Ten forty-seven.
I stare at the screen for a second.
Lying here in the quiet with the warmth of last night still sitting somewhere in my chest, I find I can’t manufacture the guilt. My body needed this. All of it, the sleep, the stillness, the first night in a long time that didn’t feel like something to survive.
There’s a message from Mom on my screen, a reply to last night’s text, sent early this morning, the way she always does.
Mom:So glad you’re safe, darling. Call me when you’re ready. No rush. Love you. X
Smiling at it, I set the phone down. I’ll call her later when the morning has settled, and I have something real to tell her beyond just waking up and not quite sure what day it is.
I grab my pink cotton dressing gown from the chair, pull it on, and that’s when I smell it.
Coffee.
Real coffee, the kind with actual weight to it, not the weak version I’d been making myself at home for weeks, because getting to the good stuff required a level of effort I hadn’t been able to summon. This smells like the kind of coffee that means it.
Following it out of my room and down the hallway, I find Tate at the kitchen window.
He’s just come back from a run, dressed in gray training shorts and a sleeveless jersey that leaves very little to the imagination, a towel draped around his neck, sweat still catching the morning light on his skin. He’s standing at the window with a coffee, looking out at the desert, completely unaware of me. The way he looks in that unguarded moment with his broad shoulders, the tattoos mapping his arms and disappearing under the jersey, and the easy stillness of a man completely at home in his own body makes something flutter low in my stomach that I don’t immediately have a name for.
Then he looks up.
“Morning.”
“Morning.” Stepping into the kitchen, I hope my face isn’t doing anything obvious. “Sorry, I slept in.”
“You needed it.” He slides a mug across the counter toward me.
Wrapping both hands around it, I bring it to my lips.
Oh, that is good coffee.
That is genuinely, unexpectedly, embarrassingly good coffee, and I let myself have a moment with it before I say anything else. “Thank you,” I manage.
He nods once, then turns back toward the window. Tate crosses the kitchen toward me a moment later, and before I havetime to react, he leans over and shakes his head directly above me, sweat flying everywhere.
“Tate!” I shriek, jumping back. “That is disgusting.”
He grins, completely unrepentant.
“Go have a shower,” I say, wiping my face with the back of my hand. “Immediately.”
“It’s just sweat,” he says.
“Go.”
He picks up his coffee, still grinning, and disappears down the hall.
I stand there for a second in the kitchen, slightly damp, trying very hard not to smile.
The desert in the morning light is something else entirely. Last night, it had been dark, vast, and silver, beautiful in that way of things you can sense more than see. But now, in the full Nevada morning, it is extraordinary. The sand is lit up in the late morning light, and the mountains are sharp and clear against a sky so blue it almost doesn’t look real.
Smiling into my coffee, I move to the kitchen island and slide onto one of the stools, tucking one leg beneath me, and let the day settle around me properly for the first time. It’s still in the way Tate’s house always seems to be, not empty still, but full and quiet, the kind that has actual substance to it.
My mind drifts briefly to work, to the branding project sitting in my laptop bag down the hall, the new Veas business looking for a complete graphics overhaul that Trevor had assigned me before I left. I’d told him I needed a couple of days to settle in before I got back to it, and he’d been completely understanding, but I can feel it sitting there at the edge of my morning, patient and waiting.
Tomorrow maybe.
