Page 189 of Pucked Around and Found Out

I take my tea and my snack, lower myself into the armchair in the corner of the nursery doorway and watch. I have learned, and this is genuine, hard-won wisdom, that there is exactly one correct response to Xaden Devlin being told he is wrong about something and it is to say nothing and wait.

Cas does not have this wisdom. Cas has a different and equally valid approach, which is to simply be correct at full volume until Xaden's pride catches up with his intelligence.

“Give me the fucking Allen key,” Cas says, holding out his hand.

“Fuck off.”

“Xaden.”

“I'm not giving you the Allen key, asshole.”

“The baby needs to be able to open the drawers⁠—”

“The baby isn’t even born yet, Caspian. The baby does not currently require access to a functioning fucking drawer⁠—”

“Give. Me. The. Allen. Key.”

I eat a biscuit.

There is a long silence from the nursery. Then the particular sound of something being taken apart with aggressive precision. Then silence. Then the careful, methodical sound of something being put back together correctly.

Cas emerges from the doorway, brushing sawdust off his hands with the expression of a man who has won something and is being extremely mature about it. He sees me in the armchair. He sees the biscuits.

“Don't say it,” I tell him.

“I wasn't going to say anything.”

“You had a whole face.”

“I don't have a face.” He drops into the chair across from me. “I have a look of quiet satisfaction. There's a difference.”

From the nursery. “I can fucking hear you!”

Cas raises his eyebrows at me. I raise mine back. We eat biscuits in companionable silence.

Twenty minutes later Xaden appears in the doorway and leans against the frame with his arms crossed and the specific expression he wears when something has been fully assembled correctly and he wants credit for it.

“Done,” he announces.

Cas and I both look at the doorway behind him. The wardrobe is pristine. All drawers opening in the correct direction. I look at Xaden. He looks back at me with the expression of a man who will never in a thousand years admit that Caspian Vought rebuilt what he put together.

“It looks great,” I say.

He nods once.

“All by yourself?” Cas asks.

“Don't fucking push it, Vought,” Xaden snarls and shoots him an ice-cold glare.

He makes coffee wrong.

He has been making coffee wrong for four months and I have not said a single word about it because the alternative—telling him and having him do it correctly from that point forward—means losing one of the very few things about Xaden Devlin that is genuinely, endearingly, completely human.

He puts the grounds in before the water.

Every time. Without fail. With the absolute conviction of a man who has never once considered that there might be a different way to do it and would not care if you told him.

The result is a coffee that is approximately twice as strong as it should be and requires the kind of preparation most people reserve for shots of something alcoholic. Cas made the mistake of trying it the first week, went very still, and quietly put the mug down and left the kitchen without comment. Cas, who can eat anything and has done things with a knife that still gives me complicated feelings, looked at Xaden's coffee and chose silence.