His hand stayed in mine. His breath warmed my skin. His weight settled against me, solid and certain, and I drifted toward sleep with the certainty of a man who had arrived somewhere he was meant to be and had no intention of leaving.
The bed held. The night held. The three of us held, and the holding was the whole point.
Chapter Eighteen
~ Mitch ~
I stood in the bunkhouse bathroom doorway at six in the morning with one sock on and my brain doing math it had no business doing this early, watching my brother brace himself over the toilet bowl like the porcelain was the only thing keeping him on the planet.
The tile floor was cold under my bare foot. The small frosted window let in a thin, grudging light that made everything look half-hearted, including Caleb’s complexion, which was doing something between paper and paste that I had been noticing for approximately a week and had decided, incorrectly, not to mention.
He made a sound that belonged in a horror movie and not in my bathroom at six in the morning. I leaned against the door frame. “You’ve been off your food for a week,” I said.
Caleb wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes were closed. “I don’t want to hear whatever you’re about to say.”
“Bone-deep exhaustion that sleep hasn’t touched.”
“Stop.”
“Tuesday’s eggs went back to the kitchen untouched.”
“Mitchell.” There was a warning in his tone.
I ignored it.
“Wednesday’s coffee. You made it, set it down, stared at it for three minutes like it had personally offended you, and walked away.”
Caleb’s shoulders tensed. His fingers were white around the bowl. The wood stove downstairs ticked its steady rhythm, counting seconds the way it counted everything, patient and entirely unconcerned with whether my brother was currently trying to turn his stomach inside out.
I said it anyway. “Pregnancy.”
The word dropped into the small tiled bathroom like something with physical weight. Caleb went completely still. His breathing stopped for one full beat, then two, and then he sat back on his heels and looked up at me with an expression I had seen exactly three times in twenty-four years of shared DNA, and every single time it meant the ground was shifting under his feet and he was deciding whether to stand or fall.
Terror first. Raw, unfiltered, the kind of terror that lived in his eyes before it reached his mouth. Then something else came up behind it—something bright and barely contained, the look of a man whose entire world had just rearranged itself in the space between one heartbeat and the next, and he was not prepared for how much he wanted the new arrangement.
He swallowed. “You can’t just say that.”
“I just did.”
“I could have food poisoning.”
“You’ve had food poisoning. This isn’t food poisoning.”
“How do you know what food poisoning looks like?”
“Because you had it in Helena and threw up on my shoes, and these are different shoes, and also you’re not throwing up on them right now. You’re sitting on the floor having a theological experience about whether you’re allowed to be happy about this.”
Caleb stared at me. His hazel eyes caught the thin light through the frosted window and held it, and the contradiction in his face—the fear and the brightness, wrestling in real time—was something I filed under its own category: Beautiful and Extremely My Problem.
I crossed the bathroom and sat down on the cold tile beside him without ceremony. The tile was objectively miserable. Cold seeped through my jeans immediately, which was not how I had planned to spend my Tuesday morning, but planning had goneout the window approximately two minutes after I heard the retching.
My arm went around his shoulders. Caleb leaned into it, his weight warm against my side, and we sat there in the kind of quiet that only brothers who had shared foster homes and bathrooms and the back seat of a truck for twenty-four years could sit in.
The bunkhouse creaked around us.
Sterling was still asleep on the other side of the wall, which was its own kind of miracle, and I was going to let him sleep through this shocking revelation because some men deserved a good morning before their entire life got turned upside down by twin-induced nausea.
“We should find out for sure before we say anything to anyone,” I said. Quiet. The kind of quiet I deployed approximately twice a year, usually when someone was bleeding or the bills were late or my brother was sitting on a bathroom floor looking at him like the world had just opened up and he wasn’t sure he was allowed to step through.
