Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
TATE
Iwake up in her bed.
Takes me a full five seconds to understand where I am.
The ceiling is wrong. Lower than mine, with a water stain in the northeast corner shaped like Texas.
The sheets smell like her. The light coming through the window is hitting from the west instead of the east, which means I'm facing the wrong direction, which means I'm not in my house.
Piper is curled against my side. One arm draped across my chest, her face pressed into my shoulder, auburn hair everywhere. Her breathing is slow, even. Deep asleep.
My internal clock says five-fifteen. My body says get up, there's work. My brain says if you move, she'll wake up, and you'll have to figure out what to say to the woman you're in bed with for the first time in three years.
I don't move.
Her fingers are resting on my chest, right over the scar on my ribs.
A fence wire incident from my twenties, ugly, healed thick.
She traced it with her fingertip last night, after the second time, and asked how I got it.
I told her. She kissed it. Pressed her lips against the raised skin, soft, deliberate, and then laid her head on my chest and fell asleep before I could figure out how to breathe again.
The cabin is cold. Fire's been dead for hours.
Her bedroom doesn't have great insulation, and I can feel the temperature difference between the air above the blankets and the warmth underneath where our bodies have been generating heat all night.
She shivers in her sleep, burrows closer, and my arm tightens around her automatically.
Cattle need feeding. East herd needs checking. There's a section of fence along the upper pasture that's been sagging for a week. I've got a list in my head that runs from dawn to dark, same as every day, same as every day for twelve years.
None of it moves me out of this bed.
Because she's warm. And she's here. And the quiet in this room doesn't sound empty. It sounds full. It sounds like someone else's breathing and the rustle of sheets when she shifts in her sleep and the soft hum of a cabin that has two people in it instead of one.
At five-thirty, I ease out from under her arm. She murmurs something, rolls into the warm spot I left, and goes still. I pull the blanket up over her bare shoulder. Stand there looking at her for a beat too long.
My clothes are scattered down the hallway. Jeans by the bedroom door. Shirt in the living room. One boot by the couch, the other near the front door. I dress in the dark, moving quietly.
The fireplace is dead cold. I stack new logs, get it going from the embers that are barely alive at the bottom. Takes a few minutes of coaxing, but the flames catch, and warmth starts creeping back into the room.
Her kitchen is small. Coffee maker on the counter, bag of grounds from Hilda's beside it. I make a pot. Strong, because that's how I make it. Then I remember the milk. Open her fridge. Add a splash to one of the two mugs I pulled from her cabinet.
Two mugs. Both full. One black. One with milk.
The simplicity of it does something violent to my chest.
I carry hers to the bedroom. Set it on the nightstand. She's still asleep, face half-buried in the pillow, lips slightly parted. I lean down and press my mouth to her temple. Barely a touch. She doesn't wake.
The morning chores take two hours. I move through them fast, efficient, my body on autopilot while my brain stays in her bed.
Bucky gets saddled. The east herd gets checked.
The sagging fence section gets a temporary patch because I don't have time for proper repairs today, and the reason I don't have time is that I need to get back to her.
I need to get back to her.
Twelve years on this ranch, and I've never said those words about anything except the land itself.
My phone buzzes while I'm unsaddling Bucky at the barn.
Mom:
Calling Sunday as usual. Anything new?
I stare at the screen. Anything new. My mother has been asking that question every week for twelve years, and the answer has always been some variation of nothing. Weather, cattle, fence repairs. The safe trinity of a man who's built his life around things that don't leave.
Me:
Met someone.
The phone rings eight seconds later.
"What do you mean you met someone?" Mom's voice is sharp with the urgency of a woman who has been waiting a very long time for this particular phone call.
"The new tenant next door."
"The one in the Mackey cabin?"
"Yeah."
"Tate Michael Rawlins. You tell me everything right now or I'm driving up there."
So I tell her. Not everything. Not the part about her bed, or the way she tastes, or the sound she made when I pushed inside her. But I tell her about the fence line. The porch step. The creek deal. The kitchen kiss. The terrible coffee with milk.
Mom is quiet for a long moment. Then she says, "Your father fixed my porch step the week after we met. Before we were even dating. He just showed up with a hammer."
My throat tightens. "I didn't know that."
"Rawlins men have one love language, sweetheart. They fix things for the people they can't stop thinking about." She pauses. "Is she staying?"
"She signed a year lease."
"I didn't ask about the lease. I asked if she's staying."
I look toward the cabin. The kitchen light is on. She's awake. Drinking the coffee I made her. Sitting in her kitchen with the fire I built going in the fireplace.
