Chapter Twenty-Three
~ Mitch ~
I woke to pale gold through a window I hadn’t paid for.
The east-facing one. Caleb’s idea, Caleb’s design, Caleb’s specific instruction to the framing crew delivered with the firm politeness of a man who had never raised his voice in his life and didn’t need to.
I’d watched him measure it twice with a tape measure and argue with Macon about the header beam for fifteen minutes, and the window was exactly where it should be—south corner, angled to catch the first light, wide enough for a man to sit beside with a tactical document and the expression he usually wore when he was pretending not to enjoy the morning.
Sterling lay between us, arm heavy across my wrist, breathing slow and even in a way that told me the three hours of sleep he’d managed were actually sleep and not the alert doze he did in the field.
On his other side, Caleb was curled tight, one hand pressed against Sterling’s ribs, making small contented sounds into the pillow that weren’t quite words and didn’t need to be.
The weight in my chest was enormous. Physical. The kind that pressed against my sternum like something with hands and intent, and I stared at the ceiling and tried to breathe through it the way you breathe through anything that’s too big to hold all at once.
Coffee. Coffee was the responsible move. Before I did something embarrassing like say it out loud, or worse, wake both of them up to tell them about the feeling, which would be very Mitch of me and very unwelcome at five-forty in the morning.
I slid out from under Sterling’s arm with the precision of a man who had spent twenty-four years extracting himself from shared beds without waking his brother. Three steps. Four steps. My hand was on the doorknob when a voice came from the bed, low and flat and entirely awake.
“You’re doing the thing where you think loudly.”
I turned. Sterling hadn’t moved. Eyes closed, face relaxed against the pillow, the same position he’d been in three seconds ago. Except his mouth was moving, which was new information.
“I’m getting coffee,” I said.
“It’s five-forty in the morning.”
“That’s when coffee happens.”
Three seconds of silence. I counted them because I’d learned to—Sterling’s version of a decision tree, the tactical pause where he weighed options against dignity and arrived at the one that cost him least. One. Two. Three.
“I take it black.”
The words landed flat and clean, delivered without inflection and carrying the weight of something considerably larger than a coffee preference.
I grinned in the bedroom doorway and carried that grin all the way downstairs, because Sterling had just asked for coffee like a man who intended to still be there when it arrived, and I was going to be insufferably smug about it for the rest of my natural life and probably several afterlives if they existed.
The kitchen was Caleb’s design triumph and also, privately, the reason I’d stopped arguing about counter space entirely.
The counters ran along three walls in a U-shape, deep enough to knead bread on and wide enough to hold every pot Caleb owned simultaneously, which he had tested twice and documented both times.
The cabinets were solid maple, unfinished, the color of fresh honey.
The sink was deep and cast iron and had cost more than my first truck, and I no longer had an opinion about that because watching Caleb wash vegetables in it with the satisfaction he brought to the task had converted me completely.
I found the mugs without looking. Three of them, clay-brown and identical, sitting on the shelf above the coffee maker where Caleb had arranged them in descending size the day we moved in, which was both efficient and slightly unhinged.
The coffee maker gurgled to life under my hand, and the smell filled the kitchen the way it was supposed to—rich, acidic, the scent of a morning that belonged to me and not to a social worker or a landlord or a man who had decided I was inconvenient.
The carafe hadn’t finished filling when Caleb appeared in the doorway. Hair completely wrecked. Eyes soft with sleep and bright with something that looked suspiciously like victory.
He was wearing one of Sterling’s shirts—the gray one, the soft one that hit him mid-thigh and did things to the outline of his belly that made my chest do that thing again, the warm one.
He looked so thoroughly pleased with himself that I had to look at the coffee maker.
He crossed the kitchen and kissed me on the cheek. Warm. Easy. The kind of kiss that cost nothing and gave back considerably more than it should have.
Then he stole the first mug the moment the carafe was full enough to pour.
“That was Sterling’s,” I said.
“Sterling can wait.”
“Sterling is going to have opinions about that.”
“I’m aware.” Caleb poured with the steady hand of a man who had never once in his life been intimidated by Sterling’s opinions. “I’m prepared to manage the situation.”
“You’re going to hand him a mug and smile at him and he’s going to forget he was annoyed.”
