4. Morning Aches
Chapter four
Morning Aches
Lorelei
The house doesn’t creak. That’s the first thing I notice on my first morning waking up here — no settling, no groan of old wood, nothing. Just a silence so complete it feels engineered, like even the building learned somewhere along the way not to make a sound it wasn’t asked to make.
I make my own noise instead, letting my bare feet slap the marble a little harder than they need to on my way down to the kitchen just to hear something answer back.
My mother’s already there, apron over yesterday’s blouse, humming something under her breath that used to play on the radio in our old apartment, back before our meant three people instead of nine.
She doesn’t hear me come in. I watch her for a moment, the particular way she moves through this kitchen, careful, like she’s still cataloguing where the sharp corners are even after two years of living here.
“Morning, Ma.”
She startles, hand flying to her chest before she recovers so quickly I almost convince myself I imagined it.
“Mija.” The smile that follows is real — I know her real smile, I’ve had twenty years of study — but it arrives slightly late, like she has to build it before she can wear it. “You scared me.”
“Sorry. You want help?”
“Sit, sit.” She’s already plating something, huevos and something that smells like home in a kitchen that doesn’t feel like it belongs to either of us yet. “?Cómo dormiste?”
“Fine.”
It’s a lie. The mattress is probably more expensive than my entire old bedroom, but I spent half the night listening to every shift of the sheets and every sound beyond the door like the house might eventually explain itself if I stayed awake long enough.
My mother probably knows I’m lying anyway.
“You’ll adjust,” she says, setting the plate in front of me. The way she says adjust makes the word carry more than it should. Her hand lingers on my shoulder. “This family takes some — understanding.”
“Is that what we’re calling it?”
“Lorelei.”
Just my name, delivered gently enough to tell me I’ve reached the edge of whatever she’s willing to discuss.
I let it go because pushing gets me nowhere with her lately, not since the wedding, not since she started measuring her sentences like they might be repeated back to her.
I’m three bites into breakfast when Rafe wanders in, shirtless, hair a disaster, looking like a man who’s never once in his life worried about how a room perceives him.
“There she is. Staying here now, huh?” He drops into the chair across from me like no time has passed at all, which — for him — it hasn’t. Two years of Thanksgivings and one deeply regrettable Fourth of July, and he still greets me like we saw each other last week. “Try to contain your excitement.”
“I’m thrilled. Can’t you tell?”
“I know. Everyone knows. You’ve had that face since the wedding.
” He steals a piece of toast off my plate without asking, same as he’s done since I was eighteen, and something about the ease of it — the total lack of performance, the fact that he still doesn’t ask — makes me laugh before I can stop myself.
“Some things don’t change.”
“I contain multitudes.” He grins around the toast. “You survived the Cassian pickup okay? He still driving like he’s late to his own funeral?”
Something in my chest tightens at his name, and I hate that Rafe’s easy grin makes it worse instead of better, like he’s accidentally handed me a mirror I didn’t ask to look into.
“He’s…” I search for a word that doesn’t give anything away. “More intense than I remember.”
“That tracks. He gets worse the closer it gets to opener season.” Rafe’s smile doesn’t fully drop, but something underneath it shifts, quick and gone. “Just — pace yourself with him. He’s got a whole thing going on. Older brother, half the time, and the other half — “
He stops himself, which feels more significant than anything he’s said so far.
“Anyway. Welcome to the circus.”
Ash comes in right as Rafe says it, already dressed, keys in hand, moving through the kitchen like a man with somewhere to be and no intention of pretending otherwise. He slows when he sees me, enough that two years of knowing each other should probably account for less of a reaction than it does.
“Morning,” he says, careful in a way that doesn’t match anything else about him — the grease still under one thumbnail, the exhaustion sitting heavy under his eyes like he didn’t sleep. “Didn’t know you came over last night.”
“Late. I still have class this week, so I wasn’t giving up the apartment just to make moving here more dramatic.”
His mouth shifts like he almost understands that too well.
“If you need anything,” he says, “I’m mostly at the shop. Same as always.”
“I remember.”
“Right.”
He pours himself coffee and leaves almost as quickly as he arrived, and I’m left with the uncomfortable sense that I just watched him work very hard not to look at me for longer than was polite. That part is new. He’s never had to work at it before.
“He’s like that,” Rafe says once the door shuts. “Don’t take it personally.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Sure you weren’t.” He says it kindly rather than smugly and steals the last of my toast anyway.
My mother watches all of it from the stove, saying nothing, and when I catch her eye she looks away too quickly — back to the pan, back to the humming, back to whatever song used to mean something simpler than it does now.
“Two weeks,” Rafe says, apropos of nothing, licking butter off his thumb. “Opener. You’ll finally see the part of this family nobody explains at Thanksgiving.”
He catches himself again, second time in five minutes, and covers it with another grin. “You’ll see.”
“See what?”
“You’ll see,” he says again, and this time it doesn’t sound like a tease. It sounds like a promise he’s not sure he’s allowed to make.
I don’t push. I’ve learned in two years that nobody in this house explains anything before they’ve decided I’m ready to hear it.
I find Cassian in the kitchen an hour later, and it takes me a full three seconds to recognize him.
It isn’t that he looks different but that he looks irritated in the completely ordinary way of a man losing an argument with an appliance, and I have never once seen his face do anything that wasn’t composed on purpose.
“Problem?” I ask from the doorway.
He doesn’t turn around right away. “The staff usually handles this.”
“Handles what, exactly?”
“Coffee.” He says it like a confession. “I don’t know how the machine works. I’ve never had to know how the machine works.”
I cross the kitchen, nudge him half a step to the side without asking permission, and press the one button he apparently hasn’t tried, the large obvious one labeled brEW in letters he could’ve read from across the room.
The machine hisses to life.
Cassian stares at it like it’s personally betrayed him.
“That was the button,” he says, flat.
“That was the button.”
“I pressed several buttons.”
“You pressed the wrong several buttons.”
He looks from the machine to me, and for once there’s none of the controlled, impossible-to-read thing he usually does. He just looks like a man realizing he’s been mildly and harmlessly outsmarted by a coffee maker and a woman who hasn’t had enough caffeine to be gracious about it.
“This is humiliating,” he says.
I laugh before I can stop myself, real and surprised out of me. “A little.”
“I coordinate people who are significantly more difficult than this machine.”
“Apparently people come with better instructions.”
The corner of his mouth moves. It isn’t the restrained almost-smile I’m used to seeing from him, but something looser, closer to an actual laugh he hasn’t decided whether to allow.
“Thank you,” he says, and it sounds strange in his mouth, like a phrase he doesn’t get much practice with.
“Don’t mention it. Literally. I don’t think anyone would believe me if I told them Cassian Vale got beaten by a coffee maker.”
“I would deny it under oath.”
“I figured.”
He pours his coffee, and for a moment, standing in a kitchen that smells like burnt grounds and early morning, he doesn’t look like the Cassian who picked me up last night or the man everybody seems to lower their voice around.
He looks tired, a little embarrassed, and entirely, unglamorously human.
Then Helena’s footsteps sound in the hall. Alistair’s house manager has a talent for appearing exactly when something needs doing, correcting, or quietly reporting, and I watch Cassian straighten before she even reaches the doorway.
By the time she appears, whatever I caught him without has disappeared.
But I saw it.
And I don’t think he minds, exactly, that I did.