Chapter Ten
~ Sterling ~
I woke flat on my back and stayed that way for a full minute, which was a problem. My brain usually hit the ground running—perimeter check, tactical assessment, threat matrix—before my feet touched the floor.
This morning, the ceiling was just the ceiling. I was just a man in a bed. And the man in the bed now was not the same man who’d gotten into it last night.
The sheets still smelled like Caleb. Warm and sweet and faintly of the soap he used, something herbal that didn’t belong to the bunkhouse and now did.
The other side of the mattress was cold.
He’d gotten up a while ago, probably. Caleb was an early riser by nature and by habit, the kind of man who treated dawn like a contract he’d signed without reading the fine print.
I did not let my hand drift to the empty space beside me.
I did not wonder what time he’d left. I did not lie there naming what had happened, because naming it would make it real, and real was a commitment I hadn’t formally signed, and Sterling Callahan did not make commitments without formal signatures.
The ceiling was pine boards, aged to a honey-brown by years of wood stove heat. I’d looked at those boards every morning for months. This morning they looked exactly the same, which meant the change was internal, and internal changes were the kind you couldn’t shoot or negotiate with.
I got up before the stillness could demand a reckoning.
Yesterday’s jeans were on the floor where I’d dropped them.
I pulled them on without turning on the light.
The boots went next, laced with the same efficiency I’d used to lace boots in nineteen countries under conditions ranging from inconvenient to lethal.
My shirt was hanging on the bedpost. I left it there.
The hallway was quiet. No footsteps upstairs. No water running. Just the low creak of the floorboards under my weight and the smell of coffee winding through the air like something with intent.
I followed it.
Caleb stood at the cast-iron range with his back to the doorway, one hand on the skillet handle, the other reaching for the pepper grinder. He wore flannel and jeans and no shoes, his feet bare on the hardwood.
He moved through the kitchen with the unhurried competence of a man who had been doing this for an hour and saw no reason to make a production of it. Flour on his forearm. A dusting across the counter that he would wipe up later and probably not completely.
I stood in the doorway. Didn’t announce myself. Didn’t need to. Caleb had the strange awareness of someone who’d spent his life listening for specific footsteps, and mine were on the list.
He set a mug on the table in front of the chair I usually took.
Black coffee. No cream, no sugar, the way I’d taken it since basic.
He did it without looking at me. Without a loaded pause.
Without the soft smile that meant something, the one I’d been braced for since my feet hit the floor—the look that would have turned this from breakfast into a conversation I wasn’t ready to have.
He went straight back to the eggs.
I picked up the mug. The ceramic was warm against my palm. I watched Caleb’s hands on the skillet—the same hands from last night, slim and capable, fingers curled around the handle with a grip that was firm without being tight.
Those hands had been everywhere last night. On my chest. In my hair. Wrapped around my cock with a confidence that had short-circuited something fundamental in my nervous system, and the memory arrived without permission and sat down at the table like it belonged there.
I took a sip of coffee. It was perfect. Caleb’s coffee was always perfect, which was irritating because I’d spent twenty years making coffee that was functional at best, and functional had always been enough until approximately four months ago.
“The Rhode Island Reds are being inconsistent,” Caleb said, his back still to me.
He broke an egg one-handed, the shell giving with a clean pop.
“Three eggs yesterday, one the day before. I think it’s the light.
The coop faces east, which is good for morning warmth, but the tree line’s grown in enough that the direct sun doesn’t hit until mid-morning, and chickens are literal about these things. ”
I said nothing. My default setting. Caleb had learned to treat silence as participation, which was either generous or delusional, and I hadn’t decided which.
“The north garden bed has a drainage issue in the northeast corner. The soil’s holding water longer than it should. I’m thinking gravel, maybe a French drain, but I want to check with Rawley first. He did something similar on the south plot last spring.”
The skillet hissed. Bacon fat popping. The smell filled the kitchen and wrapped around the coffee and the wood stove smoke and created something that my tactical mind would have filed under “irrelevant” six months ago and now filed under its own category, which I refused to name.
“The pantry’s adequate, but not optimal.
