I looked at the ceiling. The exposed beams, the knots in the pine, and the pattern of shadows the single bulb threw across the wood.
I did not have the energy to close the door. My leg hurt. My body was running on reserves that had been depleted somewhere over the Atlantic, and the coffee had worn off, and the simple fact of being horizontal after fourteen hours of travel had hit me like a tranquilizer dart.
But if I was honest with myself—and I was always honest with myself, it was one of my least convenient qualities—it wasn’t just the energy.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
The admission sat in my chest like something with weight. Not a wound. Not a threat. Something quieter and more persistent, the kind of thing that didn’t announce itself with pain or urgency but simply existed, taking up space, refusing to be filed under “irrelevant” or “later” or “never.”
I closed my eyes. The bunkhouse creaked. The wind pushed at the east door. Through the wall, someone—Caleb, probably—sighed in his sleep, a soft, unconscious sound that carried no meaning and somehow meant everything.
I left the door open. Just for tonight. Just because I was tired, and the leg hurt, and closing it would require more effort than I had in reserve.
Tomorrow, I told myself. Tomorrow I would close it. I would reassess. I would remember who I was and what I did and why two men with hazel eyes and a flannel shirt had no businesstaking up residence in a part of my head that was supposed to be empty.
Tomorrow.
The ceiling didn’t answer. The bunkhouse didn’t care. Somewhere, Mitch Pruitt snored, and the sound of it was familiar in a way that made no sense at all, and I lay there in the dark and listened to the silence of a door staying open because the man on the other side of it had decided, for once, not to fight.
Chapter Two
~ Mitch ~
I lay there in the dark with my eyes wide open and the ceiling about two inches from my nose, which was exactly how close it had been every night for the past four months, and yet somehow tonight it felt closer. Like the whole bunkhouse had shrunk by a factor of Sterling Callahan.
The wood stove ticked somewhere downstairs. A cold draft nudged the east-facing door in its frame, the hinges giving a soft, familiar groan that I’d stopped hearing three weeks into living here.
Outside, the wind had picked up off the pasture, pushing at the windows with the insistence of February in Montana, which was the meteorological equivalent of someone knocking on your door at three in the morning and refusing to take no for an answer.
Beside me, Caleb was asleep. Or close enough. One arm flung out, fingers loosely curled against the sheet, his breathing slow and even in that way that meant he’d actually made it past the threshold. His face was turned toward me, younger in the dark, the careful brightness he carried during daylight hours gone soft and unguarded. I could make out the line of his jaw, the curve of his shoulder under the blanket, the copper glint in his hair where the last thin light from the window caught it.
I was not close to asleep. Not even close. My brain was running the evening back through my head in order, like a man reviewing footage from a security camera, looking for the moment everything went sideways.
Sterling’s truck on the gravel. I’d heard it before I saw it—the growl of the engine, diesel and something heavier underneath, a sound that didn’t belong to anyone else on this ranch.
I’d been standing at the kitchen sink, hands in dishwater, and my body had recognized the sound before my brain did, which was a problem because my brain was supposed to be in charge of things like that. My hands had gone still in the soapy water. Caleb, drying plates beside me, had gone still too. We hadn’t looked at each other. We hadn’t needed to.
Then the door. Sterling standing in it with a bag on his shoulder and a leg he was carrying like a personal insult, like the leg had betrayed him personally and he was considering court-martialing it.
Dark green eyes that registered everything and gave back nothing. That jaw. That fucking jaw, square and set and carrying a shadow of stubble that looked like it had been applied with a ruler.
And then the flannel.
My flannel. Red and black plaid, worn soft at the elbows from four months of me wearing it while doing everything from fixing fence posts to sitting on the porch steps with a beer, watching the light go out of the sky over Black Butte. I’d left it on the chair. His chair. The one at the head of the table with the specific ass-groove in it that I’d been sitting in for four months because nobody had told me not to and because, frankly, it was the best seat in the house.
He’d lifted it off the chair without a word. Without a glance. His hand had reached for it before his brain had finished the threat assessment, and then he was holding it, feeling the weight of it, and I had watched his face for some sign—irritation, maybe, or the flatness that meant he was filing something under “problem”—and had gotten nothing. Nothing at all. Just the movement of his hand, automatic as breathing, hanging the flannel on the hook by the door where it belonged.
Where all outerwear belonged. Because that was the rule.
The flannel had sat there all evening. Red and black plaid against the dark wood of the wall, like a flag planted in territory. I’d looked at it approximately seventeen times during dinner.
Caleb had caught me looking at it the twelfth time and raised an eyebrow, and I’d raised one back, and neither of us had said anything because what was there to say?
Sterling Callahan had moved a piece of clothing from point A to point B, and I was acting like he’d rearranged the furniture of my internal organs.
My thumb drummed a slow, irregular beat against the mattress. One-two. Pause. One-two-three. Pause. One.
The coffee.
