Chapter Six
~ Caleb ~
The kitchen was dark when I slipped down the hallway. 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 cast-iron range look like something that had been there longer than the house itself.
I moved by muscle memory. Left hand on the counter’s edge, right hand finding the skillet where it hung on the open shelving. The flame caught with a soft hiss, the gas warm and mineral in my nose, and the black iron began to warm.
Outside, frost rimmed the pasture fence in silver.
Through the east window the world was still mostly asleep—the near field a flat, dark stretch, the far tree line a shadow that hadn’t decided yet what shape it wanted to take.
The wood stove ticked from the main room, a steady, patient sound, holding the night’s heat against the March cold.
I cracked an egg one-handed. The shell gave with a clean pop, the yolk sliding whole into the hot skillet. I reached for a second egg. Cracked it. The white hit the iron and sizzled.
Sterling’s boots were still by the door.
I’d checked twice. Once when I came downstairs—my eyes finding them in the gray half-light, the worn leather, the scuffed toe of the right one that caught the light when he walked.
Again when I filled the coffee pot, my head turning without permission toward the mud room where his jacket hung on the hook, the dark canvas with the patched elbow that smelled like pine smoke and something else, something that was just Sterling and lived in the house now whether he meant for it to or not.
I cracked a third egg. My hand paused over the carton.
The memory surfaced bright and sudden: Sterling’s hand coming up to the back of my neck last night. His fingers warm through my hair, his palm flat against my skin, the particular pressure of a man who had spent years rationing touch deciding, all at once, to spend some.
I cracked a fourth egg. Looked down at the skillet. Counted. One, two, three, four.
I’d meant to make three.
The coffee percolated on the back burner, the pot chugging softly to itself. The eggs whispered in the skillet. I reached for the pepper grinder and nearly knocked over the salt shaker, catching it with my fingertips before it tipped.
My hands were not cooperating today. My hands were remembering things the rest of me was still trying to process, and the disconnect was making breakfast complicated.
Footsteps echoed on the stairs. Heavy, unhurried, the particular tread that belonged to one person in this house and only one.
Mitch appeared in the kitchen doorway with his hat on and his hair doing something sideways underneath it that suggested the hat had gone on before anything else, including consciousness.
He crossed to the range in three strides, reached past my shoulder, and lifted the coffee carafe directly off the burner while it was still brewing.
I brought the spatula up in one smooth motion and tapped the back of his hand.
“Ow,” Mitch said, without sounding injured.
“That’s stealing.”
“I’m not stealing. I’m expediting.”
“The coffee expedites itself. That’s what the pot is for.”
He poured coffee into a mug that said “BEEF: IT’S WHAT’S FOR DINNER” in peeling letters and wrapped both hands around it like he was afraid someone might take it back. The steam rose around his face, and he closed his eyes and inhaled like a man receiving communion.
“Morning,” he said, eyes still closed.
“You slept in the hat,” I pointed out.
“The hat is comfortable.”
“The hat is a cry for help.”
He dropped into a chair at the long table, stretched his legs out, and fixed me with a look that was pure, undiluted satisfaction.
His hazel eyes caught the stove light and held it, green-gold and entirely too aware of what they were looking at, which was me standing at the range and my internal organs doing something complicated behind my ribs.
I turned back to the eggs. Reached for the salt. Shook it over the skillet and kept shaking until I realized I’d been shaking for approximately six seconds too long.
I pulled the shaker back. Set it down. The eggs were probably ruined.
Mitch’s grin widened. I could feel it without looking.
“Don’t,” I said to the skillet.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to say something.”
“I was going to say the eggs smell great.”
I pointed the spatula at him. “That is not what you were going to say.”
He sipped his coffee and arranged his face into something approximating innocence, which on Mitch Pruitt looked about as convincing as a three-dollar bill.
His eyes were doing the thing—the specific, pleased crinkle at the corners that meant he was replaying last night in high definition and finding nothing about it worth criticizing.
