I was not going to stop being insufferable about this. Not ever. Not for one second of one Tuesday in one house that was actually ours, and I was not even slightly sorry about it.
I went downstairs because the smell of eggs cooking was doing things to my stomach that bordered on indecent, and also because I wanted to be in the room where Sterling was, which was a want I had stopped pretending was complicated somewhere around week three of his absence.
Sterling stood at the range in yesterday’s jeans and nothing else, hair still pushed back from sleep, working the eggs with the same focused efficiency he applied to everything that mattered. He had found the salt. He had found the pepper.
He had somehow located the specific cast-iron pan Caleb used for eggs—the small one with the rounded edges that I hadbeen unable to find on multiple occasions despite it living in the same cabinet it had always lived in—and he was using it correctly, which was both impressive and mildly irritating.
I leaned in the door frame and watched. The morning light caught the line of his shoulders, the spread of muscle that mapped a career I understood in theory and would never fully comprehend, and I let myself look because I was allowed to now.
“Stop looming,” Sterling said without turning around.
“I’m not looming. I’m appreciating.”
“Appreciate from a chair.”
I pulled out a chair and sat in it backwards, arms crossed over the top rail, chin resting on my forearms. Sterling slid the spatula under the eggs with a flick of his wrist that said he’d done this nine thousand times and would do it nine thousand more.
“You’re still doing it,” he said.
“I’m sitting down.”
“You’re doing the thing where you look at me.”
“I’m always going to look at you.”
Sterling went quiet for a beat. The eggs hit the plate with a soft sound, golden and exactly right, and he set the plate on the counter and said, still not turning: “I know.”
He said it the same way I had said it upstairs. Flat. Direct.
I had to look at the table for a second because my face was doing something I’d rather Sterling not clock before I was ready, which was approximately never, but the never had gotten more complicated since Sterling started making eggs in our kitchen on a Tuesday morning.
Caleb came downstairs. His hair was combed now, or something adjacent to combed, and he’d exchanged Sterling’s shirt for one of his own that actually fit, which was its own kind of disappointment.
He kissed Sterling on the shoulder as he passed—brief, warm, the particular casual intimacy that cost nothing and gaveback considerably more—and then we were all at the table, elbows close, Sterling’s knee touching Caleb’s under the wood and neither of them moving it.
I ate two servings. Told Sterling they were good, because they were, objectively, the kind of eggs that made you reconsider your relationship with morning.
“I know,” Sterling said.
“You’re not supposed to say that.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“It’s immodest.”
“The eggs are good. That’s a fact, not a boast.”
Caleb nodded. “He’s right. They are good.”
“I just said they were good.”
“Sterling said it with more authority.”
“I said it first.”
“Timing isn’t everything.”
Sterling took another bite. Chewed. Swallowed. Set his fork down with the deliberate economy he brought to everything, and said, flat: “The eggs needed more salt.”
