Page 7 of Ignition Rites

“Some things don’t change.”

“I contain multitudes.” He grins around the toast. “You survived the Cassian pickup okay? He still driving like he’s late to his own funeral?”

Something in my chest tightens at his name, and I hate that Rafe’s easy grin makes it worse instead of better, like he’s accidentally handed me a mirror I didn’t ask to look into.

“He’s…” I search for a word that doesn’t give anything away. “More intense than I remember.”

“That tracks. He gets worse the closer it gets to opener season.” Rafe’s smile doesn’t fully drop, but something underneath it shifts, quick and gone. “Just — pace yourself with him. He’s got a whole thing going on. Older brother, half the time, and the other half — “

He stops himself, which feels more significant than anything he’s said so far.

“Anyway. Welcome to the circus.”

Ash comes in right as Rafe says it, already dressed, keys in hand, moving through the kitchen like a man with somewhere to be and no intention of pretending otherwise. He slows when he sees me, enough that two years of knowing each other should probably account for less of a reaction than it does.

“Morning,” he says, careful in a way that doesn’t match anything else about him — the grease still under one thumbnail, the exhaustion sitting heavy under his eyes like he didn’t sleep. “Didn’t know you came over last night.”

“Late. I still have class this week, so I wasn’t giving up the apartment just to make moving here more dramatic.”

His mouth shifts like he almost understands that too well.

“If you need anything,” he says, “I’m mostly at the shop. Same as always.”

“I remember.”

“Right.”

He pours himself coffee and leaves almost as quickly as he arrived, and I’m left with the uncomfortable sense that I just watched him work very hard not to look at me for longer than was polite. That part is new. He’s never had to work at it before.

“He’s like that,” Rafe says once the door shuts. “Don’t take it personally.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Sure you weren’t.” He says it kindly rather than smugly and steals the last of my toast anyway.

My mother watches all of it from the stove, saying nothing, and when I catch her eye she looks away too quickly — back to the pan, back to the humming, back to whatever song used to mean something simpler than it does now.

“Two weeks,” Rafe says, apropos of nothing, licking butter off his thumb. “Opener. You’ll finally see the part of this family nobody explains at Thanksgiving.”

He catches himself again, second time in five minutes, and covers it with another grin. “You’ll see.”

“See what?”

“You’ll see,” he says again, and this time it doesn’t sound like a tease. It sounds like a promise he’s not sure he’s allowed to make.

I don’t push. I’ve learned in two years that nobody in this house explains anything before they’ve decided I’m ready to hear it.

I find Cassian in the kitchen an hour later, and it takes me a full three seconds to recognize him.

It isn’t that he looks different but that he looks irritated in the completely ordinary way of a man losing an argument with an appliance, and I have never once seen his face do anything that wasn’t composed on purpose.

“Problem?” I ask from the doorway.

He doesn’t turn around right away. “The staff usually handles this.”

“Handles what, exactly?”

“Coffee.” He says it like a confession. “I don’t know how the machine works. I’ve never had to know how the machine works.”