Chapter Twenty-Two #2
“I’m home,” I said. Quiet. The kind of quiet that cost something and was worth the cost.
Caleb made a sound. Not a word. Something between a breath and a laugh and the noise a man makes when the thing he has wanted arrives and is simultaneously too much and exactly enough.
His hand came up, gripped my collar, and pulled me down.
I went. Willingly. Completely. Without a single argument left in me, which from me was approximately equivalent to anyone else writing poetry.
The kiss was warm and unhurried and tasted like coming back. Caleb’s hands in my hair, fingers threading through the short dark strands with a familiarity that suggested he’d been mapping the territory in his head for three months.
My arms went around him, one hand spanning the small of his back, the other careful against the curve of his belly where the twins lay quiet for now, and the contradiction of it—me, careful and certain at once—was something I filed under its own category.
The new house held us. Dark. Quiet. Smelling like beeswax and fresh lumber and whatever Caleb had baked earlier—something with cinnamon that clung to the sheets and the walls and the warmth of a man who had decided that baking was the smell of home.
Caleb pulled back just enough to look at my face. His eyes moved across it the way they always did—careful, patient, the particular attention of a man who had learned not to take things at face value because face value was rarely the whole story.
“You’re really here,” he said.
“I’m really here.”
“Not for a debrief. Not for a layover.”
“No.”
“You’re done.”
“I’m done.”
He read me for one more beat. His thumb traced the edge of my jaw, and I watched his face do the thing it does when something too large arrives all at once—the warmth breaking through, open and a little wrecked, his mouth doing that small tremble he tries to hide and fails at completely.
“Okay,” he said. And pulled me back down.
I heard the door creak. I didn’t look up. I didn’t need to. The weight of Mitch’s presence had its own gravitational signature, and right now it was leaning against the door frame in the dark, watching with the warm, slightly undone expression he usually kept just under the humor.
“I answered the door,” Mitch said. “That deserves acknowledgment.”
“Noted,” Caleb murmured without opening his eyes.
“Sterling. Note it.”
“Noted,” I said.
Mitch’s silhouette shifted against the doorway. “The bed. Big enough for three. My idea. I’d like that noted too.”
“Mitch,” I said.
“What?”
“Get in the bed.”
“Is that an invitation or an order?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters for the story I’ll tell later.”
I said nothing. The nothing was deliberate. The kind of nothing that said I had exhausted my word ration for the evening and what came next would be conducted in a language that required no vocabulary.
Mitch grinned. I heard it more than saw it—the sound of Mitch Pruitt being extremely pleased with himself—and then he was crossing the room, boots off somewhere between the door and the bed, and the mattress dipped under his weight as he climbed in on Caleb’s other side.
What followed was the three of us in a bed that was, objectively, exactly the right size. No feet hanging off the edge. No elbows in ribs that hadn’t been negotiated. Just heat and weight and months of shared tension finally given room to breathe without interruption.
My hands found Caleb’s skin under his t-shirt.
Warm. Softer than three months ago, the muscle giving way to something rounder where the twins had taken up residence, and I handled him the way I handled everything that mattered—deliberately, gently, with both hands aware of what they were holding.
One palm flat against the curve of his belly, feeling the solid warmth of it, and Caleb arched into the touch with a sound that made my chest do something complicated.
Mitch was not tentative. His mouth found the nape of my neck, teeth grazing the skin there with the particular confidence of a man who knew exactly what that did to me, and his hand slid down my chest to where Caleb’s hand already was, and the coordination of it—three bodies finding a rhythm that shouldn’t have worked and did—short-circuited something in my nervous system that had been holding the line since Nebraska.
Caleb’s breath came fast against my collarbone. His fingers twisted in my shirt, and I kissed him through it, thorough and patient, the way Caleb needed to be kissed—slow enough to feel each second, deliberate enough to mean it.
Behind me, Mitch’s hand worked down the length of my spine with the precision of a man who had been mapping this territory for months and had the topography memorized.
For the first time in a career built on going it alone, I conducted no threat assessment. No perimeter sweep. No calculation of exit strategies or entrance wounds or the particular arithmetic of risk that had kept me functional for twenty years.
I was simply here. In a bed. Between two men who loved me. Who I loved. Their hands on my skin, my hands on theirs, and the coordination of it was so perfect it bordered on offensive.
We moved together. Caleb under me, warm and yielding, his legs around my hips with a strength that belied the softness of everything else. Mitch behind me, driving into me with the patience of a man who had been waiting for this and was determined to make it count.