Chapter 10
Chapter ten
Noah
I woke up to the sound of someone moving around in the apartment.
For a moment, I didn’t move. I just lay there taking stock of my surroundings.
The soft weight of the blanket, the gray early light coming in through the curtains.
I ran a quick inventory the way my therapist had taught me.
Where am I? Am I safe? What’s true right now?
I’m back at Three Bears HQ. Jackson’s in the kitchen. Safe. I’m safe.
I let out a slow breath and stared at the ceiling.
Six months of therapy, and I still did the inventory most mornings. My therapist said that was okay. That eventually, my mind would learn I was safe. I was sure she was right, and it would take time, but it sure didn’t hurt to have Jackson nearby.
I could hear him out there. The low clink of a pan.
The beep of the coffee maker as it finished its cycle.
Just a normal day with a man making breakfast like it was something he’d done in this kitchen a hundred times before, even though he hadn’t.
It was scary how normal being with him felt after only a few days.
I stretched out my body and then got up, tossed on the sweats I’d worn last night, and made my way to the kitchen.
He was standing at the stove in yesterday’s jeans and a clean t-shirt, a dish towel tossed over his shoulder. Eggs were already going, a small bowl of diced peppers and onions waiting on the counter beside him. He poured hot water into a cup and slid both it and the tin of tea bags over towards me.
I crossed to the counter and picked it up.
“Morning,” he said, still facing the stove.
I picked a flavor of tea and put the bag in the water. “Morning.”
I leaned back against the counter and watched him work. He cooked in a slow, methodical way, which made me think of him taking the time to separate out the different shapes of the jigsaw puzzle.
“Did you sleep good?” I asked.
“I did.” He nudged the peppers into the pan. They hit the skillet with a hiss. “You slept through the night.”
I had. There were no nightmares. No waking up cold and disoriented with my heart hammering and expecting to find that I was locked back up in that basement. Just sleep. Deep and uninterrupted until the smell of coffee pulled me out of it. “Yeah,” I said. “I did.”
He glanced at me briefly. Something on his face that wasn’t quite a smile but was darn close. “Good.”
He plated everything without ceremony and carried both plates to the small table by the window. I sat down across from him, and we ate.
Outside, the city was doing its morning thing.
There were distant sirens, the long groan of a delivery truck making its rounds, a bird, maybe a pigeon, or it could be a dove; it was hard to tell from this far, sitting on the ledge across the way doing absolutely nothing but watching the people below.
I’d found the rhythm of it calming when I stayed here before. I still did.
Houston had been too much for me, but Vesper was just the right amount of busy.
“Julius and Mika stocked this place well,” I said, spreading jam on a piece of toast. “This is homemade jam. The kind with real fruit.”
Jackson let out a little laugh. “Yeah, he gets it at the local Farmers Market. Drags Hawk there every weekend if you can imagine.”
I tried to picture the big man browsing through tables of baked goods and homemade crafts, but I just couldn’t do it. “I think I have to see that in person.”
“Food is Mika’s love language. He loves to feed people,” Jackson said.
“I noticed.” I smiled down at my plate. “They also put a plant on the windowsill.”
“I saw.”
“And the throw on the couch.” I glanced toward the living room. “Mika made that, didn’t he?”
“Probably.”
“They went to so much trouble to make it cozy for me.” I shook my head a little. “I don’t know why that gets me.”
He looked at me across the table. “Because it means someone was thinking about what you’d need before you got here. That you weren’t just welcome, but wanted.”
I sat with that for a second. Outside, the bird reconsidered its ledge and left. “Yeah,” I said. “Exactly that.”
We finished breakfast. I washed the plates while Jackson refilled both our mugs, and there was something so ordinary about the whole thing that it made me wish I could have this every morning.
I was drying the last pan when the knock came. I glanced at the clock and shook my head. It was way too early for guests.
Julius and Mika were standing in the hallway holding their coffee cups, looking entirely too awake and suspiciously casual for how early it was.
Julius had on a silk shirt in a shade of green that would’ve been too much for anyone else, but it looked amazing on Jules.
Mika was in a soft sweater, his hair still a little damp.
Julius looked past me into the kitchen where Jackson was still standing with his mug. Julius looked at me and waggled his eyebrows in a comical way that told me he would be wanting details later.
“Good morning,” Mika said warmly, like this was a perfectly ordinary social call, which it absolutely wasn’t. It was my friends being nosey.
“Morning,” I said. “Do you want to come in?”
“We do, but first, Crowe,” Julius said loud enough for him to hear. “Hawk and Gator are back. They want you for a briefing downstairs.”
Jackson set his mug on the counter. “Now?”
“Yeah, they’re waiting.” Mika shrugged.
Jackson nodded, then he held my gaze just long enough to be deliberate.
“I’ll head down now. Noah, I’ll come find you when we’re done.”
“Okay,” I said.
He walked past the three of us out into the common area, and I watched until he entered the stairway to go down a floor to Wolfe’s office.
