“I’m not talking to your coffeemaker.”
“Then you’re not getting coffee.”
A pause. Then, so quiet I almost missed it, “Please make coffee. Thank you.”
I dropped my hands from my face and smiled. It hurt. Not the smile itself, but what it meant—that I was already in this, already tangled up in a man who talked to my coffeemaker because I told him to, and the fall was going to be devastating if I hit the ground.
I stood up and walked out of the bedroom.
Gabriel was leaning against the counter with his arms crossed, watching the coffeemaker like it was a structural problem he could solve with patience. He looked up when I appeared, and his gaze moved over me—his shirt on my body, my bare legs, my hair wild from sleep—and something in his expression shifted. Not dramatically. Just a slight softening around his mouth. A breath he took and held for half a second longer than necessary.
“Looks better on you,” he said.
“Everything looks better on me.”
The words came out before I could filter them—pure bravado, the kind of deflection I’d been perfecting since middle school. But Gabriel didn’t laugh. He just looked at me with that steady, unhurried gaze and nodded once, like I’d stated a fact and he was confirming it.
The coffeemaker gurgled and sputtered. I walked over and pulled two mugs from the cabinet—the mismatched ones I’d picked up at a thrift store when I’d first moved in—and set them on the counter. Gabriel’s hand found the small of my back as I reached for the sugar. A light touch, easy, like he’d been doing it for years.
I stiffened. Just barely—a micro-flinch that I covered by reaching higher into the cabinet—but he felt it. His hand stilled. Didn’t pull away, didn’t press harder. Just stilled, waiting.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“I know.”
But he’d noticed. He noticed everything—the way I flinched at loud noises, the way I deflected compliments, the way I’d just gone rigid under a touch that should have felt natural. He was cataloging all of it, filing it away in whatever internal system he used to read people and situations, and the thought of being that known—that seen—by anyone, let alone by this man, made my pulse climb.
I poured the coffee. Added sugar to mine, left his black. Handed him the mug and stepped back, putting the counter between us. Not running. Just getting some breathing room.
Gabriel took the coffee and drank. He didn’t close the distance I’d created. He didn’t ask what was wrong. He just leaned against the counter on his side of the kitchen, drank his coffee, and looked at me with an expression that saidI’m right here whenever you’re ready.
That was the most terrifying thing anyone had ever communicated without speaking.
We drank our coffee in a silence that should have been uncomfortable but wasn’t. The morning light moved across the kitchen floor. Outside, Main Street was waking up—I could hear a truck idling somewhere and the distant bang of a dumpster lid. Normal sounds. Morning sounds. The kind of sounds that meant the world was still turning even though everything had changed.
“I should go check on the shop,” I said finally.
Gabriel nodded. “I’ll walk you down.”
“You don’t have to?—”
“I know.”
He set his mug in the sink and went to get dressed. I stood in my kitchen wearing his shirt, holding my coffee, and I felt the fault line running right through the center of my chest—the fracture between the woman who wanted to let him in and the woman who’d spent her whole life learning that the safest place to stand was alone.
Both of those women were me. I just didn’t know which one was going to win.
8
GABRIEL
Two days. That was how long I got before it started to crack.
Two days of something I didn’t have a word for—something quieter than happiness and steadier than excitement. Two days of Brenna calling me when she was supposed to be sleeping and talking about nothing for twenty minutes. Two days of driving to her apartment after my shift and eating takeout on her couch and falling asleep with her head on my chest and her hand curled into my shirt like she was holding on to something she was afraid would move.
Two days of watching her let me in, one careful inch at a time, while something behind her eyes stayed braced for impact.
I was at Sugar & Pine when the call came in. Not on duty—I’d taken the morning off to help her clear out the kitchen.
