Chapter 49 Caleb
FORTY-NINE
CALEB
Treehouses are supposed to be for kids and cartoon animals.
Not for twenty-two-year-olds with safety plans in their backpacks and a mental health all-star team on speed dial.
But when we reach the top of the spiral stairs and the treehouse opens up around us, for a second I get it.
Why little-kid me used to circle catalog pictures with “play structure included” and write “yes please” in the margins.
It feels like stepping into another life.
The door is glass framed in warm wood and when Miguel unlocks it and swings it open, the whole place smells like sun-warmed pine and lemon cleaner.
Light pours in from the floor-to-ceiling windows, filtered green through the redwoods.
There’s a tiny kitchen to the left—stove, mini-fridge, open shelves with mismatched mugs.
A little couch to the right, a low table.
Stairs curve up to a loft where the bed is, half-hidden behind a railing.
Outside, through the glass, I can see the rope bridge leading to a deck with two chairs and a railing that probably cost more than my entire childhood.
I step over the threshold slowly, like the floor might vanish if I move too fast.
“Holy shit,” I say again, because it bears repeating.
Miguel sets his bag down and just… watches me. Volume check, I can tell, even without him asking. “What’s it at?” he says anyway, leaning against the wall, arms crossed, pretending to be casual and failing.
I take inventory. Heart racing, but in a rollercoaster way, not a razor-in-the-bathroom way. Skin buzzing. Thoughts loud, but not lethal.
“Four?” I say. “Four point five. Maybe five when I look over there.” I jerk my chin toward the window where the tops of trees sway like we’re in a ship’s mast.
He nods, satisfied. “Valid,” he says. “We’re, like, forty feet up. Your inner squirrel just needs a minute.”
“I don’t think squirrels have vertigo,” I mutter.
He grins and nudges my shoulder with his. “You wanna look around or sit and freak out first?” he asks gently.
“Multitask,” I say. “Freak out while looking around.”
“Go crazy, hermoso.”
We do a slow circuit. The kitchen is tiny but perfect—a two-burner stove, a tiny oven, and a sink with a view of nothing but branches and sky. There’s a basket on the counter with a welcome note and some local coffee. The fridge hums quietly, empty and waiting.
I open the cabinet and find plates, bowls, and a cast-iron skillet. Everything is small, scaled for the space, like we’re miniature versions of ourselves in a dollhouse.
“Kitchen of my dreams,” I say. “Minus like, ten square feet and plus the risk of dropping a tortilla on the forest floor.”
Miguel snorts. “Gravity is a harsh mistress,” he says. “We’ll sacrifice to the raccoons if we have to.”
“Don’t joke about raccoons,” I say, even as I smile. “They’re little criminals with hands.”
“Okay, but imagine a raccoon trying to climb up the stairs to rob us,” he says. “You screaming, me trying to reason with it. Peak romance.”
I laugh, the sound coming out easier than I expect. “You know what’s not peak romance?” I say. “Bears.”
He raises an eyebrow. “There are no bears,” he says.
“You don’t know that,” I counter. “We’re in the trees. Near the ocean. California has bears.”
“Big Sur doesn’t really—”
“There could be, like, one rogue bear,” I insist. “An outlier. A bear on sabbatical.”
Miguel gives me the look he reserves for when I’m spiraling about extremely specific unlikely scenarios. “Fine,” he says. “If a bear comes, we’ll give him a torta and ask him about his feelings.”
“DBT for bears,” I say. “Perfect.”
We climb the little staircase to the loft. The bed is huge, positioned so you can see the windows on two sides. The ceiling slopes down, with wood beams overhead. There are fairy lights strung along the railing and a skylight above the pillows, a square of open sky.
I put my hand on the railing and look down at the main floor. Miguel looks small from up here, even though he’s not. The trees outside feel close enough to touch.
My chest squeezes.
“Volume?” he calls up, gentle.
My fingers tighten on the wood. “Five,” I say. “But like… awe-five. Not panic-five.”
He nods slowly. “Okay,” he says. “You wanna come down or stay up there for a sec?”
I take a breath. In for four. Hold. Out for six. The way he taught me, the way Dr. K keeps repeating. The way my body remembers, even when my brain forgets everything else.
“I’m good,” I say. “Just… processing the fact that this exists. And that I’m in it. With you.”
The smile that creeps across his face could fix everything right now, soft and bright. “You earned it,” he says.
I roll my eyes, but the words land somewhere deep. “Life’s not a points system, remember?” I call down. “Your words.”