"I don't know yet."
"Then give her a reason to."
We hang up. I finish the barn chores with my mother's words rattling around in my skull.
Give her a reason to. Like it's that simple.
Like you can just hand someone a reason to uproot their life for a man who eats standing at his kitchen counter and hasn't had a conversation longer than three sentences in a decade.
But I fixed her step. And she gave me her word. And last night she whispered stay, and I stayed, and this morning I built her fire before the cold could touch her.
Maybe reasons aren't always words. Maybe sometimes they're lumber and split firewood and coffee with milk left on a nightstand.
The walk back to her cabin takes five minutes.
I knock on the front door instead of just showing up.
Seems important. She opens it in my flannel.
My actual flannel, the one I left on her bedroom floor last night because it got mixed in with the pile.
It's too big on her, sleeves hanging past her fingertips, hem hitting mid-thigh.
"That's mine," I say.
"It is." She holds out a mug. Coffee. With milk already added. "This is yours too."
I take the mug. Step inside. The fire is crackling. Her laptop is open on the kitchen table with something colorful on the screen. The cabin smells like coffee, like warmth, like the particular combination of pine and soap that is specifically, entirely her.
"You built my fire this morning," she says.
"Yeah."
"And made me coffee."
"Yeah."
"And left before I woke up."
"Had to feed the cattle."
"But you came back."
I look at her. Standing in my flannel in her kitchen with bare legs and messy hair, holding a mug she made for me, and the expression on her face is open. Soft. No teasing, no sass. Just a woman asking a man whether he came back.
"I'm always gonna come back."
The words are out before I can stop them. Raw. True. Terrifying in their simplicity.
Her eyes go bright. Wet. She blinks it away fast, takes a sip of her coffee, but the corner of her mouth is trembling.
"You wanna sit down?" She nods at the kitchen table. "I need to finish this logo, but you can stay. If you want."
I sit. At her kitchen table. While she works.
For two hours, I sit in her kitchen drinking coffee while she designs logos on her laptop.
She talks while she works. Random, stream-of-consciousness commentary about fonts and color theory and a client in Fort Collins who wants a bear holding a beer stein, which she thinks is overdone but the client loves bears, so bears it is.
I don't understand any of it. I don't need to. Her voice fills the room the way the firelight fills the corners, steady, warm, reaching places that have been dark for a long time.
At one point, she turns her laptop toward me and asks which shade of green I prefer for a label. I point to the darker one. She nods, turns the screen back, and says "Good eye, Rawlins" without looking up.
Nobody has asked my opinion on anything besides cattle feed in years.
Around ten, my phone buzzes.
Jace Callahan:
Saw your truck at the Mackey cabin this morning. Just your truck. Not you. You good?
Me:
I'm good.
Jace:
Me:
Shut up.
Jace:
Didn't say anything. But also. It's about damn time.
I pocket the phone. Piper glances up from her screen.
"Everything okay?"
"Jace. Friend in town. Noticed my truck."
"Ah." Her eyes sparkle. "Small town."
"You have no idea."
She grins. Goes back to her bears. I finish my coffee, rinse both mugs, and set them in her drying rack. Two mugs. Side by side. A matched set in a house that wasn't built for two.
She stands, stretches, and pads over to where I'm leaning against the counter. Slides her arms around my waist. Lays her head against my chest. The flannel is warm from her body.
My arms wrap around her. My chin rests on top of her head. Through the window above her sink, I can see the pasture, the fence line, the mountains. The same view I've been looking at my whole life, from a slightly different angle, in a kitchen that isn't mine, holding a woman who is.
"Come to dinner tonight," I say into her hair. "My place. I'll make chili."
She tips her head back. Looks up at me. "You cook?"
"My grandmother's recipe. Best chili in the valley."
"Bold claim."
"Factual claim." I press a kiss to her forehead. "Six o'clock."
"I'll bring wine."
"Box wine?"
"Don't start with me, Rawlins."
I kiss her. Slow. Soft. My hand cradling the back of her head. When I pull away, her eyes are closed, her lips still parted, and the look on her face is the same one she had last night when I told her I wasn't leaving.
Peace. That's what it is. She looks at peace.
I walk back to the ranch with my hands in my pockets, the midmorning sun warm on my face. Behind me, her kitchen light glows through the window. Ahead of me, the pasture stretches out to the tree line.
Same land. Same sky. Same mountains I've been staring at for thirty-four years.
All of it looks different now.