5. Jade
JADE
The light through the curtains is gray and early, which is how I know I'm not in my apartment.
My apartment faces west. I get the afternoon light in the evenings when I don't want it, and nothing in the mornings when I do.
This light is the opposite—low and cold and coming in at an angle that means east-facing, sloped land, no buildings in the way.
I lie there for a moment taking this in.
Guest room. Flanagan estate. My boxes still sealed in the corner, labeled in my own handwriting, everything exactly where I left it. Day two.
I shower in the small bathroom off the hall, where someone has put out fresh towels that weren't there last night. I don't let myself think about who put them there. I think about it the entire time I'm showering.
The water is hot. My skin is alive in a way it hasn't been in eight months. The last man I slept with finished outside me and said he didn't want to complicate things. That was months ago. I haven't bothered since.
I haven't bothered with myself either.
I'm bothering this morning.
My hand goes between my legs under the hot water.
I'm already wet—I've been since I came down the stairs to this kitchen yesterday, since the finger brush at the sink, since Killian's eyes on me from the doorway.
I close my eyes and imagine Cormac's mouth on me.
Slow. The patient kind. The way he does everything in his own kitchen—like he was always going to do this and he's just letting me in on it.
His tongue dipping between my folds. His lips on my clit.
His hands on my thighs holding me open. Not hurried. Not negotiating.
I'm close embarrassingly fast.
Killian behind me. His cock in my pussy, as big as I've imagined it.
His hands on my hips pulling me back against him hard with no patience at all because he's been holding it for two years and he's done holding it.
His thrust wild and deep. The body I've been not letting myself look at since the harvest party last fall.
I come on my own hand under the water, biting down on the inside of my cheek to stay quiet. It happens fast and it isn't enough.
I rinse off. I dry off. The towel comes away clean. There's no proof of either of them on me. That's what I want. The proof. Cum still inside me when I dry off in the morning. One of them on me on purpose. I've never had that in my life.
This morning I'm in a house with three men in it. One orgasm under hot water hasn't solved anything.
Cormac is already at the stove.
This shouldn't surprise me—he was at the stove that first Christmas morning, the second time I was here, and I've never once caught him sleeping in or even starting slow.
He moves at the pace of the land, which is to say early and without fuss.
He hears me on the stairs and doesn't turn around, just pulls a second mug from the cabinet and sets it down near the coffeepot with his back still half-turned, like I was always going to come down and he was always going to do that.
"Morning," I say.
"Morning."
I pour the coffee. He's making eggs—not scrambled, the patient kind, the kind you have to watch or they go wrong—and there are mushrooms in a pan on the second burner and bread going in the toaster.
The kitchen smells like coffee and something herby and warm, the morning-kitchen smell of this house that I spent two years filing under not mine and that keeps catching me off guard anyway.
Ryan comes in from the back hall seven minutes later with his shirt half-tucked and his hair damp, and he stops when he sees me like he didn't entirely expect me still to be here, which is fair.
Something moves through his face before he gets it settled.
The body that gave him two years registers him on reflex. I don't feed it.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey."
"You stayed."
"I stayed."
He nods, slow. "Good," he says, quiet enough that I think he means it in a way he can't fully explain right now, and then he goes to the coffeepot.
Killian comes down last, which I suspect is on purpose.
He takes the kitchen in with one sweep—me at the counter, Ryan at the coffeepot, Cormac at the stove—and then crosses to the table and sits down without a word.
There's something about how he takes his chair, settled and deliberate and already comfortable taking up space in a room he's decided belongs to him, that lands low in my stomach.
He hasn't done anything. He's sitting in a chair. This is not reasonable.
"Sleep well?" he says.
Looking at me.
"Fine," I say. "You?"
His mouth curves. "Eventually."
I look back at my coffee.
Cormac sets the eggs on the table. Plates with mushrooms on the side, toast in a basket, butter still in the dish—he's done it like the meal was always going to be exactly this and he's just letting us in on it. He pours my coffee first.
He's leaning past me to do it and his free hand settles on the back of my shoulder for a beat. The heat of his palm goes through my shirt. He moves on.
