Sterling opened his mouth. Closed it. His jaw worked. The muscle in his cheek jumped again, and I watched him run the calculation—protocol versus warmth, duty versus want, the arithmetic of a man who had spent twenty years treating his own needs as operational liabilities rather than human necessities—and arrive, visibly, at a conclusion that cost him something and was worth the cost.
“One hour,” he said.
I grinned so wide it probably looked unhinged. The kind of grin that said I told you so without needing the words, and Sterling saw it and did not look away, which from Sterling Callahan was approximately equivalent to anyone else writing poetry.
Caleb, pleasantly, said, “I want it on the record that I was an excellent load-bearing wall.”
“You were a tremendous load-bearing wall,” I said. “World-class. Hall of Fame load-bearing wall behavior. I’m putting you in for a medal.”
Sterling said, with great dignity, “Neither of you are funny.”
“We’re a little funny,” Caleb said.
Sterling looked at the ceiling. The bunkhouse ceiling, pine boards, honey-brown in the lamplight, the same ceiling he’d been staring at since the first week when he’d decided this room was his alone and these walls were his to maintain.
His mouth did the thing. The small stubborn warmth breaking through at three in the morning after an eleven-minute tactical operation, Caleb’s hand still in his, and I watched it happen and felt it land somewhere in my chest that was going to be permanent.
There he was. The man underneath all the armor. Warm and a little wrecked and not going anywhere. Sterling Callahan, allowing himself to be led down a hallway by a man half his size, holding a hand he hadn’t decided to hold, and the contradiction of it—the most controlled man I’d ever met, surrendering to something he couldn’t control—was so perfect it bordered on offensive.
I was completely, irrevocably gone for him. Had been since the first week, when he’d looked at me across a fence post with those flat green eyes and I’d felt something crack open behind my ribs that I hadn’t permitted. Was going to be for a very long time. Possibly forever, though forever was a word I tried not to spend until I was sure I could afford it.
That was not a problem. That was the whole point.
The three of us moved down the hallway toward the bedroom. Sterling still holding Caleb’s hand without havingdecided to, his fingers curled around Caleb’s smaller ones with a gentleness that contradicted every scar on his knuckles.
My shoulder brushed Sterling’s in the narrow hall, warm through fabric, and he didn’t move away. Didn’t create distance. Let the contact happen the way he was learning to let a lot of things happen—in increments, measured, each decision standing on the one before it until the structure was sound enough to hold weight.
The bunkhouse was dark around us. Warm. The wood stove ticking, the pine walls holding the night’s heat against the March cold, and beyond the windows the ranch stretched silver toward the eastern ridge where four contractors were zip-tied on gravel reconsidering several life choices.
None of that mattered half as much as the fact that Sterling was walking down a hallway holding Caleb’s hand with my shoulder against his, and he hadn’t reached for the door once.
The bedroom waited. The bed was too small. Objectively, measurably too small, and we would cram into it anyway because the alternative was distance, and distance was no longer an option any of us were willing to consider.
I smiled at the ceiling. Wide and unguarded, the kind of smile I saved for moments when the victory was real and the winning was mutual, and Sterling caught it from the corner of his eye and didn’t look away, and the warmth of that—Sterling Callahan letting me be happy, and not pretending he didn’t see it—was the best thing in the collection so far.
Almost there.
Chapter Fifteen
~ Caleb ~
I woke at five-thirty to the cast-iron stove ticking warm enough to chase the pre-dawn chill and the smell of pine smoke mingling with fresh coffee. The bunkhouse was quiet. The kind of quiet that meant Sterling was still asleep, which was its own kind of miracle, and I wasn’t about to interrupt it.
The kitchen waited. I moved through it in the half-dark, bare feet on cold floorboards, pulling the coffeepot off the heat before it could boil over. The drip basket still held grounds from yesterday. I dumped them into the compost bucket Mitch had rigged by the back door—he was serious about compost in a way that was genuinely admirable and occasionally annoying—and measured fresh, palm-fulls, no scoop because I knew exactly how much by touch.
Water over grounds. The sound was patient. I set it on the range to percolate and got the skillet heating—the double one, the heavy one with the warped handle that I’d claimed as mine because nobody else seemed to want it, which was their loss.
Eggs from the fridge. Six. Then eight. Then I lost count, cracking them one-handed the way I’d been doing since I was twelve, because sharing a kitchen with Mitch meant you learned to do everything one-handed or you learned to do without.
The yolks held. Amber in the pale gold light that was just starting to brush the east window, turning the mismatched mugs on the open shelving from shadow into something warm.
I hummed. Something tuneless. Something from the radio station Jojo left on in the barn, a country song about roads and leaving that I’d heard so many times I could hum the guitar part without thinking about the words. The words were sad. The guitar part was not. I hummed the guitar part and let the words stay where they were.
The doorway stayed empty. I kept peeking at it anyway, imagining Sterling’s face. The particular set of his jaw when he first walked into a room. The way his eyes did that thing—cataloguing, assessing, the operational part of his brain mapping the space before he decided whether to enter it.
I’d been watching that face for months. Watching him decide, over and over, whether the kitchen was worth entering. Whether the eggs were worth staying for.
The coffee finished. I poured a mug. Left it on the table in front of his usual chair. Black. No cream, no sugar, the way he took it, and the fact that I knew how he took his coffee was something I tried not to examine too closely because examining it made it real, and real was still new enough to be delicate.
