Chapter 10
TEN
MATT
Asleep, Stellan looked younger.
Mouth soft, no tension between his eyebrows, lashes dark against smooth skin. Unguarded. It made me wonder what it’d been like for him, growing up with constant change, trying to fit himself into other people’s homes and lives, always angled to shield a younger brother.
This wasn’t that, right? He wasn’t compressing himself to fit.
I exhaled into a morning that was creeping in through gaps between the blinds. So… Stellan. In my bed.
After last night, after the way he’d sat in my kitchen and offered to shield me if it came to that, I found it hard to look away.
He was on his side, one hand shoved under the pillow.
Bare shoulder and sleep-warm skin, hair a mess.
The sheet had slipped low down his torso, one leg half out from under it, and I just…
kept breathing. Told myself this wasn’t the start of something I would come to regret.
Ten past seven.
“Stellan,” I said, just loud enough to wake him, low enough not to startle.
Nothing but the slow rise and fall of his back. A faint red mark near his throat that my teeth had put there, in a moment when he’d been mine.
Shut that down.
And anyway, he wasn’t a puck I’d pinned to the boards, wasn’t something that I got to own. But he was… here. Because I’d asked, and he’d said yes.
I reached for his shoulder, ran a gentle palm down his arm. He shifted. Blinked awake with a slow intake of air, sleep still clinging to the corners of his eyes.
“Hey,” I said.
For a second, he looked lost, as if he’d surfaced from somewhere deep and strange. Then his gaze focused on me. “Oh. Hi.”
I stifled a laugh. “Not a morning person, then?”
He scrubbed a hand over his face, a tiny frown in the space between his brows. “What time is it?”
“Five minutes until your alarm goes off.”
The frown deepened. “Then why did you wake me up already?”
“Because I thought you might want coffee before you leave. Breakfast, even.”
He rolled onto his back. “Coffee. Yeah.”
“Say please.”
His attention shifted to me, something dark and slightly irritated in his eyes. “Why are you so awake?”
“I’m an athlete. Highly evolved.” I propped myself up on my elbows and grinned at him. “Superior resting heart rate. Sleep to fully operational in under a second.”
“Congratulations on your next endorsement deal.” His mouth tilted into something slightly amused but still tired. No regret there, though. I didn’t think so.
“So,” I said. “Coffee?”
“Yes.” One word that held a world of cranky mornings. He rolled out of bed and—Christ. Filtered morning light slid over his back and ass, the lean length of his legs. He bent to grab his boxer briefs off the floor, nothing intentionally sexy about it. Only made it hit harder.
He glanced over his shoulder. “You’re staring.”
“Yes.”
His smile softened the corners of his eyes. “At least you’re honest.”
In small ways, maybe. Yeah. In ways that didn’t cost me much.
I sent him a smile and got up too, dragged on sweats. “Help yourself to whatever you need in the bathroom. I’ll make coffee.”
“Best thing I’ve heard all day.”
I huffed out a laugh. “Go.”
He went.
I headed for the kitchen and turned on my espresso machine, the apartment quiet around me.
Less so than other mornings, though, grounded in the distant sound of running water, the sense of someone else’s presence.
First time since Talia. She’d liked to stay up later than me, was often still asleep by the time I left for practice.
Toward the end, I’d been glad whenever I woke up alone and didn’t have to deal with her moods, with all the things I couldn’t give her.
Maybe even in the beginning. Maybe I’d been going through the motions even then, and she’d been smart enough to notice it eventually.
Water under the bridge. Because this felt different, less like a weight I had to carry and more like the apartment had expanded around Stellan somehow. Coffee and morning hair and silence turned warm in a way it hadn’t been before.
Some minutes later, Stellan padded into the kitchen on socked feet, curls still wild but no longer waiting for a bird to land. He hovered near the island, shirt only partly buttoned up, eyes a little more awake.
“How do you take your coffee?” I asked, and he glanced from me to my machine, all polished chrome on the counter.
“How much does this thing weigh?”
“About as much as a small car.”
“You bench-press it for fun?”
I shook my head, but a grin tugged at my mouth. “No. But I take orders.”
He shoved his fingers through his hair. “Can you do cappuccino?”
“Sure,” I said, and went to work. Grind, tamp, milk foam. He watched my hands, quiet, and a part of me wanted to comment on how I should have expected his choice—slightly indulgent, a little precious, but considered. Something with texture that took an extra minute of care.
I handed his cup over, and he raised an eyebrow. “Wow. You even did the whole milk foam fern thing.”
