Chapter Two
~ Mitch ~
I lay there in the dark with my eyes wide open and the ceiling about two inches from my nose, which was exactly how close it had been every night for the past four months, and yet somehow tonight it felt closer. Like the whole bunkhouse had shrunk by a factor of Sterling Callahan.
The wood stove ticked somewhere downstairs. A cold draft nudged the east-facing door in its frame, the hinges giving a soft, familiar groan that I’d stopped hearing three weeks into living here.
Outside, the wind had picked up off the pasture, pushing at the windows with the insistence of February in Montana, which was the meteorological equivalent of someone knocking on your door at three in the morning and refusing to take no for an answer.
Beside me, Caleb was asleep. Or close enough.
One arm flung out, fingers loosely curled against the sheet, his breathing slow and even in that way that meant he’d actually made it past the threshold.
His face was turned toward me, younger in the dark, the careful brightness he carried during daylight hours gone soft and unguarded.
I could make out the line of his jaw, the curve of his shoulder under the blanket, the copper glint in his hair where the last thin light from the window caught it.
I was not close to asleep. Not even close. My brain was running the evening back through my head in order, like a man reviewing footage from a security camera, looking for the moment everything went sideways.
Sterling’s truck on the gravel. I’d heard it before I saw it—the growl of the engine, diesel and something heavier underneath, a sound that didn’t belong to anyone else on this ranch.
I’d been standing at the kitchen sink, hands in dishwater, and my body had recognized the sound before my brain did, which was a problem because my brain was supposed to be in charge of things like that.
My hands had gone still in the soapy water.
Caleb, drying plates beside me, had gone still too.
We hadn’t looked at each other. We hadn’t needed to.
Then the door. Sterling standing in it with a bag on his shoulder and a leg he was carrying like a personal insult, like the leg had betrayed him personally and he was considering court-martialing it.
Dark green eyes that registered everything and gave back nothing. That jaw. That fucking jaw, square and set and carrying a shadow of stubble that looked like it had been applied with a ruler.
And then the flannel.
My flannel. Red and black plaid, worn soft at the elbows from four months of me wearing it while doing everything from fixing fence posts to sitting on the porch steps with a beer, watching the light go out of the sky over Black Butte.
I’d left it on the chair. His chair. The one at the head of the table with the specific ass-groove in it that I’d been sitting in for four months because nobody had told me not to and because, frankly, it was the best seat in the house.
He’d lifted it off the chair without a word.
Without a glance. His hand had reached for it before his brain had finished the threat assessment, and then he was holding it, feeling the weight of it, and I had watched his face for some sign—irritation, maybe, or the flatness that meant he was filing something under “problem”—and had gotten nothing.
Nothing at all. Just the movement of his hand, automatic as breathing, hanging the flannel on the hook by the door where it belonged.
Where all outerwear belonged. Because that was the rule.
The flannel had sat there all evening. Red and black plaid against the dark wood of the wall, like a flag planted in territory. I’d looked at it approximately seventeen times during dinner.
Caleb had caught me looking at it the twelfth time and raised an eyebrow, and I’d raised one back, and neither of us had said anything because what was there to say?
Sterling Callahan had moved a piece of clothing from point A to point B, and I was acting like he’d rearranged the furniture of my internal organs.
My thumb drummed a slow, irregular beat against the mattress. One-two. Pause. One-two-three. Pause. One.
The coffee.
Caleb had handed Sterling a mug of black coffee, no cream, no sugar, the exact shade of dark that Sterling preferred.
I knew for a fact Caleb had never been told how Sterling took his coffee.
I knew because I’d never been told, and I lived with the man.
Caleb had figured it out the same way he figured out everything about people he cared about: quietly, attentively, without making a production of it.
Sterling had taken the mug. But not right away.
There had been a half-second of stillness.
A fraction of a beat where his hand had hesitated, his eyes had dropped to the mug, and something had moved across his face that I couldn’t name but recognized anyway, because I’d seen it on my own face in mirrors often enough to know it when it showed up on someone else’s.
