Chapter Five
~ Mitch ~
I came back to the bunkhouse at nine-thirty with my shoulders wired tight and my lower back aching from the extra patrols.
The security rotation was Sterling’s job, not mine, but his leg was still giving him hell, and somebody had to watch the perimeter while he sat at that table staring at maps like they held the answer to a question he wouldn’t ask out loud.
So I did it.
Two weeks of driving the fence line at odd hours, checking the motion sensors twice a night, sleeping in twenty-minute increments with the radio beside my ear.
Not complaining.
The job was the job, and the job kept the lights on, and the lights kept the roof over our heads, and the roof kept Sterling sitting at that table looking at Caleb like the man had handed him something he didn’t know how to hold.
The bunkhouse was quiet. East-facing windows dark, reflecting the single bulb hanging over the long table. I could smell bread. Caleb’s bread, the kind with the crackly crust that smelled like somebody’s grandmother’s kitchen if your grandmother had been good at anything besides disappointment.
I dropped my keys on the hook by the door. Shrugged out of my coat. Toed my boots off in the mud room and padded through the kitchen in sock feet, following the warm smell and the low, steady thrum of something that felt, after two weeks in a truck cab, almost too comfortable to trust.
Caleb wasn’t in the kitchen. The bread was there, cooling on the rack, but Caleb wasn’t. The house had that late-evening hush to it, the kind that meant everybody was somewhere doing the quiet version of whatever they did when the day was officially over. Sterling’s door was closed.
I headed down the hallway toward the bathroom, my body running on the last dregs of whatever energy I’d started the day with. My shoulders ached. My jaw was tight.
Two weeks of vigilance will do that to a man—keeps you sharp on the outside and hollow on the inside, and the hollow part was the one I needed to address before I fell face-first into a pillow and didn’t move for twelve hours.
The bathroom door opened.
Steam rolled out first, thick and warm, carrying the clean mineral smell of the bunkhouse water and something underneath it that I recognized before my brain caught up to my nose.
Sterling.
He stepped into the hallway in nothing but a towel slung low on his hips, and I stopped walking so fast my socks slid on the floorboards.
Water-dark hair pushed back from his forehead.
That jaw, square and set, carrying a shadow of stubble that looked like it had been applied with something sharper than a razor.
Broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, the towel riding the sharp cut of his hipbones, and his chest—Christ, his chest—mapped with tattoos and the occasional scar that had a story attached to it he would never tell and I had stopped asking about.
His eyes found mine across the six feet of hallway between us. Dark green, registering everything, giving back nothing. For one half-second, before the walls slammed into place, I saw something there—something warm and startled and immediately, visibly regretted.
Two weeks of driving fence lines. Two weeks of sleeping in a truck cab with the radio crackling.
Two weeks of wanting something I couldn’t have because the man who had it was sitting at a table looking at maps and not looking at me, and the wanting had built up behind my sternum like pressure behind a dam, and the dam just broke.
I crossed the distance in two strides.
My hand found the back of his neck, wet hair between my fingers, and I kissed him.
Not gently. Not carefully. The way a man kisses when he’s done waiting for permission—fierce and possessive and with enough heat behind it to melt whatever was left of the ice Sterling had been carrying around since I’d met him.
He froze.
For approximately one heartbeat, Sterling Callahan, who could field-strip a weapon in the dark and speak eight languages and had probably never been caught off guard by anything in his adult life, went completely, utterly still against my mouth.
Then his hands found my waist. Both of them, big and warm and surprisingly certain, and he kissed me back like a man who had been holding a line for too long and had just decided to abandon his post.
The kiss went deep. His mouth was hot, his stubble rough against my jaw, and I could feel his heart hammering against my chest through the thin cotton of my shirt.
One of his hands slid up my back, fingers spreading between my shoulder blades, pulling me closer like he was afraid I might change my mind and step away.
I wasn’t stepping away. I was just getting started.
I walked him backward until his shoulder blades hit the wall.
The towel slipped lower. His bad leg buckled slightly—not enough to fall, just enough that I felt the shift in his weight, the stiffness in his right hip that he’d been pretending wasn’t there for two weeks—and I braced my forearm against the wall beside his head and held him there with my body, my mouth still on his, my hand still in his wet hair.
