Page 34 of Reluctant Bride

He doesn’t answer right away. When I glance back he’s watching me with an expression I can’t fully read, somewhere between hurt and understanding, and I hate that I put it there and hate more that some starving part of me wanted him to argue.

He doesn’t argue. He follows me into the kitchen instead and leans a hip against the counter while I pull the portafilter and tamp the grounds.

“Show me,” he says, when I twist it into the group head.

“You want to learn how to make espresso?”

“I want to know how you like your coffee.” He says it lightly, but there’s nothing light underneath it. I let him stand at my shoulder while I talk him through the tamp and the shot timing, and his phone buzzes against the counter twice while I do it, unanswered both times, and I mark the muscle that jumps in his jaw each time he ignores it.

Halfway through the pour he drifts to the window, and he runs the tree line like other men check a score. Corner to corner, the Corridor gate, the ridge, twenty seconds flat. Then he’s back at my shoulder like he never left, and I let him think I didn’t watch him do it.

Cricket parks herself directly between our feet at the counter, staring up at both of us with the flat, unimpressed judgment of a dog who has clearly seen enough of this marriage already to have opinions about it.

“She thinks we’re ridiculous,” I say.

“She’s not wrong.”

I pull two mugs down while the second shot pulls, and Dawson leans back against the counter beside me in a pair of sweatpants and nothing else, watching me work with the same intense attention he gives everything.

“You’re staring,” I say.

“You’re wearing my shirt and glasses and making me coffee in a kitchen I still can’t quite believe you’re standing in. Forgive me.”

“Don’t get used to it. This is a limited engagement.”

“I’ll take what I can get.”

The way he says it, level on the surface and not underneath, gets under my skin and stays there. I busy myself with the milk instead of looking at him, because looking at him right now feels like standing too close to a ledge.

His phone buzzes a third time. He glances at it, jaw tightening before he sets it face down again without answering.

“Who’s that?”

“Finn.” He says it too casually, and I’ve spent two years learning what his too-casual sounds like. “Wants to know why I missed the group run.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

“I’m going to lie to him.”

This time he answers, phone propped against his ear.

“I overslept.” A pause. “No.” Another pause, longer, and a look crosses his face that sits one door down from panic. “That wasn’t the sound you think it was.” A third pause. “I have a dog, Finn. Dogs make noise.” He glances at me, and I have to press my lips together hard to keep from laughing out loud. “I’m hanging up now.”

He sets the phone down like it personally betrayed him.

“He heard something,” I say.

“He heard nothing.”

“Somebody just got caught by his little brother.”

“I panicked about my dignity. Different category entirely.”

I let myself laugh at that, real and bright, and the line of his shoulders loosens watching me do it, like my laugh is worth more to him than it has any right to be this early in a marriage neither of us signed up for out of love.

He takes the coffee I offer him and doesn’t sit down right away. He just stands there, watching, the way he stood in the truck cab four days ago, right before he asked me to say Cruz’s name a second time and told me what would happen if he said it to the wrong person.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he says. “About last night.”