Chapter Three
~ Caleb ~
The kitchen was dark when I slipped downstairs. Not the kind of dark you could push through with a light switch, but the real thing—deep, pre-dawn, the kind of dark that made the stove burner’s amber glow look like a small, determined sun.
I moved by feel. Left hand on the counter’s edge, right hand finding the cast-iron skillet where it hung on its hook, the weight of it solid and familiar in my palm.
The commercial range lit with a soft click and the scent of gas, then the flame caught and steadied, and I set the skillet over it and watched the black iron warm.
Eggs next. I cracked them one-handed, the way I’d learned from a foster mom outside Missoula who could do four at once and not drop a shell. Two eggs. Then four, because Mitch ate like he was storing for winter, and Sterling—My hands stilled over the carton.
Sterling.
My ribs did something complicated. Not a full clench. A tightening, a rearrangement, like my lungs had decided to take up slightly less space to make room for something else.
The memory was right there, bright and clear as if it had happened five minutes ago instead of nine hours: Sterling’s hand reaching for the coffee mug.
The half-second of stillness. His eyes on the dark surface, his face doing that thing—the thing I’d been collecting since the first week, the small shift that meant the walls had come down for exactly one beat before they slammed back up.
He’d taken it. No words. Just reached out and taken it, like a man who had forgotten that receiving something could be that simple.
I laid bacon strips into the skillet. The fat hit the hot iron and started to pop, a rapid, cheerful percussion that filled the quiet kitchen.
The coffee was percolating on the back burner, the pot chugging softly to itself, and the first gray seep of dawn was finding the frost-edged window above the sink, turning the frost to silver.
Sterling’s goodnight had been one word. Goodnight. His voice had dropped one register lower than usual, the way it did when he was tired or hurt or—and this was the part that made my ribs do that thing again—when he was being sincere.
The word had landed in the space between us like something with weight, and then the flat green gaze had locked back down, and he’d turned and disappeared into his room, and I’d stood there holding my own empty mug and feeling like I’d been handed something fragile I hadn’t asked for.
I flipped the bacon. The spatula was warm in my hand. Outside, the ranch was still dark, the kind of dark that held its breath before light, and the only sound was the bacon and the coffee and the soft, steady tick of the wood stove in the main room, keeping the February cold at bay.
I’d made the kitchen garden decision three weeks ago.
Two raised beds behind the bunkhouse, close enough to the south wall to catch morning sun, far enough from the mud room that the foot traffic wouldn’t compact the soil.
I’d measured it. I’d drawn it on the back of a feed receipt.
I’d dug the first bed myself, breaking through the frost line with the pickaxe Mitch had brought me for my birthday, and then I’d stopped, because planting something meant staying, and staying meant something I wasn’t ready to say out loud, not even to Mitch.
Not yet.
The bacon needed another flip. I gave it one, and the fat spat back at my wrist, a quick hot sting that I ignored because I’d been cooking long enough to know that bacon had opinions and didn’t care about mine.
Wanting Sterling was the largest risk I’d taken since Mitch and I stopped unpacking our bags fast. Since we’d looked at each other one night in our bunkhouse room and agreed, without saying it, that maybe this time we wouldn’t leave the toiletries in their travel case.
Maybe this time we’d put the coffee mugs in the cabinet instead of leaving them on the counter.
Small things. The kind of things people did when they weren’t expecting to leave.
I wanted Sterling. The wanting was quiet and fierce and lived in my chest like something with roots, and I was taking it anyway, with both hands, the way I held everything that mattered.
Not dramatically.
Not loudly.
Just steadily, the way I held the skillet handle, the way I held a garden trowel, the way I’d held Mitch’s hand through seventeen different houses and the night our parents died and the three-day stretch when we were eleven and a social worker in Helena had tried to separate us and I had refused to let go of his wrist.
Quietly. With both hands. That was how I did things.
The eggs were next. I cracked two more into the skillet beside the bacon, watched the whites go opaque at the edges, and reached for the pepper grinder without looking because I knew exactly where it lived.
Boots on the stairs. Heavy, unhurried, the specific tread that belonged to one person in this house and only one.
