Slow-Cooked Cravings by Zane T. Matrix

Lila Quinn still proofs dough in a boarded-up apartment while the slow horde works the stairs. Outspoken, stubborn, and armed with a barbed-wire bat where a rolling pin used to live, she has one rule: no pets, no exceptions, no pretty corpses who used to linger too long at her pastry case.

Then she nets a familiar set of shoulders.

Cole Brennan comes through the mesh with her name in a ruined mouth. He is gray in patches, bound in zip-ties and pastry twine, and still carrying fragments of the Thursday he never asked her out. Feeding him leftover sponge is supposed to be practical. Watching his broken smile while she rolls crust is not. Neither is the way hunger in the kitchen starts to change its flavor.

Close quarters turn restraint into a game neither of them can quit. He remembers rain on the shop glass and a sentence that died in a truck. She remembers cold coffee, almond croissants taken apart filling-first, and the pause at the register she pretended not to want. When the classic shuffle thickens and faster feet find the stairwell, Lila has to decide what she is willing to leave tied to the island and what she will stay and fight for.

In a world that only knows how to consume, a pastry chef and the zombie who loved her first will have to learn the difference between a bite and a vow.

Some recipes only rise after the oven fails. Some obsessions cook low and slow until the only thing left to ask is this: if the last clear word he owns is her name, what happens when she finally answers it?

***

Science warns that a pandemic can change the world forever, but no textbook prepares you for love in the time of the undead!

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