34. Pancakes For Four #2
The griddle heats. Butter hisses and goes gold. The whole kitchen fills up with the warm, sweet smell of batter. Under it runs the magnolia-and-sugar of Sawyer working happy.
I catch myself smiling at a mixing bowl like an idiot.
"Ye of little faith," Sawyer says, ladling the first round of batter into neat gold circles.
"You wounded me earlier. A sacrifice pancake.
I don't believe in the sacrifice pancake, Blooming Apricot.
I believe in a properly seasoned pan and a little preparation.
Same principles I bring to a four-hundred-guest reception, and I've never once lost a wedding to the pan gods. "
"You lost a cake to a seagull in April."
"That was an act of God. We do not speak of it. Do you even know what to do with a day off? Genuine question. I've watched you work clean through two of them already."
"I know precisely what to do with a day off. I catch up on the things I don't have time for on the days that aren't off."
"That's just work wearing a disguise."
"It's a very convincing disguise," I admit, and he laughs, low and warm, the sound folding into the smell of butter and sugar.
"You're doing the thing," Sawyer says, not looking up from the griddle.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you're happy, and it's making you suspicious." He flips a pancake with a neat flick of the wrist. It lands perfectly. He looks insufferably pleased. "You don't have to interrogate it, you know. Sometimes a good morning is just a good morning."
Before I can decide whether to argue, heavy footsteps announce the next arrival.
Beckett shuffles in like a bear coming out of hibernation, hair standing straight up on one side, a pair of gray sweatpants riding dangerously low, scratching idly at the dark hair on his chest. He's got sheet creases pressed into his cheek. He yawns so wide his jaw cracks.
"Whatever that is," he rumbles, voice gone to gravel, "I want some. All of it. My whole body hurts. I feel like I got hit by a truck and then the truck backed up to check its work."
"You sound," Sawyer says pleasantly, "like an old man."
Beckett points a thick finger at him without any real heat behind it.
"Shove it, Devereaux."
I giggle into the batter bowl.
I can't help it.
Beckett swings his glare to me, and it melts halfway there into something soft and pleased, like the sight of me laughing in a bad robe at seven in the morning is worth more than a full night's sleep.
"She laughs," he says. "At my pain."
"At your drama," I correct.
The hallway delivers August next, and he arrives with a grievance already loaded and ready to fire. He's the only one of them who looks halfway put together — a soft Henley pulled on, drawstring pants, his hair somehow fine — but he's rolling one shoulder in its socket and wincing.
"This old man," August announces to the room, aiming a wounded look directly at Beckett, "tried to break my back in the middle of the night."
Beckett doesn't even turn around from where he's leaning over the griddle, inhaling steam.
"I knocked you off the bed by accident."
"Accident." August pulls out a chair and lowers himself into it like a man twice his age. "Accident my ass, Shaw. I don't move in my sleep. You know I don't move in my sleep. I woke up on the floor. The floor came to me."
"Then you should be grateful for the change of scenery." Beckett shrugs, one big shoulder rolling, and delivers the verdict with the flat calm of a man who has thought about it. "Well. That's what you get. I didn't get to brush Amber's hair last night."
There's a beat of pure silence.
Then I set the whisk down, because I need both hands free for how hard I'm about to laugh.
"I'm sorry." I brace myself on the counter. "You knocked August onto the floor…on purpose, allegedly by accident…because Sawyer did my hair instead of you?"
"I never said on purpose," Beckett says with tremendous dignity.
"You are holding a grudge," I wheeze. "About a hairbrush. Against a man who was asleep."
"I am holding," Beckett corrects, "a completely reasonable position. Hair duty is my duty. It got stolen from me, in my own house, by a smooth-talking wedding planner. Somebody had to pay. August was closest."
Sawyer slides the first stack of pancakes onto a plate and passes it down the counter, grinning like the cat with the canary.
"In fairness, Beck, you couldn't tell a comb from a paddle brush last night. You stood there holding both like they were live grenades. I did the girl a mercy."
"I was performing a controlled comparison," Beckett says.
"You asked, and I quote"—Sawyer pitches his voice into a passable imitation of Beckett's gravel—"'why are there two tools for the same job.'"
August snorts.
Beckett's ears go faintly pink above the beard, which is the most extraordinary thing I've seen all morning, because I did not previously know that Beckett Shaw was capable of being flustered by anything short of a natural disaster.
