Sterling.
My ribs did something complicated. Not a full clench. A tightening, a rearrangement, like my lungs had decided to take up slightly less space to make room for something else.
The memory was right there, bright and clear as if it had happened five minutes ago instead of nine hours: Sterling’s hand reaching for the coffee mug. The half-second of stillness. His eyes on the dark surface, his face doing that thing—the thing I’d been collecting since the first week, the small shift that meant the walls had come down for exactly one beat before they slammed back up.
He’d taken it. No words. Just reached out and taken it, like a man who had forgotten that receiving something could be that simple.
I laid bacon strips into the skillet. The fat hit the hot iron and started to pop, a rapid, cheerful percussion that filled the quiet kitchen. The coffee was percolating on the back burner, the pot chugging softly to itself, and the first gray seep of dawn was finding the frost-edged window above the sink, turning the frost to silver.
Sterling’s goodnight had been one word.Goodnight. His voice had dropped one register lower than usual, the way it did when he was tired or hurt or—and this was the part that made my ribs do that thing again—when he was being sincere.
The word had landed in the space between us like something with weight, and then the flat green gaze had locked back down, and he’d turned and disappeared into his room, and I’d stood there holding my own empty mug and feeling like I’d been handed something fragile I hadn’t asked for.
I flipped the bacon. The spatula was warm in my hand. Outside, the ranch was still dark, the kind of dark that held its breath before light, and the only sound was the bacon and the coffee and the soft, steady tick of the wood stove in the main room, keeping the February cold at bay.
I’d made the kitchen garden decision three weeks ago. Two raised beds behind the bunkhouse, close enough to the south wall to catch morning sun, far enough from the mud room that the foot traffic wouldn’t compact the soil. I’d measured it. I’d drawn it on the back of a feed receipt. I’d dug the first bed myself, breaking through the frost line with the pickaxe Mitch had brought me for my birthday, and then I’d stopped, because planting something meant staying, and staying meant something I wasn’t ready to say out loud, not even to Mitch.
Not yet.
The bacon needed another flip. I gave it one, and the fat spat back at my wrist, a quick hot sting that I ignored because I’dbeen cooking long enough to know that bacon had opinions and didn’t care about mine.
Wanting Sterling was the largest risk I’d taken since Mitch and I stopped unpacking our bags fast. Since we’d looked at each other one night in our bunkhouse room and agreed, without saying it, that maybe this time we wouldn’t leave the toiletries in their travel case. Maybe this time we’d put the coffee mugs in the cabinet instead of leaving them on the counter.
Small things. The kind of things people did when they weren’t expecting to leave.
I wanted Sterling. The wanting was quiet and fierce and lived in my chest like something with roots, and I was taking it anyway, with both hands, the way I held everything that mattered.
Not dramatically.
Not loudly.
Just steadily, the way I held the skillet handle, the way I held a garden trowel, the way I’d held Mitch’s hand through seventeen different houses and the night our parents died and the three-day stretch when we were eleven and a social worker in Helena had tried to separate us and I had refused to let go of his wrist.
Quietly. With both hands. That was how I did things.
The eggs were next. I cracked two more into the skillet beside the bacon, watched the whites go opaque at the edges, and reached for the pepper grinder without looking because I knew exactly where it lived.
Boots on the stairs. Heavy, unhurried, the specific tread that belonged to one person in this house and only one.
I didn’t turn around. “You slept in your hat again.”
“Good morning to you too.” Mitch dropped into the chair behind me, the wood creaking under his weight. “And I did notsleep in my hat. I put it on with dignity and purpose at five-thirty in the morning.”
“It’s four-forty-five.”
“Then I put it on with dignity and purpose at four-forty-five in the morning. My point stands.”
I could hear the grin in his voice. I’d been hearing that grin since I was five years old, and it still did the same thing to my chest it had always done —a small, warm loosening, like a knot coming untied.
His hand reached past my shoulder and straight into the skillet. I brought the spatula up in one smooth motion and caught his wrist an inch from the bacon.
“Table,” I said. “Now.”
“I’m just quality testing.”
“Set the table and you can quality test all you want.”
“The table is fine where it is.”
