“I’m aware.” Caleb poured with the steady hand of a man who had never once in his life been intimidated by Sterling’s opinions. “I’m prepared to manage the situation.”
“You’re going to hand him a mug and smile at him and he’s going to forget he was annoyed.”
“That’s the management strategy, yes.”
“That’s not management, that’s manipulation.”
“It’s affectionate manipulation. Which is different.”
“I love you.”
“I know.” He took both mugs—his stolen one and the second pour—and headed for the stairs with the serene confidence of a man who had already won every argument he was about to have and was extremely pleased about it.
I followed with the third mug. Leaned in the bedroom doorway and watched.
Caleb set a mug on the left nightstand. The left side. The side he had decided belonged to Sterling while the walls were still studs and the plumbing was still exposed, announced to me with the gravity of a man filing a legal document. The left side is Sterling’s. The right side is ours. That’s the system.
I had not argued. Some systems were worth the investment.
Sterling sat up. Pushed his hair back with one hand—the gesture he did when he was transitioning from horizontal to vertical and needed his brain to catch up—and looked at the mug, then at Caleb.
His expression did the thing it does when something good has happened and he hasn’t worked out how to absorb it: the slight crease beside his left eye, the firm set of his jaw holding back whatever’s behind it, the warm bewilderment of a man who had spent twenty years building walls and was discovering that the people on the other side of them kept handing him coffee.
Caleb climbed back into bed like this was just what mornings were. Tucked himself against Sterling’s side, mug balanced on his own knee, and took a sip with the air of a man who had absolutely not stolen the first pour and would not be acknowledging it.
“It’s good,” Sterling said.
“I know,” Caleb said.
“You took the first mug.”
“I did.”
“That was mine.”
“You couldn’t have known that. The mugs are identical.”
“I can tell by the temperature.”
“That’s not a real thing,” Caleb protested.
“It’s absolutely a real thing.”
I raised my own mug from the doorway. “He’s been here one night and he’s already arguing about mug temperature.” I took a sip, held Sterling’s dark green gaze over the rim, and said it like it was weather. “He’s home.”
Sterling looked at me. His mouth did the thing—the small stubborn warmth breaking through, spreading from the crease beside his left eye to the whole left side of his face, landing in my chest with the clean tactical certainty of something I had been waiting for since the first week.
I grinned back. Widely. Without apology.
The morning light thickened through the east-facing window, painting gold stripes across the rumpled sheets and Sterling’s bare shoulders and the two mugs sitting on nightstands in a house that was actually ours, and the weight in my chest settled into something I could carry.
Something permanent.
Something that smelled like coffee and pine soap and whatever Caleb had baked yesterday, and I was going to be insufferable about it for the rest of my natural life, and Sterling was going to pretend to be annoyed, and he wouldn’t be, not really, and I was already looking forward to it.
We ended up back in bed because that’s where the coffee was and also because Sterling’s bare shoulders looked better in morning light than they had any right to, and I was a man with priorities.
Sterling sat against the headboard, mug balanced on one knee, the sheet pulled low across his hips in a way that was either deliberate or extremely convenient.