We’re low on flour. The brown sugar’s gone hard at the edges because someone didn’t seal the bag.
” He glanced over his shoulder. Just a glance, quick and neutral, like he was checking the temperature of the room rather than the temperature of me.
“That might have been me. I’m not entirely sure. ”
“It was you,” I said.
“You don’t know that.”
“I know you made cinnamon rolls yesterday. The sugar was out.”
Caleb’s mouth did a thing at the corner. Not quite a smile. The precursor to one, the warmup act, and then he turned back to the skillet before it could fully deploy.
He slid a plate in front of me. Eggs, over easy, the yolks intact and golden. Bacon on the side, crisp at the edges. Toast that had been buttered while still hot, the way it was supposed to be done.
He sat across from me with his own plate and picked up his fork and started eating like this was just what mornings looked like now, and the ease of it was so complete it bordered on offensive.
I ate. Methodical. Focused. The way I did everything—treating food as fuel, refueling as a functional necessity. The eggs were perfect. The bacon was perfect. The toast was perfect.
I did not say any of this. I did not comment on food quality unless the food quality represented a tactical liability, and this food represented the opposite of a tactical liability.
I ate every bite.
Caleb talked about seed catalogs. About the carrot variety he’d circled yesterday that promised exceptional sweetness, which he seemed to find genuinely exciting in a way that made my chest do something I wasn’t going to examine.
About the greenhouse temperature and whether the overnight lows were still dipping too far for the seedlings.
His voice was soft and unhurried and filled the kitchen without trying, bouncing off the ceiling beams and the cast-iron pans and the open shelving where the mismatched mugs lived.
I listened. I ate. I watched his hands move around his plate, the same hands, and failed immediately and completely to stop thinking about last night, which was a tactical error of considerable magnitude.
The wood stove held the night’s heat against the March cold. Pale morning light came through the east-facing window and turned the tabletop gold. The bunkhouse creaked. Somewhere in the distance, a crow called, and the sound carried across the winter pasture and found the kitchen window.
Caleb refilled my coffee without being asked.
His forearm brushed mine when he reached for the mug, warm and brief, and he didn’t linger.
Didn’t make it a thing. Just filled the mug and set it back in front of me and went back to his eggs like contact was normal, which it wasn’t, not for me, not in this context, and the fact that it had just happened without ceremony was its own kind of revolution.
I drank the coffee.
It was still perfect.
The door opened. Boots on the porch, heavy and familiar, and the particular cadence of someone who moved through the world taking up exactly as much space as he felt entitled to, which was considerable.
Mitch.
I did not look up from my plate. I ate the last bite of egg and set my fork down with the deliberate care of a man who had decided that whatever happened next was going to happen with or without his cooperation, and cooperation, at this moment, felt like a luxury I couldn’t afford.
The doorway filled. Mitch stood there with his hat on backward, arms loose at his sides, and his eyes moved from Caleb to me to the empty plates to the general atmospheric charge of a kitchen where something fundamental had shifted overnight.
He grinned. Wide. Slow. Deeply satisfied, the grin of a man watching a specific outcome arrive exactly on schedule, and the schedule, apparently, had been his all along.
Mitch crossed to the coffeepot in three strides, poured a mug with the focused determination of a man who treated caffeine as both sacrament and ammunition, and dropped into the chair beside me.
Close. Close enough that our arms touched, his shoulder warm against mine, the heat of Mitch Pruitt radiating like a furnace that had decided, this morning, to be smug about it.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I’m not doing anything.” He raised the mug to his mouth, his eyes steady over the rim, the grin still there, wide and unrepentant.
“You’re doing something.”
Mitch set his mug down with the careful deliberateness of a man performing innocence for an audience of one who wasn’t buying it. “I’m drinking coffee. That’s the entirety of what I’m doing. Coffee consumption is a morning activity. This is a morning. The math checks out.”
“Your face is doing a thing,” Caleb said without looking up from his plate.
“My face always does a thing. That’s just my face. I was born with it. Had very little input on the design.”
“Not this thing,” Caleb said. “This thing is specific. This thing has an agenda.”