I was also replaying last night. The hallway. Sterling against the wall. The sound he made when he came, low and broken and entirely, devastatingly real. His hand finding mine on the blanket. The weight of it, warm and certain, like something I’d been carrying for months without knowing it.
I flipped the eggs. They landed with a soft thud, the yolks miraculously intact.
Mitch watched me from his chair, both hands cradling his stolen coffee, and the warmth in his expression was the kind that had nothing to do with teasing and everything to do with the particular pleasure of watching something you’ve wanted for someone else finally happen.
The kitchen doorway filled.
Sterling stood there with his hat on and his jaw dark with stubble, his hair pushed back from his forehead like he’d run wet fingers through it and called it good.
He was dressed—jeans, boots, the gray henley that made his shoulders look broader than they had any right to—and he looked, for approximately half a second, like a man who had slept better than he’d expected to and was quietly, comprehensively annoyed about it.
Like good sleep was something that had happened to him without his permission, and he intended to file a formal complaint.
His eyes moved through the kitchen in order: Me at the range. Mitch at the table. The coffee pot on the burner. He went for the coffee first, crossing to the range with that long, unhurried stride that covered ground at a pace that still surprised me, and poured himself a mug without speaking.
Black. No cream. No sugar. The exact way he took it, which I had never been told and had figured out anyway, the same way I figured out most things about people I cared about: quietly, attentively, without making a production of it.
He stood at the counter with his coffee. Didn’t sit. Maintained the option of a quick exit, even at six in the morning in his own kitchen, because Sterling Callahan did not surrender tactical advantages until he was good and ready, and apparently being vertical counted.
I carried a plate to the table. Set it down in front of his chair without ceremony.
Eggs. Toast. The bacon I’d started after the eggs, because Mitch ate like he was storing for winter and Sterling ate like food was fuel and he was refueling, and both of them needed more calories than they ever admitted to.
Sterling looked at the plate. His expression didn’t change, but something moved behind his eyes—a recalibration, the particular shift of a man who had just realized that the person across from him had been paying closer attention than he’d given credit for.
“You made eggs,” he said.
I nodded once. “I did.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
He looked at the plate again. His jaw worked. His eyes found mine across the table, held for a beat that felt longer than it was, and then he sat down.
He picked up his fork and ate a bite of egg. He didn’t comment, but then he didn’t need to. The way he ate—methodical, focused, treating breakfast with the same precision he brought to everything—was commentary enough.
Across the table, Mitch mouthed two words at me over the rim of his mug. Told you.
I mouthed back two of my own. Shut up.
Turned to the range before Sterling could catch either of us doing it, because Sterling missed nothing, and the last thing I needed this morning was for him to decide that being watched was a reason to remember all the walls he’d spent last night taking down.
Nobody said anything about last night.
The air in the kitchen said it for us. Warm. Slightly charged. The thick atmosphere of three people who had crossed a line sometime around nine-thirty the previous evening and were all, quietly, individually, deciding what the other side of it looked like.
Sterling’s boots were still by the door.
His jacket was still on the hook. He was still here, eating eggs at a table that had started to feel like his and then stopped feeling like his and was now, somehow, something else entirely—a table where three people sat within arm’s reach of each other and nobody was pretending that proximity was accidental.
The wanting had gotten more specific overnight. Less theoretical. Rooted in detail now: the corner of Sterling’s mouth when it did that thing, the low rough yeah he’d given me in the hallway, the way his hand had found mine on the blanket and held on like he was afraid I might let go.
I carried my own plate to the table and sat down across from both of them, and the wood stove ticked, and the frost held its silver line along the pasture fence, and the three of us ate breakfast in a silence that didn’t need filling.
Breakfast ran easy in a way that shouldn’t have been possible.
Twelve hours ago everything had shifted, the three of us rearranged in Sterling’s bed with our hands tangled together, and now here we were eating eggs like it was a Tuesday and Tuesdays had always been like this, which they absolutely had not.