Chapter Fifteen #2
Sterling opened the kit. Pulled out antiseptic, a gauze pad, medical tape.
His hands moved with the same efficiency he brought to everything—methodical, unhurried, treating a scratch on Mitch Pruitt’s arm with the same focused precision he’d bring to field surgery.
He wiped the scratch. One pass, firm, no fuss.
Mitch’s jaw tightened.
Sterling didn’t notice, or pretended not to. Bandaged it quickly—overlap at the edges, tape secure, the whole operation taking less than thirty seconds and containing exactly zero ceremony.
When he finished, Mitch’s expression did something I hadn’t expected.
The performance drained away. The joke retreated.
What was left was warm and a little undone, the man underneath the bravado deciding he was needed, and what he needed, apparently, was to look at Sterling’s hands on his arm and mean what he said next.
“Thanks,” Mitch said quietly.
Sterling closed the kit. Set it back on the shelf.
Turned and said, “Eat your eggs,” with the same flat delivery he used for weather reports and tactical assessments, and the contradiction of it—Sterling Callahan, tender and gruff in the same breath—made my chest do something complicated that I turned away from before my face could catch up.
I slid eggs onto Mitch’s plate. Mitch dug in. Sterling refilled his mug and remained at the table, his bad leg stretched out to the side where the stiffness didn’t show, and the three of us ate in the kind of silence that didn’t feel like silence at all.
After breakfast, none of us rushed.
Sterling refilled his mug a third time and stayed at the table, one elbow on the wood, his eyes on the east window where the light had gone full gold. Mitch leaned back with his boots on the bench and his hat tipped over his eyes—comfortable, not asleep.
I washed up. Dried my hands on the dish towel. Looked at the table—two men, two chairs, no third option—and claimed the counter instead, hopping up to sit on the edge with my knees drawn up, my back against the cabinet.
The kitchen held us. Warm from the stove, amber from the light, smelling of eggs and coffee and the particular mineral tang of work boots that had been in the barn and were now tracking a fine layer of Montana into a kitchen that Sterling would notice and not comment on.
I watched them.
Sterling with his mug, his jaw loose, his eyes on the window like he was seeing the ranch for the first time.
Mitch with his hat tipped, his bandaged arm resting across his chest, breathing slow and even.
Two men in a kitchen, existing in the same room without either of them running a threat assessment on his own feelings, and having this—this specific, earned thing—felt almost too bright to look at directly.
Sterling caught me staring.
His eyes shifted from the window to my face with that precision that still surprised me, the way Sterling noticed everything whether he wanted to or not. He raised an eyebrow. One dark brow lifting, the expression of a man who had caught something he wasn’t entirely sure how to categorize.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You’re doing a thing,” he said.
“I’m sitting on the counter.”
“You’re doing a thing while sitting on the counter.”
Mitch lifted his hat. Grinned. The kind of grin that said he’d been waiting for this moment and had prepared remarks.
“He’s happy. Happy Caleb is a force of nature and there is no shelter from it.
The eggs were Wednesday good, the coffee is perfect, and you,” he pointed at Sterling with his bandaged arm, “are sitting at the table without checking the exits. That’s a Tuesday-through-Sunday good morning in Caleb’s mental chart, and the chart is extremely real. ”
I threw the dish towel at him.
He caught it without looking. One hand snapping up, fingers closing around terry cloth, the move so smooth it had to be muscle memory from twenty-four years of me throwing things at him when he got too pleased with himself.
He draped it over his face and went back to his hat-tipped repose like nothing had happened.
Sterling watched this exchange with the careful blankness of a man processing data that didn’t fit his existing frameworks.
His jaw worked. The muscle in his cheek jumped once, and I watched something shift behind his eyes—the operational assessment giving way to something warmer, something a little bewildered, the look of a man who had spent twenty years building walls and was now discovering that the people on the other side of them had brought ladders.
“How long have you two been doing that?” he asked.
I laughed. “Throwing dish towels? Since approximately 1998. There was an incident with a foster mother’s prized ceramic rooster. I’m not proud of it.”
“Not the dish towels,” Sterling said. He swept his hand at the air between the three of us. “The whole thing. The whole—” He stopped. Sterling Callahan, out of words, which was rarer than Sterling Callahan asleep and approximately twice as precious.
