Chapter 19 Maya
MAYA
The kitchen smells of roasted root vegetables and warm bread, earthy and deep.
"Sit," Jace says, pulling out a chair with his boot. He's already moving through the kitchen, plating something with easy authority.
His gaze catches mine. "Well. Don't you look thoroughly... relaxed." He draws the word out like taffy. "Must be something in the mountain air today."
I sit. My fingers find the edge of the table. Press.
"Owen made lunch," Jace continues, setting a plate in front of me. Roasted carrots and parsnips, golden-edged and caramelized, arranged with a precision that could only be Owen's work. Thick slices of sourdough alongside them, still warm enough to steam. "Personally, I think he's showing off."
Owen says nothing from the counter. He pours water into glasses with the focused attention of someone who has endured Jace’s teasing that knows it’s best to not participate.
Reid comes in behind me. I feel him before I see him, the shift in the room's gravity, the way the doorway changes when he fills it. He pulls out the chair beside mine. Sits. His knee settles against mine under the table, unhurried and deliberate, and stays.
"Interesting," Jace says, leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed. "Since when do you come home for lunch? I thought the wolves would mutiny without their fearless leader."
Reid picks up his fork. "They'll manage."
"They'll manage." Jace lets the words float. He looks at me, back at Reid, and there is something in his expression. Not a smirk, not quite. Something warmer. He winks at Reid, quick and unmistakable. "Good. I like this new arrangement. Works for me."
Reid doesn't look up from his plate. "Eat your lunch, Jace."
"I'm just saying." He spreads his hands. All innocence, zero credibility. "I'm a flexible man."
The heat starts in my chest and climbs. Throat.
Cheeks. I reach for my water and drink, buying three seconds I desperately need because Jace is looking at me with those sharp pale eyes, and Reid's knee is warm and solid against mine, and somewhere in the air between the two of them is a conversation I'm not entirely sure I'm reading correctly.
Or maybe I'm reading it exactly right.
"So," Jace says, turning to Owen, "about the rest of the lunch?"
"It's going," Owen snaps.
Jace turns to me, conspiratorial. "He's been like this all morning. Very forthcoming. Real chatterbox."
Owen brings the rest of lunch and sits at the end of the table beginning to eat with the same unhurried precision he brings to everything. Cuts his bread into even pieces. Doesn't look up.
I pick up my fork and try to focus on the food.
The carrots are sweet and slightly charred at the edges, the rosemary sharp enough to cut through the sweetness.
Owen's cooking is like Owen himself: careful, specific, better than it announces itself to be.
I take another bite and realize I'm hungrier than I thought.
Jace is already launching into a story. Something about a client last season who showed up for a backcountry hike in brand new boots, tags still attached, and a daypack full of protein bars and zero navigation tools.
"I said, where's your map? He said, I've got GPS on my phone. I said, great, does your phone know that we lose signal in about four hundred meters?" Jace shakes his head, grinning. "You should have seen his face."
Reid makes a sound that might’ve been a laugh if he committed to it harder.
"So we're two hours in," Jace continues, "and the boots are eating this guy alive. He's got blisters on blisters. And he looks at me, dead serious, and goes, but the brochure said moderate difficulty."
"Did you write the brochure?" Owen asks, without looking up.
"I did write the brochure."
"Was it accurate?"
"It was aspirational."
Owen's fork pauses midway to his mouth. He sets it down.
Looks at Jace with an expression so perfectly flat that it takes me a second to realize it's the driest possible form of disapproval.
Jace catches it and his grin widens. Reid shakes his head with the expression he reserves specifically for Jace's stories, the one that looks like patience but is actually affection in disguise.
I watch them. The ease of it, the rhythm they've built across years of shared meals and familiar arguments and the specific, practiced love that doesn't announce itself. Jace fills the room. Reid anchors it. Owen observes it from the edges with a quiet attention that misses nothing.
And I am sitting in the middle of it with Reid's knee against mine and the taste of Owen's cooking on my tongue and Jace making me fight a smile.
The ridge comes back to me. Not as a complete memory, more like a color.
The burnt umber of the cedar bark. The cold blue of the sky behind Reid's head.
The warm gold of his eyes when he pulled back to look at me, stripped of every careful layer he wears in front of other people.
I came apart in his arms and he looked at me like I was already his. Like I had always been.
He held me afterward. Not like something fragile. Like something found.
I glance at him beside me. The silver threading his temples.
Those hands around a fork, the same hands that held my face and kissed my name into my skin.
Reid doesn't perform tenderness. He just is tender, underneath the stillness, underneath the quiet authority, and I felt it on the ridge and I feel it now in the warm pressure of his leg against mine. Asking nothing. Offering everything.
My gaze drifts to Jace before I can stop it. He's gesturing with his fork now, building toward another punchline, auburn curls falling across his forehead. And I think about the kiss that we shared on the porch.
That kiss was different. Not less.
Where Reid is depth, Jace is ignition. The match-strike, the sharp breath before the flame catches.
He needles me and pushes me and finds the cracks in the careful architecture I've built and pries them wider, not to hurt but because he is genuinely, infuriatingly interested in what's behind the wall.
Every time I snap back at him, his eyes light up like he's been looking for exactly that.
He doesn't want the measured version of me.
He wants the real, the warmth, the temper.
The parts I locked away because the last time I let someone see them, they were used as a weapon against me.
