I turned. Not quickly. Not sharply. Just turned and looked at him, my face arranged in the expression I’d been perfecting since we were nine—pleasant, patient, and completely immovable.
The Look.
Mitch held my gaze for approximately two seconds. Then his mouth twitched, and he pushed back from the table. “Fine. Jesus.” His eyes rolled dramatically. “You and your table-based fascism.”
“You love my table-based fascism.”
“I tolerate it. There’s a difference.”
He moved to the cabinet and pulled down three mugs without asking where they were. He’d known where they were since the second day we lived here. I slid the butter dish across the counter to the spot where his hand would land when he turned around, and his hand landed there exactly on cue, and hepicked up the butter without breaking stride and carried it to the table.
That was how it worked. That had always been how it worked. Mitch knowing where the mugs lived. Me knowing where his hand would be. The whole choreography of two people who had shared space since before either of us could remember, who had learned to read each other’s movements the way other people learned to read road signs—automatically, without conscious effort, because the alternative was bumping into each other in hallways too narrow for two growing boys and learning to take up less space than we were entitled to.
I watched him set the table. Three plates. Three forks. Three knives arranged with the blades turned inward because that was how I liked them, and Mitch had noticed that on day three and never once teased me about it, which was maybe the most telling thing about my brother—he noticed everything, and he only teased about the things that didn’t matter.
The gratitude hit me then, the way it did sometimes in quiet moments: a warm, heavy wave that started behind my sternum and moved outward. Not doing this alone. Not cooking in a dark kitchen at five in the morning with no one to slide the butter dish to. Not wanting Sterling Callahan with no one to look at across a table and know, without saying it, that the wanting was mutual and complicated and worth the risk.
Mitch caught me looking. His eyes—hazel, shifting to gold in the stove light—held mine for a beat, and something passed between us that didn’t need words. He knew. Of course, he knew. He’d known before I did, probably.
“Eggs are ready,” I said.
“I’m aware. I’ve been smelling them for approximately six minutes, which is a form of torture I’m pretty sure is banned by the Geneva Convention.”
“It builds character.”
“My character is already built. It’s magnificent. Ask anyone.”
“Ask who? The rooster? Because he’s the only one up.”
“That rooster loves me. We have an understanding.”
I turned back to the range, smiling at the skillet, and lifted the eggs onto the waiting plates. The toast was next. I dropped four slices into the cast-iron pan—no toaster in the bunkhouse, just the range and the skillet and the patience required to make toast without burning your fingerprints off—and reached for the coffee pot.
And then the air in the kitchen changed.
Not the temperature. Not the light. Something subtler, a shift in the quality of the silence, like the room had taken a breath and held it. I knew what it was before I turned around. I’d felt it enough times by now to recognize the weight of it—the way the space rearranged itself when Sterling Callahan walked into it.
He was in the doorway. Dressed, hat on, jaw set. Moving at what looked like seventy percent and performing a hundred, the way he did everything. His dark green eyes swept the kitchen once, cataloguing, and landed on the table—eggs, bacon, toast in progress, coffee already poured into three mugs—and something crossed his face.
Brief. Unguarded. Not quite surprise and not quite longing, but something adjacent to both, something warm and startled and immediately, visibly regretted.
I saw it. I’d been studying Sterling long enough to read what happened in the half-second before the walls went up, and this—this was the clearest one yet.
His eyes found mine. The walls locked into place. His voice, when it came, was steady and low. “Morning.”
I smiled. Just a little. Just enough.
“Morning,” I said, and turned back to the toast like my heart wasn’t doing something complicated behind my ribs. “Sit down. It’s ready.”
Sterling stood in the doorway for a beat longer than strictly necessary. His eyes moved over the table—eggs, bacon, the toast I was sliding onto a plate, coffee steaming in three mugs—and something crossed his face.
Brief.
Unguarded.
Not quite surprise and not quite longing, but something warm and startled, like a man who had walked into a room expecting empty countertops and found instead that someone had been thinking about him.
Then the flat green gaze locked back down. The jaw set. The performance of a hundred resumed, despite the leg I could see he was favoring, the stiffness in his right hip that he was trying very hard not to let anyone notice.