I get a hit of him as he goes—clean sweat, oak, the sweet edge of wine that lives in everything in this kitchen. The chest-voice when he says morning to the boys is the one I've been thinking about since last night.
Killian's jaw goes flat. He doesn't say anything. He picks up his fork.
Ryan doesn't react to the order. The not-reacting tells me everything about how much he's reacting.
"East rows," Cormac says, sitting at the head of the table.
"I'll handle it before Thursday's rain," Ryan says.
"Said that yesterday," Killian says.
"And I'll handle it today."
"You said that yesterday too."
"Killian."
Cormac says it without looking up. One word. Killian goes back to his eggs.
I watch all of it from over my coffee cup.
Cormac eats slowly, his focus on the plate but his attention somewhere else—I can feel it on me, even though he hasn't looked.
The width of his shoulders under the flannel.
The work-marked hands. Killian eats fast—leaner shoulders than his father's, same forearms, the same mouth.
Ryan barely eats—his hand around his mug, broad palm, the same Flanagan body in a slightly slimmer frame.
Three deep voices in this kitchen. I've been not noticing them for two years.
I've been noticing them for two years.
The brothers' fork rhythms are the conversation underneath the conversation about tractors, and the conversation underneath that is something I'm pretending not to be in the middle of.
"How's the second tractor holding up?" I ask. Real question—I remember he was worried about it last spring.
Cormac looks at me. Right at me. The full attention I'd been feeling on me sideways, now direct.
"It's not."
"Are you going to make it through harvest with one?"
"If I have to. I'd rather not."
"What's the plan?"
He almost smiles. Not quite. Something at the corner of his mouth. "Decide that this week."
Killian, still focused on his plate: "I told him to buy the new one in August."
"You did," Cormac says.
"And you decided not to."
"I did."
"You always do."
That comes out lower than I think Killian meant it. The kitchen goes quiet for half a second—Ryan looks up, Cormac doesn't, I keep my eyes on my mug and my body lights up under the table because there's a thing happening that isn't about tractors at all.
Cormac's voice when it comes is the one that ends conversations. "Drink your coffee, Killian."
Killian drinks his coffee.
I take another sip from my mug to do something with my hands.
Across the table, Killian's eyes lift to mine before he's fully done swallowing.
Held. Steady. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to.
Two years of Sundays under that exact gaze.
He held it back because I was his brother's.
Ryan made sure I wasn't anymore. Now the gaze isn't holding back.
Ryan is watching his plate.
"Jade," Cormac says.
I look at him. His eyes are warm and steady. "Eggs?"
He's already holding the serving spoon. His other hand is open, palm up, asking for my plate.
I hand it over. His knuckles brush my fingertips when he takes it. Not an accident. I feel it land in my stomach and stay.
He spoons eggs onto my plate. Sets it back in front of me. Goes back to eating.
Killian is still looking at me. Mouth slightly open. He sees what just happened and he doesn't pretend he didn't.
I pick up a piece of toast and take a bite because my hands need something to do.
Killian leans across the table. His thumb comes up to the corner of my mouth and brushes off a crumb that may or may not have been there. The pad of his thumb is warm. He doesn't pull his hand back right away.
"Got it," he says, low.
Beside me Ryan sets his mug down on the table—too hard, a small crack of porcelain on wood. His jaw is locked. His face has gone thunderous. He doesn't look up.
I don't look at him.
I look at Cormac. His eyes are already on me, steady and unbothered, the corner of his mouth doing the not-quite-smile thing again. He doesn't intervene. He doesn't have to.
Killian sits back. Slowly. His eyes don't leave my mouth.
I look at Cormac's hand reaching for the toast basket. The wide flat of his palm. The steady tendon in the wrist. The fact that he pours coffee in the order he wants and doesn't apologize for it.
And my brain, with no warning whatsoever, produces a thought I have absolutely no business producing.
What his kid would look like.
Strong—there's no other outcome for those hands, that jaw, the mass of him moving through his own kitchen at six in the morning. Long-lived. Twenty-seven years on this land and nothing about him is slowing. Whatever came out of him would have his patience and the body underneath it.
What he looks like underneath that flannel.