Mitch lifted his hat again. “Since approximately the second week you were here the first time.”
Sterling’s eyes narrowed. “That was months ago.”
“Yes.”
“I was only here for two weeks.”
“We work fast,” Mitch said.
Sterling paused. Stared at the ceiling. The pine boards, honey-brown in the morning light, absorbed his gaze the way they absorbed everything—steady, patient, giving back nothing except the particular warmth of wood that had been holding heat for a very long time.
Sterling’s knee pressed against the leg of my empty chair.
He did not move it.
I slid off the counter and crossed the kitchen before Sterling knew what hit him. Three strides. Boots on floorboards, the sound carrying in the warm quiet.
Sterling looked up from whatever he’d been staring at on the ceiling and I was there, my hands on the arms of his chair, leaning down, pressing my lips to his without preamble.
He made a small surprised sound against my mouth. A catch of breath, involuntary, the kind of sound that came from somewhere behind his sternum when the argument was over and the truth had won.
Then he kissed back.
Coffee-warm. Unhurried. His mouth soft in a way that Sterling’s mouth was almost never soft, the stubble rough against my jaw, and his hand came up to the back of my neck like he was making sure I wasn’t going anywhere.
His fingers threaded into my hair, warm and certain, the grip firm without being tight, and I felt the exact moment Sterling Callahan stopped thinking and started feeling.
It was measurable. Quantifiable. The tension in his shoulders draining, his jaw slackening under mine, his breath mingling with my breath across the tabletop that still held the empty plates and the salt shaker and the evidence of a breakfast that three people had shared without anyone leaving.
I pulled back. His eyes stayed closed for an extra second.
One full second, maybe two, his lashes dark against his cheeks, his hand still on the back of my neck like he’d forgotten it was there, and I filed that away somewhere permanent.
Sterling Callahan, eyes closed, letting something happen to him that he hadn’t planned for.
Worth the wait.
Worth every second of it.
Mitch’s voice came from behind his hat, drawled and delighted, “My turn.”
Sterling’s eyes opened. Dark green, registering everything, giving back the particular flat assessment of a man who had just been kissed and was now being informed there was a queue. “You can wait,” he said.
“I’ve been waiting for months,” Mitch said.
He hadn’t moved from his sprawled position, boots on the bench, hat tipped, the picture of a man who believed patience was a virtue he had already demonstrated in excessive quantities.
“Months, Sterling. Literal months. I’ve had a count. Caleb knows the number.”
“Not my problem.”
“It’s a little your problem,” Mitch added, gesturing at me with his bandaged arm.
I shrugged. “Mitch has a point.”
Sterling looked at me. Really looked. The full Sterling assessment—cataloguing, recalibrating, deciding whether the man who had just kissed him was now betraying him in the marketplace of morning affection. “Caleb is supposed to be on my side,” he said.
“I am on your side,” I said. “Which is why I’m telling you that kissing Mitch is in your best interest. Medically speaking. Emotionally. Several charts support this conclusion.”
Sterling looked at the ceiling again. The expression of a man who had lost an argument with the universe and was processing the terms of surrender. His jaw worked. The muscle in his cheek jumped once, hard, and he said, “You two planned this.”
“We’ve been planning it since approximately the second week,” I said.
“That’s unsettling.”
Mitch dropped his hat. It hit the floor with a soft thud that nobody acknowledged because Mitch’s hats hit the floor approximately seventeen times a day and the floor had stopped caring around week three.
He kicked off the bench in one smooth motion, boots heavy on the hardwood, and closed the distance to Sterling’s chair in two strides that covered ground at a pace that still surprised me.
Sterling went still. The utter stillness he got when Mitch got inside his space—rigid along the spine, his breath catching, his body orienting toward the heat of Mitch like a compass finding north against its will.
His hands stayed on the arms of the chair. His eyes held Mitch’s, dark and flat and giving nothing except the slight dilation of his pupils, which I noticed because I had been noticing Sterling’s pupils for months and had charts.
Mitch kissed him slow. Deliberate. Thorough as a mission briefing, one hand cupping Sterling’s jaw, thumb rough against stubble, and Sterling’s hand found Mitch’s collar. Gripped it. Held on like a man who had decided that if he was going to surrender, he was going to do it holding onto something.