~ Mitch ~
I woke to pale gold through a window I hadn’t paid for.
The east-facing one. Caleb’s idea, Caleb’s design, Caleb’s specific instruction to the framing crew delivered with the firm politeness of a man who had never raised his voice in his life and didn’t need to.
I’d watched him measure it twice with a tape measure and argue with Macon about the header beam for fifteen minutes, and the window was exactly where it should be—south corner, angled to catch the first light, wide enough for a man to sit beside with a tactical document and the expression he usually wore when he was pretending not to enjoy the morning.
Sterling lay between us, arm heavy across my wrist, breathing slow and even in a way that told me the three hours of sleep he’d managed were actually sleep and not the alert doze he did in the field.
On his other side, Caleb was curled tight, one hand pressed against Sterling’s ribs, making small contented sounds into the pillow that weren’t quite words and didn’t need to be.
The weight in my chest was enormous. Physical. The kind that pressed against my sternum like something with hands and intent, and I stared at the ceiling and tried to breathe through it the way you breathe through anything that’s too big to hold all at once.
Coffee. Coffee was the responsible move. Before I did something embarrassing like say it out loud, or worse, wake both of them up to tell them about the feeling, which would be very Mitch of me and very unwelcome at five-forty in the morning.
I slid out from under Sterling’s arm with the precision of a man who had spent twenty-four years extracting himself from shared beds without waking his brother. Three steps. Four steps.My hand was on the doorknob when a voice came from the bed, low and flat and entirely awake.
“You’re doing the thing where you think loudly.”
I turned. Sterling hadn’t moved. Eyes closed, face relaxed against the pillow, the same position he’d been in three seconds ago. Except his mouth was moving, which was new information.
“I’m getting coffee,” I said.
“It’s five-forty in the morning.”
“That’s when coffee happens.”
Three seconds of silence. I counted them because I’d learned to—Sterling’s version of a decision tree, the tactical pause where he weighed options against dignity and arrived at the one that cost him least. One. Two. Three.
“I take it black.”
The words landed flat and clean, delivered without inflection and carrying the weight of something considerably larger than a coffee preference.
I grinned in the bedroom doorway and carried that grin all the way downstairs, because Sterling had just asked for coffee like a man who intended to still be there when it arrived, and I was going to be insufferably smug about it for the rest of my natural life and probably several afterlives if they existed.
The kitchen was Caleb’s design triumph and also, privately, the reason I’d stopped arguing about counter space entirely. The counters ran along three walls in a U-shape, deep enough to knead bread on and wide enough to hold every pot Caleb owned simultaneously, which he had tested twice and documented both times.
The cabinets were solid maple, unfinished, the color of fresh honey. The sink was deep and cast iron and had cost more than my first truck, and I no longer had an opinion about that because watching Caleb wash vegetables in it with the satisfaction he brought to the task had converted me completely.
I found the mugs without looking. Three of them, clay-brown and identical, sitting on the shelf above the coffee maker where Caleb had arranged them in descending size the day we moved in, which was both efficient and slightly unhinged.
The coffee maker gurgled to life under my hand, and the smell filled the kitchen the way it was supposed to—rich, acidic, the scent of a morning that belonged to me and not to a social worker or a landlord or a man who had decided I was inconvenient.
The carafe hadn’t finished filling when Caleb appeared in the doorway. Hair completely wrecked. Eyes soft with sleep and bright with something that looked suspiciously like victory.
He was wearing one of Sterling’s shirts—the gray one, the soft one that hit him mid-thigh and did things to the outline of his belly that made my chest do that thing again, the warm one.
He looked so thoroughly pleased with himself that I had to look at the coffee maker.
He crossed the kitchen and kissed me on the cheek. Warm. Easy. The kind of kiss that cost nothing and gave back considerably more than it should have.
Then he stole the first mug the moment the carafe was full enough to pour.
“That was Sterling’s,” I said.
“Sterling can wait.”
“Sterling is going to have opinions about that.”