He finds those parts delightful. And something about being wanted for the pieces of myself I tried hardest to bury makes my ribs ache in a way I can't rationalize away.
"Maya."
Owen's voice cuts through both memories at once. Low, measured, arriving without preamble.
I blink. He's standing now, a small bowl in his hands. Roasted beets, sliced thin, drizzled with balsamic.
"I made this for you. You mentioned you liked beets."
I did. Once. A passing comment while putting groceries away.
"Thank you, Owen."
I take the bowl. Our fingers brush, brief, accidental, and the small shock of contact travels up my wrist and invades my chest.
Owen doesn't rush. Doesn't reach. He occupies space with a certainty that makes me feel, against every trained instinct, that I don't have to perform a single thing.
He remembers what I say. Acts on what he notices without making it a production, without requiring acknowledgment, without extracting a cost.
His jaw tightens. Barely. Then he turns and goes back to his seat.
Three men. Three completely different palettes. Reid is cadmium blue, deep and steady and immovable. Jace is burnt sienna, all heat and motion. And Owen is raw umber, quiet and warm and the kind of color that makes everything next to it appear more vivid without drawing attention to itself.
I am sitting here painting them in my head like they're a composition.
Stop.
I have no business doing this. I carry enough wreckage to poison every good thing within reach.
I should not be getting involved with anyone. Whatever is growing between me and these men, whatever quiet impossible thing is taking root in this kitchen, I have no right to let it keep growing.
And three men. Three. I can already hear my mother's silence, the specific quality of it. Not disapproval. Worse. The careful blankness of a woman choosing her words. I don't need to add to the list of reasons people whisper my name.
But.
The word sits in my chest. Warm and stubborn.
But what if.
What if belonging didn't mean belonging to one? What if claimed didn't mean owned but chosen, freely and completely? What if I could be held in place not by control but by want? Reid's steadiness. Jace's fire. Owen's still, deep attention.
All of it. All of them.
What if I could let them want me? What if I could want them back?
I put down my fork.
Reid looks up. His eyes find mine, and what I see in them isn't hunger or expectation. It's tenderness. Quiet and certain. The kind that doesn't need a response because it isn't a question.
I turn my head. Jace is watching me too. He winks. Not the teasing version he aimed at Reid earlier. Something softer. Something that says stop thinking so much.
And against every rational warning my body has learned to obey, I let myself believe.
I remember who I used to be. The Maya who sang in the car with the windows down. Who made friendship bracelets for her kindergartners and cried at their graduation. Who laughed freely and constantly.
She's been here lately. Surfacing without permission, bypassing every defense I've built.
Laughing at Jace's terrible jokes before I can stop myself.
Bickering with him about dish-drying technique.
Standing in Owen's office doorway too excited about a fox illustration to remember I'm supposed to be careful.
She keeps coming back, that old Maya.
I like her. God, I miss her.
I look down at my plate. Empty. I don't remember finishing.
"I'll clear up," I say, standing, stacking plates. Motion. The familiar refuge.
Reid pushes back his chair. He stands and the kitchen reshapes itself around him, not crowded, just full. He carries his glass to the sink, sets it down, pauses beside me.
His lips press against my forehead.
The scratch of his beard against my skin. Brief, particular. Rough and soft at the same time. His mouth stays one second longer than casual. Not dramatic. Not for show. A man pressing his lips to a woman's forehead in a kitchen because he wants to, and wanting to is enough.
"See you tonight," he says, only for me.
His eyes hold mine. I feel my pulse in my wrists, in my temples, in the place on my forehead where his beard was, steady and insistent, the warmth spreading outward like pigment dropped into water.
Then he's gone.
I stand at the sink with a plate in one hand and the other pressed flat against the counter because the warmth on my forehead is still there and my body has decided to remember everything at once, the ridge, his hands, his voice saying sweetheart against my hair, and I need a task immediately.
I turn on the faucet. Run the water too hot. Don't adjust it.
Footsteps behind me. The clink of dishes on the counter beside the sink.
Jace.
"I'd stay and help," he says, "but I've got to run into town."
He leans in. His breath grazes the curve of my ear, unhurried, and every nerve ending along my neck fires in sequence.
"We have an unfinished conversation, Maya." His voice casual. "And I intend to finish it. Very soon."
My hands go still in the water.
I don't turn around.
His laugh, quiet, knowing, slightly insufferable, follows him out of the kitchen.
Owen is still in the kitchen.
I know it the way I always know. Not by sound or movement but by the quality of the air. A focus that didn't leave with the others. I turn off the faucet. Turn around.
He's standing by the table. Dishes in his hands. Looking at me.
With an intensity that crosses the kitchen like radiant heat. His face is composed. Calm as still water. And underneath it something I can't read, something taut and controlled and pulling at me the way Owen always pulls at me. Steadily. Quietly. From a depth I haven't found the bottom of.
The silence stretches.
"I have a call I need to make," he says.
He sets the dishes on the counter. Carefully. Without hurry. He nods once, to me or to something he's decided, and walks out of the kitchen with a steadiness that feels chosen, each step even and measured down the hall until I hear a door close softly at the far end of the house.
I stand in the empty kitchen.
Reid makes me feel safe. Jace makes me feel free.
And I don't understand Owen Calloway at all. His restraint. His stillness. The way he gives me his complete attention and then leaves the room like staying would cost him something he isn't ready to spend.
But I can't stop wanting to.