“I’m sitting on the counter.”
“You’re doing a thing while sitting on the counter.”
Mitch lifted his hat. Grinned. The kind of grin that said he’d been waiting for this moment and had prepared remarks. “He’s happy. Happy Caleb is a force of nature and there is no shelter from it. The eggs were Wednesday good, the coffee is perfect, and you,” he pointed at Sterling with his bandaged arm, “are sitting at the table without checking the exits. That’s a Tuesday-through-Sunday good morning in Caleb’s mental chart, and the chart is extremely real.”
I threw the dish towel at him.
He caught it without looking. One hand snapping up, fingers closing around terry cloth, the move so smooth it had to be muscle memory from twenty-four years of me throwing things at him when he got too pleased with himself. He draped it over his face and went back to his hat-tipped repose like nothing had happened.
Sterling watched this exchange with the careful blankness of a man processing data that didn’t fit his existing frameworks. His jaw worked. The muscle in his cheek jumped once, and I watched something shift behind his eyes—the operational assessment giving way to something warmer, something a little bewildered, the look of a man who had spent twenty yearsbuilding walls and was now discovering that the people on the other side of them had brought ladders.
“How long have you two been doing that?” he asked.
I laughed. “Throwing dish towels? Since approximately 1998. There was an incident with a foster mother’s prized ceramic rooster. I’m not proud of it.”
“Not the dish towels,” Sterling said. He swept his hand at the air between the three of us. “The whole thing. The whole—” He stopped. Sterling Callahan, out of words, which was rarer than Sterling Callahan asleep and approximately twice as precious.
Mitch lifted his hat again. “Since approximately the second week you were here the first time.”
Sterling’s eyes narrowed. “That was months ago.”
“Yes.”
“I was only here for two weeks.”
“We work fast,” Mitch said.
Sterling paused. Stared at the ceiling. The pine boards, honey-brown in the morning light, absorbed his gaze the way they absorbed everything—steady, patient, giving back nothing except the particular warmth of wood that had been holding heat for a very long time.
Sterling’s knee pressed against the leg of my empty chair.
He did not move it.
I slid off the counter and crossed the kitchen before Sterling knew what hit him. Three strides. Boots on floorboards, the sound carrying in the warm quiet.
Sterling looked up from whatever he’d been staring at on the ceiling and I was there, my hands on the arms of his chair, leaning down, pressing my lips to his without preamble.
He made a small surprised sound against my mouth. A catch of breath, involuntary, the kind of sound that came from somewhere behind his sternum when the argument was over and the truth had won.
Then he kissed back.
Coffee-warm. Unhurried. His mouth soft in a way that Sterling’s mouth was almost never soft, the stubble rough against my jaw, and his hand came up to the back of my neck like he was making sure I wasn’t going anywhere.
His fingers threaded into my hair, warm and certain, the grip firm without being tight, and I felt the exact moment Sterling Callahan stopped thinking and started feeling.
It was measurable. Quantifiable. The tension in his shoulders draining, his jaw slackening under mine, his breath mingling with my breath across the tabletop that still held the empty plates and the salt shaker and the evidence of a breakfast that three people had shared without anyone leaving.
I pulled back. His eyes stayed closed for an extra second. One full second, maybe two, his lashes dark against his cheeks, his hand still on the back of my neck like he’d forgotten it was there, and I filed that away somewhere permanent. Sterling Callahan, eyes closed, letting something happen to him that he hadn’t planned for.
Worth the wait.
Worth every second of it.
Mitch’s voice came from behind his hat, drawled and delighted, “My turn.”
Sterling’s eyes opened. Dark green, registering everything, giving back the particular flat assessment of a man who had just been kissed and was now being informed there was a queue. “You can wait,” he said.
“I’ve been waiting for months,” Mitch said. He hadn’t moved from his sprawled position, boots on the bench, hat tipped, the picture of a man who believed patience was a virtue he had already demonstrated in excessive quantities. “Months, Sterling. Literal months. I’ve had a count. Caleb knows the number.”
