Chapter 10 Haven
TEN
Haven
He said I needed to eat first…but he needed to shower after a day at work.
And so did I, of course.
That was how we ended up in the shower—my leg hitched up around his waist, Wyatt’s lips on my throat as we went another round just a half hour or so after the tack room. I stayed in his arms afterward, shaking, my fingers gripping his muscular back as he breathed harshly against my pulse.
I felt the scars…shrapnel wounds, had to be.
After, he gave me one of his t-shirts, which I accepted even though I’d brought a set of my own PJs like a weirdo—then I sat at the small wooden kitchen table while he got out ingredients to cook.
He moved around the kitchen with a surprising amount of familiarity, which I guess shouldn’t have been that surprising given that he’d been living alone this whole time.
Still, it surprised me.
“What are you making?” I asked.
“Za’atar,” he said, setting a jar of spices on the counter.
I blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“Za’atar chicken,” he says. “It’s a Middle Eastern spice blend. Herbs, sesame…a little sour. You’ll like it.”
“Well, that sounds fancy.”
“It’s really not,” Wyatt chuckled. “Just a recipe I picked up.”
He started mixing the ingredients in a bowl: yogurt, lemon juice, the spices, garlic. I watched his hands move, how deft he was, knowing how gentle and how rough those hands could be.
“Who taught you?” I asked. “Or do you just watch a lot of Food Network?”
He was quiet for a second. Kept cooking, didn’t look at me.
“Hm—guy I served with,” he said. “Ethan. His family was Lebanese on his dad’s side, used to talk about food the same way some guys talk about cars.” A pause. “Said if he ever got home, he was going to open a restaurant.”
“Did he—” I started.
But I didn’t finish—knew I didn’t have to.
He didn’t say it like Ethan had made it home.
Wyatt covered the bowl and put it in the fridge, then ran his hands under the tap. I sat there and didn’t say anything, because what the heck were you supposed to say to that?
Finally, he dried his hands and leaned back against the counter, crossing his arms.
“The scars,” he said. “I know you’ve noticed.”
I frowned. “Just…I’ve been touching you. Happens.”
He hummed. “Wanna know?”
“Of course I do,” I breathed.
He turned around again, pulled a sheet pan out from under the oven, put it on the counter. I just—waited.
Then he talked again.
“IED,” he said. “Outside Fallujah, 2004. We’d been running the same supply route for six weeks…same road, same checkpoints, same order of everything.” He pulled the chicken out of the fridge, setting it on the counter. “Gets routine. That’s when it gets dangerous.”
He started laying the chicken out on the pan.
“Ethan was driving. I had the passenger seat. Two guys in the back—Kowalski, and a kid named Pruitt who’d been in country about three weeks. Device was packed into a culvert about ten feet off the road, and it went off under the driver’s side.”
He stopped for a second.
“I uh…I woke up around forty feet from the vehicle? I was the medic, but my leg was too fucked up to move. And besides—two of them were already dead. Ethan wasn’t…
well, nothing was salvageable. Kowalski took a piece of shrapnel straight to the brain.
Pruitt got hit in the stomach. You don’t come back from shit like that. ”
He swallowed hard. I did too.
“Shrapnel caught me across the back and shoulder. Cracked two ribs. Busted my knee, and it still gives me trouble when it’s cold.
” He slid the pan into the oven and finally looked back at me.
“I went to boot camp with Ethan. He always told me to have a cigarette and a glass of whiskey for him if we lost him. So uh…that’s what I do every year on the anniversary. ”
My eyes widened as I looked at him, my breath catching in my throat. “My birthday,” I whispered.
Wyatt let out a harsh laugh. None of this was funny. “Not quite. Two days after, but…usually take the weekend for it so it doesn’t interfere with work.”
I looked at him. "That's why you were at the Spur."
"Yeah."
"Alone."
"Yeah."
He turned back to the counter and started cleaning up—rinsing the bowl, wiping down the cutting board. I sat there and thought about that night. Wyatt leaning against the outside wall with a cigarette, looking out at nothing. The way his face had been doing something I didn't recognize.
I realized it now.
He'd been keeping an appointment.
And I'd walked around that corner in my tight jeans and cherry red cowboy boots and asked him to kiss me.
"Wyatt," I said. "I'm sorry. If I interrupted—"
"You didn't." He said it fast. Flat. Then softer: "You didn't, Haven."
"I basically ambushed you on the worst night of your year."
He hung the dish towel back on the oven handle and turned around. Leaned against the counter and looked at me.
"I'd had the whiskey and the cigarette already," he said. "I was just...sitting in it. The way I do." A pause. "And then you came around that corner."
I waited.
"You were good for me that night," he said. "I don't know how else to say it."
My heart leapt. "Even though I kissed you on your dead best friend's anniversary weekend."
Something moved across his face. Not quite a smile. "He would've thought that was funny."
"Yeah?"
"Ethan thought everything was funny." He crossed his arms. "He also would've had a lot of opinions about you."
“Good opinions?”
Wyatt did smile now, shaking his head. “Let’s see…he would’ve thought I was too old for you. Too cranky. Would definitely call me out for the fact that I was getting blown up in Iraq while you were—what, five years old?”
I grimaced. “Three.”
He barked out a loud laugh, then, shaking his head again. “Jesus…yeah, Ethan would’ve howled at that.”
"He sounds like he was a good person," I said.
Wyatt's smile faded, but not in a bad way. "Yeah. He was a good person." He glanced at the oven. "Obnoxious. Never shut up. But good."
"Would've been fun at a party."
"He was fun everywhere." He pulled out a chair across from me and sat down for the first time since we'd gotten back.
"Grew up in Dearborn. Michigan. His dad came over in the eighties, met his mom at a university there—she was American, from Ohio, which Ethan said explained a lot about her.
" A pause. "He used to say he got the best of both of them and none of the sense. "
I smiled. "How old was he?"
"Twenty-two." Wyatt looked at his hands on the table. "Same as me."
Twenty-two years old, and he'd been carrying it for eighteen years.
I didn't say that. I just sat there across from him in his kitchen, in his t-shirt, and let it be what it was.
"He'd written the recipes on the last few pages of this paperback I had," Wyatt said. "No measurements. Just ingredients and method, the way his mom taught him. I had to figure out the amounts myself." A beat. "Took me about ten tries to get the chicken right."
"Ten tries."
"Maybe twelve."
"That's dedication."
He looked up at me. "It's chicken."
"Wyatt."
"Haven."
"You spent a year learning to cook your dead best friend's mother's recipe."
He held my gaze for a second. Then he looked away, jaw working. "He would've hated that I made it sound like something."
"I think," I said carefully, "that he would've loved that you kept making it."
Wyatt didn't answer. But he didn't look away either, and after a moment he reached across the table and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, almost like he didn't mean to. His thumb dragged across my cheekbone.
Then the oven timer went off.
He dropped his hand and stood up. Back to business, back to moving, like the last thirty seconds hadn't happened.
"Eat," he said, pulling the oven open. "Then you can say whatever you're working up to say."
"I wasn't working up to anything."
"You've been working up to something since the shower." He set the pan on the stovetop. The smell hit immediately—lemon and herbs and something warm underneath. "Just let me feed you first."