Chapter Nine #3
From where I was lying, it fell very firmly into the better column, with footnotes.
“Mitch is going to know the moment he sees us tomorrow morning,” I said.
Casual. Like I was commenting on the weather, which I had done approximately seventeen times in the last three weeks because Sterling found it irritating and I found his irritation entertaining, and the cycle was self-sustaining at this point.
Sterling’s head turned slightly. I felt the shift of his jaw against my shoulder, the stubble rough against my skin. “How?” he asked.
“He always knows.” I shrugged, which was difficult with Sterling’s arm across me, but I managed.
“It’s one of his most annoying qualities.
He has a gift for it. Walking into rooms and immediately identifying which emotional landmine has recently detonated.
Very useful in foster care. Extremely irritating in daily life. ”
Sterling went quiet, which was not empty but full, like silence was just words he hadn’t decided to spend yet. “Does he know about tonight specifically,” Sterling asked, flat, “or generally?”
“Generally.” I traced a line along Sterling’s forearm with my fingertip, following the muscle there, the topography of a man built for endurance. “Tonight was my idea. He’s aware I had an idea. The specifics were—” I paused. “Flexible.”
Sterling’s arm tightened across my middle. Not much. Just enough that I felt it, the particular pressure of a man who had just processed something and was deciding how he felt about it. “You two planned this,” he said.
“We’ve been planning it since approximately the second week after we met you,” I said. “Possibly the first. The timeline gets fuzzy. There was a lot of staring involved. Mostly you staring at things that weren’t us and pretending you weren’t staring at us.”
“That’s unsettling.”
“It’s romantic,” I insisted.
“Those aren’t the same thing.”
“For you and Mitch they are, which is very funny.” I grinned at the ceiling.
“You should see the way he looks at you when you’re not looking.
It’s the same face he makes when he finds a tool he’s been missing for three days.
Pure, undiluted satisfaction, with a side of ‘I told you so’ that he hasn’t actually said out loud yet but is absolutely saving for the right moment. ”
Sterling went quiet for another beat. His breathing had settled into the slow, even rhythm that meant he was thinking, and Sterling thinking was a process I had learned to respect because it usually ended with him being right about something I hadn’t considered, which was irritating and useful in equal measure.
“He’s going to be insufferable tomorrow,” Sterling said.
“Absolutely,” I said. “He’s going to be so smug you’ll be able to see it from the east pasture.
He’ll make eye contact over the coffee pot and you’ll know, immediately, that he knows, and he knows that you know he knows, and the knowing will be mutual and unbearable for approximately eight hours, after which he’ll make a joke about fence posts and you’ll pretend to be annoyed and nobody will be fooled. ”
“I’m not looking forward to that.”
“Yes, you are.”
Sterling exhaled. Slow and almost amused, the breath warm against my shoulder, and I felt the vibration of it travel through his chest into mine, and the sensation landed somewhere behind my sternum and stayed there, warm and specific and entirely its own thing.
He didn’t move his arm.
I closed my eyes and let myself have this: the warmth of him, the weight of his arm across my middle, the particular reality of Sterling Callahan choosing this.
Choosing us.
One quiet night at a time, which was how Sterling did everything—in increments, measured, each decision standing on the one before it until the structure was sound enough to hold weight.
I stored it. Added it to the collection.
The cinnamon rolls Mitch had stolen. The almost-smile at the corner of Sterling’s mouth when the joke landed.
The way Sterling’s hand had found mine on the blanket in the dark and held on like he was afraid I might let go.
The sound he’d made when he came, low and rough against my skin, a confession spent carefully the way Sterling spent everything that mattered.
This was the best thing in the collection so far. Not because it was perfect—though it had been, objectively, extremely good—but because perfection wasn’t the point.
The point was Sterling’s arm across my middle, not moving, and the wood stove ticking, and the bunkhouse holding us the way it had been holding people since before any of us arrived, steady and patient and entirely unconcerned with whatever came next.
I knew what came next. Mitch’s smugness. Sterling’s irritation, performed and not entirely genuine. The security threat still breathing on the perimeter, waiting for its moment. The cut fence, the boot prints, the dark truck on the county road with windows too tinted to see through.
All of it waiting. All of it real.
And Sterling’s arm stayed where it was, warm and certain, and for tonight, that was enough.