Shrugging while rolling his eyes. “Fine. You didn’t earn it, you just get it,” he says. “You chose to stay, we chose to book this. Cause and effect. Sit with me in my logic.”
I look up at the square of sky instead of down. Little flecks of dust drift in the light. It feels like some indie film bullshit. I kind of love it.
“Okay,” I say quietly. “I’m sitting.”
We stock the kitchen like we’re moving in for a month instead of a long weekend.
Miguel unloads the cooler while I put things away.
Mom’s tortas go on the top shelf in a neat Tupperware stack.
Fruit, yogurt, and a pack of tortillas in the door.
Eggs in the little tray, a block of queso fresco, and some vegetables for the one token healthy meal we’ll pretend we’re going to cook.
“Hospitality basket, my ass,” Miguel mutters, holding up a tiny jar of jam. “We brought enough food to open a taquería up here.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I say, arranging spices Mom snuck in. “She packed cumin. Who brings cumin on vacation?”
“Celeste Veracruz-Burton,” he says. “Warrior, saint, destroyer of bland food.”
My chest warms.
It feels… weirdly normal, doing this. Unpacking groceries, fighting about where the coffee should go, bumping hips in a space too small for both of us to be in the same cabinet at once.
Not stepbrothers.
Not patient and caregiver.
Just… us.
Miguel grinds coffee beans while I fill the electric kettle. When the smell hits the room, dark, rich, and familiar, I have a flashback to all the mornings I didn’t think I’d get. Ones where making coffee felt like a chore. I swallow hard and keep my hands steady.
As the kettle whistles, Miguel leans against the counter, watching me. “What?” I ask, self-conscious. “Do I have coffee on my face?”
“Just thinking,” he says. “About how much I like you.”
I snort. “Gross,” I say, because I don’t know what else to do with that.
He grins. “You love it,” he says gently.
I do.
The shower is a glass box tucked into the corner of the bathroom, with stone tile and one of those rainfall heads that make you feel like you’re in a shampoo commercial.
There’s a tiny window high up where tree branches wave like they’re trying to peek.
We decide to shower together because we’re not monsters and also because the water heater is probably the size of a shoebox.
Steam fills the space fast. The glass fogs. It smells like eucalyptus from the little bunch of fresh branches and leaves that are secured around the showerhead. We take our time. Not in the frantic, hands-everywhere way we used to. More… careful. Reverent, almost.
I soap his shoulders, slow circles over muscle and scar. The water beads on his curls and runs in thin lines down his chest. Miguel closes his eyes and lets me. His breathing evens out. One of his hands rests on my hip, not pulling, just… there.
“Volume?” he murmurs.
“Three,” I say. “Yours?”
“Four,” he admits. “But like… happy-four. ‘Hot boyfriend touching me in a shower in the woods’ four.”
“Scientific scale,” I say, smiling.
He grins back, eyes crinkling. “We should publish,” he says. “Burton-Veracruz Volume Index.”
I laugh, the sound bouncing off the tile.
There are moments where my brain tries to loop in old scripts—you’re using him, this is just another distraction, you’re going to drag him under with you, but they’re quieter than they used to be. Easier to spot. Easier to name.
I notice and label them under intrusive thoughts. I come back to the heat of the water and the feel of Miguel’s ribs under my palms.
We kiss, slow and soft under the spray. Lips, jaw, the corner of his mouth. It feels less like drowning and more like floating.
When my wrist twinges, scar tissue complaining about the change in temperature and he notices, even though I don’t say anything. His hand slides down, covering mine gently, thumb brushing over the line under the band of my bracelet.
“You good?” he asks, barely audible over the water.
“I’m okay,” I say. “Just body memory. Not urge.”
Miguel searches my face for the truth and must find it, because he nods and leans in to rest his forehead against mine. “Good,” he whispers.
Finishing the shower in a tangle of limbs and towels, laughing when we almost both slip trying to get out of the tiny stall. It’s not sexy in the way our earlier stuff was. It’s… domestic and a little ridiculous. And somehow that’s hotter.
Later, when the sky starts to go pink behind the trees, we climb up to the loft and flop onto the bed.
The mattress swallows us and these sheets are that high-thread-count hotel cotton that makes you want to burrow in and never leave. The fairy lights glow along the railing in a warm, gentle halo. Through the windows, branches sway, dark silhouettes against the dimming sky.
There’s a faint rush of the ocean in the distance, a hiss under the wind through the needles.
No car horns, no neighbors, no roommate’s music bleeding through the wall.
Just… tree sounds. I lie on my back, staring up at the square of sky in the skylight.
A single star is just starting to show up, stubborn in the fading light.