“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
Sterling’s jaw worked. The muscle jumped once, hard. “Don’t do the thing where you tell me what I’m feeling.”
“I’m not telling you what you’re feeling. I’m confirming what’s already on your face.”
“My face isn’t doing anything.”
Caleb, eyes still closed: “Your face is doing everything.”
“You’re not even looking at me.”
“I have it memorized.”
Sterling opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at me for a long beat with the dark green gaze doing the reading thing—the full tactical assessment, the focus he brought to situations that required precision—and then he said, quiet and flat and completely unguarded: “Yeah.”
Just that. One syllable. Load-bearing.
I grinned so wide it probably looked unhinged and did not care even slightly. The kind of grin that took over my whole face and carried no apology for how much joy it contained, and Sterling held my gaze through it, which was its own kind of courage.
Caleb opened one eye. “I have been thinking about breakfast since approximately four in the morning, and someone needs to go downstairs and make it.”
“I made coffee,” I said. “That’s my contribution.”
“Coffee is not breakfast.”
“It’s the foundation of breakfast.”
“The foundation of breakfast is eggs.” Caleb looked at Sterling. The look was warm and entirely without subtlety, the expression Caleb deployed when he had decided something was happening and the universe was welcome to adjust accordingly.
Sterling set his mug on the nightstand. The left one. His one. He did it with the deliberate economy he brought to everything, and then he said, without inflection, “I’ll make eggs.”
The room went completely still.
I looked at Caleb. Caleb looked at me. Sterling sat between us like a man who had announced the weather and was mildly confused by the atmospheric response.
“Sorry?” I said.
Sterling’s jaw tightened. Slightly defensive. “I know how to make eggs.”
“We know that,” Caleb said. His voice had gone very quiet. “I’m processing.”
“It’s not a complicated offer.”
“It’s not the eggs that are complicated,” I said.
Sterling looked at me. “Then what’s complicated.”
“The fact that you just volunteered to cook breakfast in our kitchen in our house on a Tuesday morning like it’s a thing you do.”
“It is a thing I do now.”
“Is it? I asked.”
“I said it, didn’t I.”
“You say a lot of things.”