Surprise. The kind that comes from being handed something without a catch attached. The kind that says, This is for me? Just because?
I had watched that from the doorway. Watched the big, dangerous, eight-language-speaking, field-stripping-a-weapon-in-the-dark man look at a mug of coffee like it was a puzzle he hadn’t been briefed on, and I had felt something tighten behind my sternum that had nothing to do with irritation and everything to do with four months of a head that refused to cooperate with my intentions.
Four months of every truck on the main road making me look up. Four months of every creak in the bunkhouse making me wonder if it was the front door.
Four months of sitting in that chair at the head of the table and feeling the absence of someone who had never, not once, given me any indication that he gave a single fuck whether I was sitting in his chair or not.
I hadn’t examined it too closely. Examining things too closely was what got you in trouble.
I’d filed it under “later” and gone about my business, which was running fence and fixing water lines and making sure Caleb had everything he needed, because that was the job and the job kept the lights on and the roof over our heads, and wanting things beyond that was a luxury I’d trained myself out of a long time ago.
But I was examining it now. In the dark. With Caleb breathing beside me and the wood stove ticking downstairs and Sterling Callahan—hurt, tired, carrying a leg that had clearly been through something he wasn’t planning to discuss—right downstairs.
The bunkhouse creaked.
A single, specific sound. From downstairs. From his room. The groan of a floorboard taking weight, or a bed frame settling, or a man shifting position because his leg hurt and sleep wasn’t coming easy.
My whole body went still. My thumb stopped drumming.
My breathing slowed without my permission, the way it did when I was tracking something through underbrush, and I listened.
Not the listening of someone pretending not to care.
The real thing. The kind where every other sound in the building faded to background and that one creak became the only thing my ears were tuned to.
That creak was doing things to my focus I refused to name out loud.
Naming them meant admitting how long I’d been listening for it. How many nights I’d lain here with my eyes on the ceiling and my ears pointed at the staircase, waiting for boots on the treads that never came. How many times I’d told myself it was about the chair, or the flannel, or the way
Sterling moved through a room like he owned the air in it, and not about the fact that the man had looked at Caleb’s coffee like it was a gift he didn’t know how to receive, and I had wanted, with a clarity that scared me, to be the one handing it to him.
The bunkhouse settled. The draft nudged the door again. Caleb sighed in his sleep, a soft, unconscious sound, and turned onto his side, his back to me now, the line of his shoulder a dark curve against the sheets.
I kept listening. My body kept listening, even after my brain had called it quits for the night.
One creak. That was all I’d gotten. One creak from a man who made as little noise as humanly possible, who moved through the world like he was trying not to leave footprints, and my nervous system had treated it like a full orchestral arrangement.
I closed my eyes. Opened them. The ceiling hadn’t moved.
“Shit,” I said, very quietly, to no one at all.
Caleb didn’t stir. The wood stove kept ticking.
Somewhere downstairs, Sterling Callahan existed, unhurt enough, and I lay there in the dark with my thumb gone still against the mattress and the weight of four months sitting on my chest like something with actual mass, and thought, Well. This is going to be a problem.
I turned the wanting over in my head the way I turned a problem with a busted water line — looking for the edges, the clean lines, the place where I could get my hands around it and twist — and came up with nothing. Nothing useful, anyway.
I’d wanted things before. Plenty of things.
A truck that ran more than three days in a row.
A place with a real kitchen instead of a hot plate and a mini-fridge.
A job that didn’t end when the season changed or the foreman decided he didn’t like the look of me.
Those wants had shape. They had weight. You could hold them in your hand, measure them against what you had, make a plan for getting from point A to point B.
Sterling Callahan was not a thing you could hold in your hand.
Sterling Callahan was a thing that held you at arm’s length and made you feel, somehow, like that was your fault.
Like if you were smarter or faster or spoke eight languages and could field-strip a weapon in the dark, maybe then you’d deserve the five words he’d decided to spend on you that day.
My jaw tightened at the ceiling. I could feel it, the clench along the hinge that meant I was working too hard at something that wasn’t working back.