He made a sound. Low and rough and entirely involuntary, the kind of sound that comes from somewhere behind your sternum when you’ve stopped censoring yourself. I felt it vibrate through his chest into mine, and something hot and possessive uncoiled in my gut.
“Fuck,” Sterling said against my mouth. His voice was wrecked. Two syllables, and he sounded like he’d been running.
“Eloquent,” I said. “Very you.”
“I don’t—” He stopped. Swallowed. His eyes were darker now, pupils blown, and the expression on his face was one I’d never seen before—not the flat green stare, not the almost-smile, something rawer. Something that looked dangerously close to want, undisguised and urgent and a little bit terrified.
“You don’t what?” I asked, my thumb tracing the line of his jaw. “Don’t want this? Because your mouth says one thing and the rest of you is saying something entirely different, and I’m inclined to believe the rest of you.”
“I don’t do this,” he said. Quiet. Rough. Like the words cost him something.
“I know.” I kissed him again, softer this time, letting my mouth linger against his. “That’s why I’m doing it for you.”
Soft footsteps from the hallway. I knew the cadence before I turned my head—light, unhurried, the particular rhythm of someone who moved through the world taking up exactly as much space as he needed and not a centimeter more.
Caleb stood at the end of the hall. One hand on the wall, his strawberry-blond hair catching the low light from the bulb overhead.
His eyes moved from me to Sterling—Sterling pinned against the wall, my hand in his hair, both of us breathing hard, the towel hanging by a thread—and something shifted in his expression.
Not surprise. Warmth. A slow, steady recognition, like he’d been waiting for this particular train wreck and was pleasantly surprised by how it had arranged itself.
“Hi,” Caleb said. Soft. A little breathless.
“Hi, yourself,” I said.
I looked at Sterling. His eyes were on Caleb now, that same raw expression, like he was seeing something he’d been trying very hard not to want. I made a decision. The kind that lives in your chest and your gut and doesn’t ask your brain for permission.
I turned Sterling. Pivoted him so his back was to my chest, my hands on his hips, and faced Caleb down the hallway. Sterling between us, solid and warm and vibrating with something that felt like restraint stretched to its breaking point.
“Come here,” I said to Caleb.
He came. Not fast. Not slow. Just steady, the way Caleb did everything, his eyes on Sterling’s face the whole time, reading whatever was happening there with the attention he brought to things that mattered.
He stopped in front of us. Close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him, could smell the bread on his hands and the faint sweetness that was just Caleb, the scent that lived in the bunkhouse like it belonged there.
“Hey,” Caleb said to Sterling. His voice was so gentle it almost hurt to hear. One hand came up, hesitated for a half-second, then settled against Sterling’s chest, palm flat over his heart. “Is this okay?”
Sterling looked at him. Really looked—the kind of look that stripped away every defense he’d ever built, every wall, every careful calculation about what he deserved and what he didn’t. His throat worked. His jaw clenched, then released.
He nodded. One sharp movement, like the word was too expensive to spend.
Caleb smiled. The small one, the one that lived in the corner of his mouth and reached his eyes, and then he was moving. His hands found the towel—not yanking, not demanding, just easing it loose with a gentleness that made something in my chest tighten—and it dropped to the floor between us.
Sterling was naked against me. All of him, every inch of that disciplined body pressed against my chest, and I could feel him shaking. Not from cold. From something deeper, something that lived in the space between want and fear, and my arms tightened around his waist, holding him steady.
Caleb looked up at Sterling. His eyes were warm and steady and entirely unafraid. Then he dropped to his knees on the hardwood floor.
I felt Sterling’s breath catch. His whole body went rigid against mine, his hands finding the wall, fingers splaying against the pine boards like he needed something to hold onto.
“Easy,” I murmured against the back of his neck. My mouth found the damp skin behind his ear, and I felt him shudder. “I’ve got you. Let him.”
Caleb’s hands were gentle. One on Sterling’s hip, steadying, the other wrapping around him with a confidence that shouldn’t have surprised me, but did.
Caleb, who moved through the world taking up less space than he was entitled to, who spoke in a voice so soft people routinely mistook it for weakness—Caleb knew exactly what he was doing.