“That’s the management strategy, yes.”
“That’s not management, that’s manipulation.”
“It’s affectionate manipulation. Which is different.”
“I love you.”
“I know.” He took both mugs—his stolen one and the second pour—and headed for the stairs with the serene confidence of a man who had already won every argument he was about to have and was extremely pleased about it.
I followed with the third mug. Leaned in the bedroom doorway and watched.
Caleb set a mug on the left nightstand. The left side.
The side he had decided belonged to Sterling while the walls were still studs and the plumbing was still exposed, announced to me with the gravity of a man filing a legal document.
The left side is Sterling’s. The right side is ours. That’s the system.
I had not argued. Some systems were worth the investment.
Sterling sat up. Pushed his hair back with one hand—the gesture he did when he was transitioning from horizontal to vertical and needed his brain to catch up—and looked at the mug, then at Caleb.
His expression did the thing it does when something good has happened and he hasn’t worked out how to absorb it: the slight crease beside his left eye, the firm set of his jaw holding back whatever’s behind it, the warm bewilderment of a man who had spent twenty years building walls and was discovering that the people on the other side of them kept handing him coffee.
Caleb climbed back into bed like this was just what mornings were. Tucked himself against Sterling’s side, mug balanced on his own knee, and took a sip with the air of a man who had absolutely not stolen the first pour and would not be acknowledging it.
“It’s good,” Sterling said.
“I know,” Caleb said.
“You took the first mug.”
“I did.”
“That was mine.”
“You couldn’t have known that. The mugs are identical.”
“I can tell by the temperature.”
“That’s not a real thing,” Caleb protested.
“It’s absolutely a real thing.”
I raised my own mug from the doorway. “He’s been here one night and he’s already arguing about mug temperature.” I took a sip, held Sterling’s dark green gaze over the rim, and said it like it was weather. “He’s home.”
Sterling looked at me. His mouth did the thing—the small stubborn warmth breaking through, spreading from the crease beside his left eye to the whole left side of his face, landing in my chest with the clean tactical certainty of something I had been waiting for since the first week.
I grinned back. Widely. Without apology.
The morning light thickened through the east-facing window, painting gold stripes across the rumpled sheets and Sterling’s bare shoulders and the two mugs sitting on nightstands in a house that was actually ours, and the weight in my chest settled into something I could carry.
Something permanent.
Something that smelled like coffee and pine soap and whatever Caleb had baked yesterday, and I was going to be insufferable about it for the rest of my natural life, and Sterling was going to pretend to be annoyed, and he wouldn’t be, not really, and I was already looking forward to it.
We ended up back in bed because that’s where the coffee was and also because Sterling’s bare shoulders looked better in morning light than they had any right to, and I was a man with priorities.
Sterling sat against the headboard, mug balanced on one knee, the sheet pulled low across his hips in a way that was either deliberate or extremely convenient.
Caleb had tucked himself against Sterling’s side, one hand flat on Sterling’s chest, narrating pantry dimensions in the dreamy satisfied tone of a man who had won every argument he’d ever had about counter space and was still extremely pleased about it.
“The shelves are eighteen inches deep,” he was saying. “Organized by category. Dry goods on the left, preserves center, baking supplies right. The flour bins are labeled. All of them. Even the rye, which we don’t use.”
I stretched out across the foot of the bed, boots off somewhere between the kitchen and the bedroom, and watched both of them with the specific slightly-unhinged warmth of a man who had gotten exactly what he wanted and was still not entirely used to the fact that it was allowed to stay.
Sterling caught me looking. His dark green gaze did the full perimeter sweep—me first, then Caleb, then back to me—and landed with the flatness he deployed when he’d identified a tactical situation he wasn’t prepared for.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re doing the thing again.”
“I don’t have a thing.”
Caleb didn’t pause his pantry narration. “You absolutely have a thing. It’s been documented.”
I sat up. “Who documented it?”
“I did.”
Sterling’s mug stopped halfway to his mouth. “When?”
“Third week. I have notes.”
“You have notes on Mitch’s thing.”
“I have notes on several things.” Caleb took a sip of his coffee. “It’s a very organized system.”
“I want to see the notes,” I said.
“You’re not in the index.”
“I’m definitely in the index.”
“You’re in the appendix.”