I didn’t turn around. “You slept in your hat again.”
“Good morning to you too.” Mitch dropped into the chair behind me, the wood creaking under his weight. “And I did not sleep in my hat. I put it on with dignity and purpose at five-thirty in the morning.”
“It’s four-forty-five.”
“Then I put it on with dignity and purpose at four-forty-five in the morning. My point stands.”
I could hear the grin in his voice. I’d been hearing that grin since I was five years old, and it still did the same thing to my chest it had always done —a small, warm loosening, like a knot coming untied.
His hand reached past my shoulder and straight into the skillet. I brought the spatula up in one smooth motion and caught his wrist an inch from the bacon.
“Table,” I said. “Now.”
“I’m just quality testing.”
“Set the table and you can quality test all you want.”
“The table is fine where it is.”
I turned. Not quickly. Not sharply. Just turned and looked at him, my face arranged in the expression I’d been perfecting since we were nine—pleasant, patient, and completely immovable.
The Look.
Mitch held my gaze for approximately two seconds. Then his mouth twitched, and he pushed back from the table. “Fine. Jesus.” His eyes rolled dramatically. “You and your table-based fascism.”
“You love my table-based fascism.”
“I tolerate it. There’s a difference.”
He moved to the cabinet and pulled down three mugs without asking where they were.
He’d known where they were since the second day we lived here.
I slid the butter dish across the counter to the spot where his hand would land when he turned around, and his hand landed there exactly on cue, and he picked up the butter without breaking stride and carried it to the table.
That was how it worked. That had always been how it worked.
Mitch knowing where the mugs lived. Me knowing where his hand would be.
The whole choreography of two people who had shared space since before either of us could remember, who had learned to read each other’s movements the way other people learned to read road signs—automatically, without conscious effort, because the alternative was bumping into each other in hallways too narrow for two growing boys and learning to take up less space than we were entitled to.
I watched him set the table. Three plates.
Three forks. Three knives arranged with the blades turned inward because that was how I liked them, and Mitch had noticed that on day three and never once teased me about it, which was maybe the most telling thing about my brother—he noticed everything, and he only teased about the things that didn’t matter.
The gratitude hit me then, the way it did sometimes in quiet moments: a warm, heavy wave that started behind my sternum and moved outward.
Not doing this alone. Not cooking in a dark kitchen at five in the morning with no one to slide the butter dish to.
Not wanting Sterling Callahan with no one to look at across a table and know, without saying it, that the wanting was mutual and complicated and worth the risk.
Mitch caught me looking. His eyes—hazel, shifting to gold in the stove light—held mine for a beat, and something passed between us that didn’t need words. He knew. Of course, he knew. He’d known before I did, probably.
“Eggs are ready,” I said.
“I’m aware. I’ve been smelling them for approximately six minutes, which is a form of torture I’m pretty sure is banned by the Geneva Convention.”
“It builds character.”
“My character is already built. It’s magnificent. Ask anyone.”
“Ask who? The rooster? Because he’s the only one up.”
“That rooster loves me. We have an understanding.”
I turned back to the range, smiling at the skillet, and lifted the eggs onto the waiting plates.
The toast was next. I dropped four slices into the cast-iron pan—no toaster in the bunkhouse, just the range and the skillet and the patience required to make toast without burning your fingerprints off—and reached for the coffee pot.
And then the air in the kitchen changed.
Not the temperature. Not the light. Something subtler, a shift in the quality of the silence, like the room had taken a breath and held it.
I knew what it was before I turned around.
I’d felt it enough times by now to recognize the weight of it—the way the space rearranged itself when Sterling Callahan walked into it.
He was in the doorway. Dressed, hat on, jaw set.
Moving at what looked like seventy percent and performing a hundred, the way he did everything.
His dark green eyes swept the kitchen once, cataloguing, and landed on the table—eggs, bacon, toast in progress, coffee already poured into three mugs—and something crossed his face.
Brief. Unguarded. Not quite surprise and not quite longing, but something adjacent to both, something warm and startled and immediately, visibly regretted.
I saw it. I’d been studying Sterling long enough to read what happened in the half-second before the walls went up, and this—this was the clearest one yet.