Chapter 9 MAYA
MAYA
I'm standing at the kitchen window with the mug pressed between my palms, and I've been here long enough that the steam stopped rising. I haven't moved. I don't particularly want to.
Three days. I've been in this house for three days, and the thought of leaving it produces a physical response like the kind of contraction that happens when someone pulls a blanket off you in the cold.
I try to think about it practically. The cabin is still there. My things are still there. There's no real reason I can't go back.
Except that every morning here starts with Reid across from me at the kitchen table while the coffee brews, talking about the day ahead the way people do when they are comfortable with each other.
He tells me what he has planned at the wolf center.
I tell him what I'm trying to finish for the illustration project.
And the afternoons in Owen's office, both of us at our respective work, the only sound the scratch of my pencil and the occasional measured tap of his keyboard.
Sometimes an hour goes by without either of us speaking.
I hadn't understood, until this week, what it felt like to be in a room with someone and have the silence be company instead of pressure.
I steal glances at him sometimes without meaning to.
He has good hands, careful and deliberate, and occasionally he'll look up and catch me, and his eyes hold mine for a second longer than necessary before he looks back down.
I've started saving those moments. Filing them away in a mental drawer for later.
Dinner is a different energy entirely. Jace brings chaos in the best way.
He sits down and immediately the room gets louder without him actually being loud.
He asks too many questions, argues with Owen about things that don't matter, and last night he made me laugh so hard I nearly choked on my water.
Reid watched from the end of the table with his knowing patience.
Outside, the rising sun is casting white-gold light through the tree line, turning the snow into a surface too bright to look at directly.
Reid and Owen are in the clearing beyond the back porch, in the area the men have built up into something that functions as an outdoor gym.
Half a tractor tire buried in the frozen ground for box jumps.
A TRX strung between two pines. A second tire lying flat in the snow with ropes coiled beside it for drags. Not polished but effective.
Reid and Owen are sparring. Jace went for a run, the way he has every morning since I've been here.
They've been at it a while. I can tell by the quality of their focus, the way they've stopped needing to communicate between exchanges and started reading each other through the rhythm itself.
Reid's footwork has gone loose and economical.
Owen's counters have gotten sharper. Reid has a couple inches and forty pounds on his nephew, and it doesn't seem to matter much.
Owen doesn't try to overpower him. He waits.
Reads the combination as it's thrown and rolls left, watches the miss without expression, and adjusts.
Two steps. A shift in his weight. Patient.
The thud of leather on leather carries through the glass.
I notice things I have no business noticing.
The flush in Reid's skin from the cold, high across his cheekbones.
The specific quality of stillness that comes over Owen when he's choosing his moment, the way his shoulders draw tight in the second before he moves, every muscle in his back visibly loading.
The way Reid controls something in himself when he connects.
A deliberate pulling of force before impact, the kind of precision that requires more effort than swinging hard.
I take a sip of cold coffee.
I am ogling them. There is no other word for it.
It surprises me. That something in me is still capable of noticing a man's shoulders or the way he moves across cold ground in the early light without my brain immediately filing it under threat assessment. I thought Daniel had taken that too. The way fire ruins everything it burns through.
But here I am. And the thing I feel watching them isn't fear or the careful assessment I've been running on every person I've encountered since Los Angeles. It's simpler than that and more uncomfortable.
Want.
Outside, they stop. Reid says something, low enough that I can't make it out, and Owen nods. They separate, and Reid moves to the wooden tub at the edge of the clearing. I know he filled it before they started, packing snow that has since half-melted, the surface glassy and still in the cold air.
Reid peels off his shirt.
My grip tightens on the mug.
I knew he was built. You can't spend three days in close proximity to a man that size without acknowledging that.
But knowing it and watching him in the cold morning light without a shirt on are two experiences that have nothing to do with each other.
His chest is broad and heavy with muscle, dark hair across the pectorals narrowing as it tracks down his stomach.
He strips down to his boxers, drops his clothes on the bench, and steps up to the edge of the tub without hesitation. No preamble. No bracing himself. He steps in.
There is no sound. Not a word, not a gasp. He drops to his shoulders, then his head, and holds.
My mouth has gone dry.
He stays under longer than seems reasonable.
I count without meaning to. One, two, three, four, and on five I start thinking about knocking on the glass.
And then he surfaces with a long exhale that fogs the cold air.
Bits of ice cling to his beard. He runs one hand over his face and stands there for a moment like he's in no hurry to be anywhere else, water streaming off his shoulders, his chest red from the cold, his expression completely, terrifyingly calm.
It is, without question, the most aggressively attractive thing I have ever seen a man do.
Owen has moved to the TRX. He's working his upper body in suspension, slow controlled reps, and where Reid is brute scale and force, Owen is architecture.
The long muscles of his back pulling in sequence under cold-flushed skin, shoulder blades drawing together and releasing with controlled precision.
Line and form and controlled tension, the kind of movement my hands would want to draw before my brain caught up to the reason.
"See something you like?"
The voice is right at my ear.
I flinch hard enough to slosh coffee onto my hand and the front of my shirt. I spin around and Jace is there, three inches away, those pale blue eyes lit with an expression of profound innocence that doesn't fool me.
"You scared me." I step back and shake coffee off my fingers. "I could have burned myself."
"Coffee's been cold for ten minutes." He nods at the mug. "I've been watching you watch them."
My face goes hot. "I was not watching them."
"You were so watching them." He leans one hip against the counter and crosses his arms, and there's something about the way his mouth works when he's enjoying himself that makes me want to throw the mug at him.
I pull at my damp shirt, the fabric sticking to my collarbone where the coffee hit. "I wanted to know when they'd be done so I could start breakfast."
Jace tilts his head. "Uh-huh."
"I'm making breakfast. As a thank you."
He holds my gaze for a beat. I hold mine. I will not blink first. I will not give him the satisfaction of watching me squirm, even though there's a warmth spreading up the back of my neck that has nothing to do with the coffee.
"You could use some situational awareness," His voice drops half a register, easy and amused. "Living out here. In the wild."
He moves past me before I can respond, close enough that his arm brushes mine, and the contact is so brief and so casual that I can't tell if it was deliberate. He unhooks the window latch and leans out. "Hey." His voice carries clean across the cold air. "Maya's making breakfast. Wrap it up."
Outside, Reid looks toward the house. His hands drop to his sides and something in his posture releases, the operational tension replaced by something warmer.
Owen drops out of suspension and catches the towel Reid throws at him, and they move toward the house together, with the wordless coordination of two people who have been doing this for years.
I watch them come and tell myself that this is the ordinary norm of gratitude. Making breakfast for people who've been kind to me. Nothing more than that.
Then Jace is behind me again, and before I can turn he lifts the mug out of my hands and sets it on the counter, easy and unhurried. His fingers brush a strand of hair back from my jaw. The touch is light. Not tentative. His mouth drops to my ear.
"For the record," he whispers, "I know exactly what I want to eat."
He's gone before I can find a response. I hear his footsteps on the stairs, then the sound of a door down the hall, and I stand in the middle of the kitchen with my skin still buzzing where his fingers touched.
I can feel my own pulse in the hollow of my throat. My breath has gone shallow and every nerve between my collarbone and the base of my spine is awake and paying attention.
I start breakfast.
The work helps. Eggs and the good bread Reid keeps and bacon.
I find butter and a cast iron pan and I let myself exist in the mechanics of it.
Cracking eggs, watching the butter foam and hiss in the iron, calculating quantities, because there are three of them and they have been outside in the cold lifting things and fighting each other, so I double the bacon.
The fat renders and the kitchen fills with the smell of it and I realize I'm humming.