"They are two tools for the same job," he mutters.
"They are absolutely not," August and I say at the same time, and then point at each other, delighted.
Sawyer leans across the counter toward Beckett, dropping his voice into something low and syrupy, purely to twist the knife.
"Tell you what? You want the hair job so bad, I'll teach you. Real patient. Start you on the easy stuff. We'll build up your"—he lets it hang, the pause obscene—"technique."
Beckett, who came into this kitchen unbothered by the loss of an entire night's sleep, goes the deep, betrayed red of a man who has just heard his own bedroom vocabulary handed back to him across a breakfast counter. He opens his mouth. Nothing comes out. He closes it.
Sawyer looks like he'd like to frame the moment.
"That's—" Beckett starts.
"Pancakes are getting cold," I sing, taking mercy, and carry the plates to the table.
We eat.
Actually sit down and eat, all four of us crammed around a table that's a little too small, elbows knocking, the good maple syrup going around, and it's loud and warm and stupid in the best way.
August steals the crispy edges off Beckett's stack when he thinks no one's looking. Beckett notices every single time and lets him.
Sawyer keeps up a running commentary rating each pancake on a scale he refuses to explain.
"That one's a seven-point-five," he declares around a mouthful. "Good crumb. Lost points on geometry."
"Pancakes don't have geometry," Beckett says.
"Everything has geometry, Beck. That's what makes it a nine or a seven-point-five." Sawyer aims his fork at August's plate. "His come out nines every time, because he pours them like he's defusing a landmine. Slow. Even. It's honestly a little sad how good he is at it."
"I contain myself," August says serenely, and reaches over to lift another crispy edge off Beckett's stack.
"That's the fourth one," Beckett says, without looking up.
"I'm aware."
"Just say you want your own, August."
"I don't want my own. I want yours. It tastes better when it's stolen."
"Everything tastes better stolen," Sawyer agrees. "Ask any raccoon."
"I am not a raccoon."
"You have raccoon values. It's a compliment — raccoons are survivors."
Beckett slides the last of his crispy edges onto August's plate without a word, the way you'd feed a stray you've quietly decided to keep, then goes back to his coffee like he didn't.
August pretends not to notice.
I pretend not to notice August pretending.
I referee, badly.
I eat more than I mean to.
The whole time there's this ache building behind my ribs that has nothing to do with hurt.
Nobody mentions the empty chair.
Cade never came home last night — chose the bar again, the way he keeps choosing everything else but me lately — and the four of us have gotten quietly good at leaving a Cade-shaped gap in the conversation and stepping around it.
I notice the gap…always notice.
I just don't have it in me, this morning of all mornings, to be the one who names it.
This is the exact thing I spent five years refusing to picture, because picturing it and not having it might have finished me.
A slow Sunday. A crowded table. Three men who bicker like brothers and look at me like I'm the point of the whole arrangement. I've orchestrated other people's happily-ever-afters for a living, hundreds of them, and I never once let myself believe I'd get to sit inside my own.
"You've gone quiet," August says, gentle, watching me over the rim of his coffee with those hyper-observant eyes that never miss a change in a room. "Good quiet or bad quiet?"
"Good quiet," I say, and I mean it so much my voice almost gives. "Very good quiet."
He smiles at me, small and private, the smile he saves for when he's decided not to fuss.
"Okay, Amber. Eat your breakfast."
The dishes come after, because someone has to be the adult, and it turns out that someone is a rotating committee. I take the drying towel.
Sawyer stations himself at the open cabinet, stacking clean plates onto the shelf as I hand them up.
Beckett wipes down the table with the focus of a man defusing something.
August leans against the counter by the window, thumbs moving over his phone, murmuring something about a delivery of ranunculus that came in short.
It's the most ordinary tableau in the world, four people cleaning a kitchen, and I am so full of it I can barely hold the plate steady.
Then the front door opens.
Not a knock. The door.
The particular scrape-and-swing of the heavy front door. A gust of outside air. A scent riding in on it — spiced rum, blood orange, sandalwood, the salted-caramel warmth I'd know anywhere. Cade.
Threaded through it, faint but unmistakable, is somebody else's perfume.
Something floral and not mine…
The kitchen doesn't stop, exactly.
It just changes key.
Beckett straightens up from the table, cloth still in his hand, and looks toward the entryway with an expression I can't quite read.
"Where've you been? You're just now getting home?"