“Okay?” I asked. The same question Caleb had asked. Simple. Direct. The way Sterling liked things.
He turned his head. Looked at me. His eyes were dark in the low light, the green nearly black, and the expression on his face was one I would carry with me for a very long time—not guarded, not calculated. Just present. Just here. Just Sterling, stripped down to whatever lived underneath all the armor, and what lived there was warmer than I’d given him credit for.
“Okay,” he said. One word. Spent carefully, the way he spent all his words, but this one landed where it was supposed to.
I kissed him. Not the fierce, possessive kiss from the hallway. Something softer. Something that lived in the same neighborhood as the hand on my thigh and the arm around Caleb’s shoulders and the silence of three people who had stopped negotiating with themselves about what they wanted.
He kissed me back. Slow. Certain. Like a man who had decided, somewhere in the last ten minutes, that wanting things was not the tactical liability he’d always thought it was.
Caleb sighed against Sterling’s shoulder. A soft, contented sound, the kind that comes from somewhere behind your sternum when you’ve stopped holding your breath.
Sterling’s arm tightened around him, and I watched his hand find Caleb’s hair, fingers threading through the copper strands with a gentleness that did not match the man’s reputation or his jawline or the gun that lived on his hip.
The three of us sat there on Sterling’s unmade bed, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, and the bunkhouse settled around us—wood stove ticking, wind nudging at the east door, the particular creak of a building that had decided, for tonight at least, to be still.
I looked at the wall. The same wall Sterling had been staring at for two weeks, probably, lying in this same bed, listening to the sounds of two men breathing through the thin pine boards, wondering what it would cost him to want something he couldn’t control.
Turns out it cost less than he thought. Turns out the thing he’d been protecting himself from was the same thing that had been keeping him hollow, and hollow was a poor substitute for whatever this was—this warm, complicated weight of three people who had stopped being careful and started being honest, and found that honesty, against considerable odds, was the thing that fit.
Sterling’s hand found the back of my neck. His thumb traced the line of my jaw, rough and warm, and I turned my face into his palm and kissed the callus at the base of his thumb because it was there and because I could.
“Stay,” Sterling said. Quiet. Not a question. Not quite a command. Something in between—the certainty of a man who had decided what he wanted and was no longer pretending he hadn’t.
“We’re not going anywhere,” I said. Simple. True. The kind of truth that costs nothing to say and everything to mean, and I meant it with both hands.
Caleb’s fingers laced through Sterling’s where they rested on the blanket. Three hands, tangled together, and nobody seemed interested in untangling them.
The bunkhouse creaked. The wind pushed at the east door. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote called, and the soundcarried across the winter pasture and found the three of us sitting on a bed that had never been meant for this many people and was, apparently, exactly the right size.
I leaned my head against Sterling’s shoulder. Felt the solid warmth of him, the steady rhythm of his breathing, and closed my eyes.
Not carefully. Not patiently. Just all the way down, the way I did everything that mattered, and the last thing I registered before sleep found me was the weight of Sterling’s hand in mine and the sound of Caleb breathing beside us, and the certainty that whatever came next, we would figure it out the same way we’d figured out everything else—together, stubborn, and with considerably less arguing than any of us had any right to expect.
Chapter Six
~ Caleb ~
The kitchen was dark when I slipped down the hallway. Not the kind of dark you could push through with a light switch, but the real thing—deep, pre-dawn, the kind of dark that made the cast-iron range look like something that had been there longer than the house itself.
I moved by muscle memory. Left hand on the counter’s edge, right hand finding the skillet where it hung on the open shelving. The flame caught with a soft hiss, the gas warm and mineral in my nose, and the black iron began to warm.
Outside, frost rimmed the pasture fence in silver. Through the east window the world was still mostly asleep—the near field a flat, dark stretch, the far tree line a shadow that hadn’t decided yet what shape it wanted to take. The wood stove ticked from the main room, a steady, patient sound, holding the night’s heat against the March cold.
I cracked an egg one-handed. The shell gave with a clean pop, the yolk sliding whole into the hot skillet. I reached for a second egg. Cracked it. The white hit the iron and sizzled.
Sterling’s boots were still by the door.
I’d checked twice. Once when I came downstairs—my eyes finding them in the gray half-light, the worn leather, the scuffed toe of the right one that caught the light when he walked.
Again when I filled the coffee pot, my head turning without permission toward the mud room where his jacket hung on the hook, the dark canvas with the patched elbow that smelled like pine smoke and something else, something that was just Sterling and lived in the house now whether he meant for it to or not.
I cracked a third egg. My hand paused over the carton.
The memory surfaced bright and sudden: Sterling’s hand coming up to the back of my neck last night. His fingers warmthrough my hair, his palm flat against my skin, the particular pressure of a man who had spent years rationing touch deciding, all at once, to spend some.
I cracked a fourth egg. Looked down at the skillet. Counted. One, two, three, four.
I’d meant to make three.