Julius watched me watch the door, and I braced myself for the questions I knew were coming.
“Well?” he asked.
I looked over where Mika had settled on the couch with his feet tucked up under him, both hands wrapped around his mug, but he also had an expectant look on his face.
“Julius,” I said. “Don’t you have morning appointments?”
“I shifted them.”
I stared at him. “You shifted your appointments.”
“Harper was happy to take them. She’s been asking for more hours.” He looked at me over the rim of his cup. “Don’t make it weird.”
“Julius.” Something moved through my chest. He didn’t take off work because he wanted to hear how things went with Jackson. He took off because he was worried about me. “You didn’t have to do that.”
He met my eyes, and for just a second, the carefree mask he normally wore dropped entirely. “Yes, I did. Now stop being sentimental before Mika cries and then we all cry, and none of us have waterproof mascara.”
“I’m already a little emotional,” Mika said, unbothered. “I’m so glad you’re back.”
I laughed and sat down on the couch beside Mika, pulling one knee up. “I am, too, Mika. I missed you.”
“I am worried, though. That sounds so scary.”
“It was. When Jackson showed up, I knew it couldn’t be good, but I didn’t expect it to be so much so fast.”
I told them about how it had felt to find out someone was watching me, my apartment being broken into, and how surreal it was to actually be in a car chase.
“I always thought it would be exciting to be in a car chase,” Mika said, which totally shocked me.
“You? You always thought it would be exciting to be in a car chase?”
“Sure, I mean, I wouldn’t want to be driving the car, and I wouldn’t want to be the one hanging out the window shooting at the car that was chasing us, but if I was just a passenger, it might be exciting.”
“It was exciting, I’ll give it that, but other than that, I’d say one out of ten stars, do not recommend.
Although, Jackson was pretty sexy while he was driving.
He was all calm and collected and shit.” I grinned.
“At one point, I said the guys chasing us knew what they were doing, and you know what he said?”
“What?” they both asked at the same time.
I tried for a deep voice to imitate Jackson. “So do I.”
We all cracked up, and I had to admit it felt good to be able to laugh about it.
It had been terrifying at the time, but I survived it, and that was what mattered.
I didn’t tell them about hiding in the cellar.
I was proud of myself for being able to do that without falling apart, but I wasn’t ready to talk about it with them.
I was going to give Dr. Reyes a call and talk to her about it, though.
I thought she would be proud of me, too, but she would also help me deal with any feelings it stirred up.
“Okay, enough about that. We don’t have answers or a plan yet, so no reason to dwell on it. You two tell me all about what I missed while I was gone.”
Julius and I talked on the phone pretty regularly, but he loved to talk, so he spent the next twenty minutes telling me everything that had happened at the salon since I’d left Vesper, and I mean everything.
The client who’d come in for a trim and cried through the whole appointment about her divorce. “Poor thing, can you believe her husband left her for some tramp he met in a country bar? There was no way his side piece looked anywhere near as good as she did when she left my chair.”
A color treatment that had gone horribly wrong, and the poor girl ended up with mermaid green hair instead of smoky teal.
“I swear she looked like she was auditioning for a spot in a community theater production of The Little Mermaid. Luckily, I was able to step in and correct it, cause it was not a good look.”
And finally, the ongoing situation with the product supplier that Migs had a thing for.
“Turns out, the guy isn’t straight at all but is already in a relationship.
Poor Migs was so heartbroken he forgot to check the merchandise as he unloaded, and the guy drove off with half our products.
Luckily, I caught him before he left town, or we would’ve been out of almost everything. ”
Most of his stories were ridiculous, but by the time he was finished, I was laughing again.
Mika took over once Julius wound down. He said that he’d been taking some classes from his friend Mars and had even tried goat yoga.
“As soon as this mess is all over, you’ll have to come with me. He has classes on meditation and yoga. You’d love it.”
“That sounds fun. How is your rooftop garden going?”
“It’s fantastic. I can’t wait to show you. You know way more about plants than I do.”
“I can’t wait to see it. How’s Milly doing?” Milly was a rescue dog that Hawk and Mika had adopted.
“She’s awesome. She lays around the condo like she’s a big old lazy log, but the second we get to the park across the street, suddenly she’s speed racer. So basically, same old stuff for me,” Mika said. “Now, tell us about you. What have you been doing?
“Other than Crowe,” Julius said. “And don’t think we won’t be coming back to that.”
I’d talked to both of them on the phone over the last six months and had already told them all about the flower shop and how much I liked working there, so I didn’t have much else to tell them.
Not unless I wanted to talk about the apartment that I’d never quite unpacked, about therapy twice a week, and the slow, unglamorous work of putting myself back together from the inside out, but we were having fun today, so I’d save all that serious stuff for another day.
And that left nothing but… “So I called Jackson Daddy, and then we had really hot, fabulous sex.”
I wouldn’t normally just blurt it out that way, but the gasps and the looks on their faces was totally worth it.
“OMG, tell us everything,” Julius insisted. So I did.