Page 51

I head for the kitchen. Beau and Hunter are already there. Beau doesn’t look at me as I enter, like he’s ignoring my very existence. It makes my heart sink. I know I told him to forget about it, but still… he didn’t have to go so far as to forget about me entirely.

Hunter beams at me from across the kitchen.

“Good morning, Goldilocks! Ready for coffee?” Completely normal. Like nothing ever happened.

A little shaken, I nod and head across the kitchen to accept the cup that he’s poured. I’m moving slowly, carefully, trying not to aggravate my sore muscles any more than is absolutely necessary. As I’m taking the cup from Hunter’s hands, Emmett comes into the room. He pauses at the threshold, his eyes scanning all of us, as if he’s reading the room.

His brow furrows slightly. I walk back to the table and carefully pull out the chair, then slowly sit down. He’s watching me move. My hips nearly give out on me as I sit down in the chair.

“Are you okay?” Emmett asks. “You seem sore.”

My face blazes with embarrassment. “Yeah, I’m okay. I think I pulled something during the deer rescue the other day.”

“Hm.” He looks at me for a beat too long, like he doesn’t quite buy that, but he doesn’t say anything else.

Relieved that he’s apparently letting it go, I sip my coffee.

“Everybody ready for breakfast? Eat up. Beau, I’m going to need your help fixing the fence today.” Hunter starts plating up the breakfast scramble he’s been working on, still acting like everything’s normal. It’s surreal.

“Sure,” Beau says.

We all start eating. I didn’t think I’d be able to eat with my nerves in a jumble like this, but as soon as the food is in front of me I realize that I’m absolutely starving. I guess I worked up an appetite last night and just fell asleep before it hit me. The guys eat quickly, talking about the fence and what needs to be done to it.

I watch them while I eat, trying to be subtle about it. They’re different in the daylight. Last night they were two separate forces, two different kinds of want, two different rhythms that I moved between like I was learning a new language in real time. Now they’re just brothers again. Hunter passes the hot sauce without Beau asking for it. Beau refills Hunter’s coffee without looking at the mug. They have this shorthand, this twin thing, where half the conversation happens in grunts and gestures and the other half doesn’t need to happen at all. I keep searching for some trace of last night in the way they interact with each other, some tension, some awkwardness, some sign that sharing a woman between them was unusual or uncomfortable or even noteworthy. There’s nothing. They’re talking about fence posts. They’re arguing about whether zip ties count as a permanent fix. Hunter says no, Beau says everything is temporary if you think about it long enough, and Hunter throws a piece of scrambled egg at him.

I don’t know what to do with that. I’m sitting here with my thighs sore and my heart in knots and they’re throwing food at each other like it’s any other Tuesday. Either they’ve done this before, or they’re both so compartmentalized that last night is already filed away in whatever drawer men keep things they don’t want to look at. I’m not sure which option unsettles me more.

“We need to think about putting up a solid wood fence before spring,” Hunter is saying. “That chain link is going to keep being a problem, especially once the deer start migrating.”

Beau grunts and nods. “Can’t do that in the snow. We can put some red tags on it for now.”

Hunter agrees and they keep talking about the logistics. I silently let their conversation wash over me, bringing a sense of normalcy back to my brain. Everything is fine. Everything is normal. Nothing is the same, but it’s okay for now. They’re going to fix the fence, which means they aren’t going to be here making me nervous. That’s good. That gives me time to process.

After breakfast, Emmett offers to do the dishes so the twins can get started on the fence. Nobody argues and everybody goes on their way. I head for the shower. My muscles are aching, my body smells like sex and dry sweat, and there’s nothing I need more right now than a long, hot shower.

I let the water pour over me for a long, long time before I start washing myself. The heat is unwinding my muscles, relaxing the knots and tension left over from last night. I start scrubbing and that’s when I notice it, the map of last night written all over my skin. There’s a tenderness on my hip where Hunter’s fingers dug in, a faint sting on my ass where Beau’s hand landed, a soreness between my legs that somehow feels like two different kinds of sore, like my body can tell the difference between them even when my brain doesn’t want to. My own hands feel wrong on those places. Too small. Too familiar. Too mine. I wash between my legs carefully and my breath catches, not from pain but from the thing right next to pain that I can’t name. It isn’t shame. It isn’t pride. It’s something that lives in the space between those two words where nobody ever taught me a feeling was allowed to exist.

I wash my hair. I condition it. I stand under the water and try to turn my brain off but it won’t cooperate. I keep trying to file last night into a category and nothing fits. It wasn’t a mistake, because I don’t regret it. It wasn’t a relationship, because we all agreed it wasn’t. It wasn’t meaningless, because my hands are still shaking and my heart is still doing something weird every time I think about the way Hunter whispered good girl against my neck or the way Beau’s voice cracked when he came. I’ve always had a box for everything. Good girl, bad girl, girlfriend, slut, prude, too much, not enough. Other people built those boxes and I climbed into them and stayed. Last night I threw the instructions out and built something I don’t have a label for, and the scariest part isn’t what I did. It’s that I liked who I was while I was doing it. I slowly relax from my neck to my ankles, and even though my lower belly is still sore, I feel ten times better.

When I’ve finished my shower, I head back to the kitchen. Emmett is still here, sitting at the table, drinking his coffee. I tense up, remembering how he looked at me before, knowing that he has questions I haven’t answered to his satisfaction. I look around frantically, looking for anything to focus on that isn’t me and my sore muscles. I find the answer to my problem on the doorframe.

“What are these?” I ask, running my fingers over the notches on the doorframe.

Emmett looks at what I’m talking about. His face doesn’t change, but it never seems to change anyway. “Those are mine,” he says. “My growth chart. My grandpa used to measure me.”

“That’s sweet. Were you here in the summers?”

There’s a flicker of something behind his eyes. “Summers, winters, everything in-between. He built this place and raised me in it. My parents weren’t in the picture.”

His voice drops a little at those last words, and it makes a soft ache spread through my chest. I move toward the table unconsciously. “Where were they?”

He shrugs. “Couldn’t tell you. They couldn’t handle being parents. Or they didn’t want to. I don’t know. Anyway. Grandpa took me in. Taught me everything I know.”

I sit down, watching his face. His eyes go a little misty and distant. I want to reach out and touch his hand, give him some comfort, but I don’t know how well that would be received. So I just sit there, being present.

“What happened?” I ask, leaving the question open. Something obviously happened. Grandpa is nowhere to be found around here, the same way Beau’s cat is just gone. Somehow I doubt that Grandpa was sent to the city for a better life, though.

Emmett sighs. “He died while I was working the wildland fire crew. He left this place behind for me.” He looks around at the walls, at the intricately carved details, as if he’s seeing the place again for the first time. “He would have done anything for me.”