The afternoon light bled through the kitchen window, thick and golden with motes of flour dancing in its beam. It was the kind of light that made the ordinary seem sacred. Clark watched you, his reporter’s eye cataloging the details: the faint line of concentration between your brows, the way your lower lip was caught gently between your teeth, the delicate smudge of flour on the cuff of your sweater. Your hands, capable and sure, worked the pale dough on the floured marble, pushing and folding with a rhythm that was both ancient and intimately yours.

The apartment was quiet, save for the distant hum of Metropolis traffic—a sound that was, to him, a constant, layered symphony of life and emergency. He had learned to tune it to a low murmur, a background static to the more immediate music of your presence: the soft sigh of your breath, the scrape of the ceramic bowl on the counter, the rustle of your clothes. Here, in this kitchen that smelled of yeast and warmth, the world’s cacophony softened into something manageable, almost gentle.

“Can I help?” he asked, his voice softer than he intended. It felt too loud in the quiet space, an intrusion on your ritual.

You looked up, your eyes crinkling at the corners. A smile, small and private, touched your lips. You nodded, gesturing him over with a flour-dusted hand. He approached with the deliberate care of a man used to navigating worlds too fragile for him, his socked feet silent on the tile.

You portioned a lump of the pale, living mass and pushed it toward him. His domain was the stratosphere, the crushing pressure of the deep sea, the fractured logic of a photon’s path. This was different. This was alchemy.

He placed his hands on the dough. It was cool and slightly damp, yielding under his palms. He pressed, and the sensation was profoundly strange. His touch was calibrated to avoid shattering steel, to mend fractures in tectonic plates. This required a surrender of force, a gentleness so absolute it felt like a foreign language. He pushed, and felt the structure collapse under his palms, the air rushing out with a soft sigh. He’d turned it into a dense, hopeless brick.

A soft sound escaped you—not a laugh, but a breath of amusement, warm and forgiving. You moved behind him then, and the air shifted. He could feel the heat of your body a fraction of an inch from his back, a tantalizing almost-touch. Your hands, smaller and infinitely more knowledgeable, covered his. Your chin brushed against his shoulder blade.

Focus, he told himself, but not on the city’s cries. Focus on this. On the texture of your skin against his knuckles, smooth where his were calloused from a different kind of work. On the scent of you r shampoo cutting through the earthy smell of the flour. On the sound of your breathing, steady and calm beside his ear.

“Gently,” you murmured, your voice a vibration against his back. You guided his hands, not with force, but with suggestion. “Feel the rhythm. Not the force.”

He closed his eyes, shutting out the visual spectrum, the infrared, the radio waves. He focused only on the tactile world. Under your guidance, his hands learned a new language. Push, fold, turn. A slow, patient dance. He could feel the gluten strands weaving together, the tiny bubbles of air trapped within, a universe being built under his palms.