace. “The snow got into my gloves.”
“What?” Harper asked, alarmed, images of frostbitten fingers suddenly flooding his mind. “Let me look.”
“It’s fine,” Mark started, but he went abruptly silent when Harper grabbed his hands, inspecting them.
They were large and rough - Mark liked to work with his hands and he never remembered to moisturize, even though Audrey reportedly had a huge bottle on her desk in their tiny two-person station. And they were very, very cold, though they started to warm up a little the longer Harper held them.
And he was holding them, he realized too late. He all but shoved them back at Mark. “You’re right, it’s fine,” he said, too quickly. “Nothing the tea won’t fix. Maybe start on that.”
Mark just stared at him. “Harper - ”
“Let’s see where you can sleep, shall we?” Harper said brightly.
Turning the bottom floor into a bakery had seemed like a grand idea at the time, but unfortunately that meant Harper had taken out the guest bedroom to make more room for the kitchen. Standing up in the upstairs apartment, where Harper had also taken out a bedroom to replace with a constantly overflowing office, Harper came to the unfortunate realization that there was only one bed in his entire home.
“That’s an oversight,” he muttered.
He’d been damnably obvious all night. Hopefully Mark wouldn’t be too uncomfortable to share the bed, because Harper certainly wasn’t going to suggest he sleep on the floor unless absolutely necessary. He knew how often he vacuumed.
He did his best to summon a certain amount of breezy arrogance when he went back downstairs. “Turns out I took out the second bedroom ages ago,” he said. “We’ll just have to share mine. Hope you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind at all,” Mark said. He coughed abruptly. “Uh, thanks again.”
“Of course,” Harper said, already heading back upstairs. Forget freezing anything - he could chuck everything directly into the bin in the morning and call it a day. The thought of lying in the same bed as Mark all night made him immediately feel exhausted.
It was less awkward once they were upstairs. Harper kept a good amount of just-in-case supplies, which included spare toothbrushes, and it was warm enough upstairs that Mark stopped shivering entirely. Mark dried his hair with a towel while Harper brushed his teeth, then gently elbowed Harper out of the way to brush his own.
It had been a long time since Harper had someone in his space like this. Was this what relationships felt like, once you got serious about them? Harper didn’t know; he’d had enough trouble being serious with anyone that he’d largely given up even before he’d started laser-focusing on Mark.
What he did know was that it felt comfortable slipping into bed beside Mark, like he’d done it every night before. “Goodnight, Mark,” he said.
“Goodnight,” Mark said softly, and turned off the lights.
Mark probably didn’t normally sleep this early, Harper realized only after the fact. Harper’s own hours were ridiculous - one of the perils of being a baker - but Mark was a police officer in a town whose worst crime in recent memory was someone stealing a life-sized Santa statue from in front of the general store. He probably only woke up a few minutes before he walked to Harper’s bakery most days.
It explained why Mark was so still, the kind of stillness that Harper could feel in the dark. He was clearly very awake.
Harper fought his own tiredness long enough to roll over. Which might have been a mistake, because the light of the moon through his bedroom window was just enough to illuminate the darkness of Mark’s eyes, less than a foot away from his own.
Harper’s heart skipped a beat.
Mark had a way of looking at things that was more like looking through them. Harper felt it even if he couldn’t really see it in the dark, the way Mark seemed to be looking into him, and suddenly he was wide awake.
“Mark,” Harper asked, “how did you end up out there in the storm?”
Mark’s eyes closed for a second, then opened again. “Trent,” he said, like that was an explanation.
It was enough of one, Harper supposed. Living in a small town meant everyone knew everyone else’s business. Harper certainly knew plenty about Mark’s son, though he’d only met him a few times over the course of the last year. He wasn’t really one for pastries.
“I figured it was better to let him cool off at home,” Mark continued. “And then...I didn’t know where else to go. So I came here.”
Harper swallowed. Somehow it felt as if Mark had gotten even closer without moving.
They were so close to begin with - Harper’s bed wasn’t that big, and talking together in the dark was intimate even if they weren’t touching. But Harper was suddenly aware of how easy it would be to touch Mark. It wouldn’t even have to be on purpose. How close were their legs under the covers? Where was Mark’s hand in the space between them?
“I’m glad you came,” Harper whispered. He didn’t have it in him to cover it up with something flippant, and more poured out of him, like that first small confession had triggered an avalanche. “You know, this whole time I was fairly sure you didn’t like me.”
Mark’s eyes widened in the dark.
“Didn’t like you?” He asked. It wasn’t just Harper’s imagination - he did get closer, just a little. Close enough that Harper could feel Mark’s breath against his lips. “I think maybe I like you too much.”
After, Harper couldn’t tell who had closed the distance. He just knew that Mark’s lips were warm against his, and then the whole firm line of his body was pressed against Harper’s, his hand on Harper’s waist, Harper’s hand on his forearm.
Outside, the wind kept howling, but inside Harper felt warmed from the inside out, dizzy and breathless, never wanting this moment to end. He clutched Mark closer, kissing him back fiercely, trying to answer Mark in kind - I like you too much, too.
“Oh,” Mark said when they parted, like he was surprised.
Harper pressed his face into his pillow to keep from laughing aloud. And then it spilled out of him anyway, the giddiness in his chest too much to be contained.
Mark jabbed him in the side. “If you’re laughing at me, I’m going to shove you out of bed,” he said, a smile in his voice. “I don’t care if it’s your bed.”
Harper shook his head, still smiling. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever stop. “That’s fine,” he said. “You’re the only one other than me allowed in it, anyway. You can stay unattended if you’d like.”
Mark’s hand wrapped around his, rough but warm.
“Actually,” he said, “I think I like it better with you in it.”