“Spent a day watching videos and teaching myself,” I said.
“Yeah, okay. Somehow, I can actually picture that.” He took a sip, smiling up at me around it. “So, espresso for you?”
I paused, halfway through reaching for one of the tiny cups I used for just that. “How did you know?”
“It’s efficient,” he said, just slightly smug. “Strong and severe in a hot way. Very on brand.”
“Love being diagnosed before breakfast.”
“You asked.”
“That I did,” I said.
I readied my own coffee, then joined him at the island. For a moment, we sipped in companionable silence, weak morning sun cutting through clouds that hung low above the water, mist swallowing the view of distant mountains.
“Good coffee,” Stellan said eventually.
I slid him an amused look. “You sound surprised.”
“Not surprised, no. Just…” He tilted his head, eyes thoughtful. “Assembling a more complete picture of you, I guess. Like… makes excellent coffee. Stress paints.”
“Stress paints,” I repeated.
Kind of accurate. It had started exactly like that, years ago, after one especially shitty game and with a hardware store still open, no better plan than buying paint before I punched a wall or picked a fight I’d regret.
He took another sip. “Happy paints, too, possibly. Somewhere to put your feelings. Which, for the record, is much more interesting than journaling.”
My mouth twitched, and I locked it down. “I don’t journal.”
“Hence the giant secret feelings wall.”
A laugh caught in my throat. “Okay, fine. What about you?”
He leaned one elbow on the island, morning sun shifting the color of his eyes to green more than blue. “What about me?”
“What’s the more complete picture of you?” I asked, then wondered if it was too blunt, asking for something I hadn’t earned the right to.
He watched me, face gone silent. Then he glanced away.
“Well,” he said. “You kind of know, right? There’s the customer-facing version—very polished, strong opinions on lapels.
And then there’s the behind-the-scenes version that comes with childhood instability, poor career choices, and a tendency to track my spending more than I have to. ”
It echoed somewhere low in my gut, warm and a little soft. I nodded and held his gaze. “Your parents—I guess they’re not around anymore? You don’t have to answer, but with growing up in the foster system…”
He went quiet around another sip of coffee, gaze growing slightly distant.
It didn’t feel like a lockdown, though, more like he was gathering his thoughts.
“My dad’s dead,” he said then, shrugging in a way that pretended to be casual.
“My mother is… alive, last I heard. Probably looking for her next fix.”
Jesus.
I set my cup down, voice dropping. “Stellan.”
He glanced back at me, one corner of his mouth tugging up in something that wanted to pass for humor. “See? This is why I don’t put it on my cover letter.”
Something in my chest shifted. “I think we’re a little past that,” I said, and he blinked at me as if I’d caught him by surprise, then dipped his chin.
“Yeah. Guess we are.”
“What about the foster system?” I asked, tone gone careful. “Was it bad?”
His fingers tightened slightly around his cup.
“Sometimes.” Another shrug. “Sometimes it was fine, which made the bad ones worse, somehow. But mostly it was just… tiring. New houses, new rules, everyone pretending it’d be fine, it was just until our parents got their act together.
” His mouth thinned, then eased. “You learn fast, you know? How to be pleasant, how to stay out of the way. How to act like you don’t need much of anything. ”
That made too much sense. I wanted to reach for him and didn’t, not sure whether I was still allowed to do it here, with the morning clear and immediate, making last night seem like the shape of a dream.
I leaned against the counter. “How old were you?”
“Old enough to understand what was happening.” He breathed out through his nose. “Young enough to be naive about it, to keep hoping that things would go back to normal.”
I let the words sit for a moment, didn’t rush to fill the gap. Neither did Stellan, quietly propped against the kitchen island with both hands around his cup, expression thoughtful and a little heavy.
When he spoke again, it was slow, hesitation caught in the edges.
“Ronan was too young, at first. Too young to really know what was happening.” Stellan traced his thumb along the rim of his mug, not quite looking at me.
“I mostly remember logistics, weirdly. Pickup times. Making sure he had everything in his backpack. Which sounds bleak, I guess.”
“It doesn’t sound bleak, no.” I paused, unsettled in ways I couldn’t define. Like the morning had veered just slightly to the left, and I didn’t know how to make it stop. Didn’t know if I wanted to. “It sounds like you helped raise him into the person he’s become.”
A small, fleeting smile crossed Stellan’s face. “He tells me I have to stop acting like his dad.”
“Hard to outgrow a habit like that, probably.”