Chapter One #2
The three of us settled around the long plank table like men negotiating a truce nobody had officially declared.
I took the head—my spot, the one with sight lines to both exits—and Mitch dropped into the bench across from me with his boots up on the wood like he’d been sitting there for years.
Caleb took the end, close enough to the stove that the heat caught the copper in his hair and turned it gold.
The wood stove ticked. The February cold pressed at the east-facing door and found no weakness.
Outside, the ranch was going dark, the last thin light bleeding out of the sky over Black Butte, and the bunkhouse windows had turned to mirrors, showing me three men sitting at a table that was too big for the conversation we were having.
Which was no conversation at all, because I wasn’t having one.
“I’m here to recover,” I said. My voice came out lower than I’d intended, the whisky rough tone that usually made people stop talking and start listening. “Not to be managed. Not to be fussed over. And I don’t want opinions about my pain medication schedule.”
Sixteen words. I counted. It was more than I usually spent on a positional statement, but the leg was making me generous.
Mitch received this information the way he received most things I said: with cheerful and total disregard.
He leaned back in his chair, hooked his thumbs through his belt loops, and looked at me with the patient expression of a man who had already decided how this was going to go and was simply waiting for me to catch up to the program.
“Noted,” he said. “You want a pain pill?”
“No.”
“You sure? Because you’re sitting like someone welded your spine to that chair, and not in the good way.”
“I’m sure.”
“Your funeral.” He shrugged. “Caleb makes a mean hot toddy if you change your mind. Right, Cal?”
Caleb said nothing. He just reached across the table and set a mug in front of me—black coffee, no cream, no sugar, the exact shade of dark I preferred and the exact temperature that wouldn’t scorch the roof of my mouth.
I had never told either of them how I took my coffee. I was almost certain of it.
I drank it anyway.
I didn’t ask.
The coffee was good. Better than good — it was the kind of coffee that had been made by someone who paid attention, who knew that the difference between drinkable and worth drinking was about fifteen seconds of brewing time and a willingness to throw out the first pour if it didn’t taste right.
I took another sip and didn’t thank him.
Thanking people was a social convention I had mostly abandoned somewhere around my third deployment, and Caleb Pruitt didn’t seem to be the type who needed it.
“So,” Mitch said, stretching the word out like he was savoring it. “Four months. That’s a long time to be gone without a postcard.”
“I don’t send postcards.”
“Shocking. I’m devastated.”
“You’ll recover.”
“Will I?” His grin was wide and unrepentant. “You have no idea what you’ve done to my delicate emotional state, Callahan. I’ve been languishing.”
“You’ve been languishing,” I repeated.
“Languishing. Pining. Wasting away. Ask Caleb, he’ll confirm it. I’ve been unbearable.”
Caleb made a noncommittal noise into his mug. His eyes caught mine over the rim, and there was something in them—a warmth, a steadiness—that made me look away faster than I meant to.
“The bunkhouse looks different,” I said.
The words were out before I could stop them. A full sentence. An observation. A contribution to a conversation I had not, five minutes ago, intended to have. I registered the tactical failure immediately and with the clarity of a man watching a perimeter breach happen in slow motion.
Mitch’s eyebrows went up. “Different how?”
“Cleaner.”
It wasn’t a compliment. It was an assessment.
The bunkhouse was cleaner—the floors swept, the windows washed, the cast-iron pans hanging on the open shelving arranged by size instead of whatever drunken hand had last put them away.
There was a pot of something growing on the windowsill above the sink.
I didn’t know what it was and I wasn’t going to ask.
“Cal’s doing,” Mitch said. “He can’t sit still in a room without improving it. Drives me insane. Our last place, he rearranged the furniture three times in two weeks. I kept walking into walls.”
“I like things to have a place,” Caleb said softly.
“So do I,” I said.
The second tactical failure. Two sentences in under a minute. I was falling apart.
Caleb looked at me. Really looked—the kind of look that felt like being scanned, except warmer and less clinical, and then he smiled. Not a big smile. A small one, just a tilt at the corner of his mouth, but it did something to the air between us that I couldn’t name and didn’t want to.
“Where’d you go?” Mitch asked. “The last four months. You don’t have to tell me what you did, but geography seems like a reasonable request from a man who’s been watering your plants.”
“I don’t have plants.”
“You do now. Cal bought a cactus. It’s on the desk. Don’t kill it, he’s attached.”