Tristan padded in, hair damp and shirt buttoned unevenly. “Is there any coffee left, or has Matt had it all?” he asked, yawning in the middle of his question.
Colby pushed Tristan’s filled mug across the table. Tristan blinked at it. Then at him. “You’re up. And awake.”
Colby tried not to smile. He suspected he failed.
Chaos butted the door.
“Tristan,” Matt said tiredly. “Your goat.”
“Right,” Tristan muttered. “Better see to the demon before she eats through the glass. Though I’d like to know why they’re never my goats when Jason does something delicious with their cheese but only when they’re misbehaving.”
“Life sucks,” Jesse pointed out.
It didn’t, Colby thought. Not anymore. It really, really didn’t.
* **
Tristan parked outside a diner with a faded red awning.
“Huh,” he said, looking around himself as he climbed out of the car. “I guess this is where it all started.” He drew in a sharp, shocked breath. “If Nico hadn’t been here that night, I’d never have met you,” he blurted, looking stunned by the realization.
Colby was still trying to work out how to answer that—hell, how he evenfeltabout that—when Tristan spoke again.
“Come on,” he said. “I want to introduce you to Sam.”
Sam owned and ran the diner, and turned out to be a no-nonsense woman with auburn hair, somewhere in her forties, whose face lit up when Tristan walked in. Colby liked her for that alone.
“This,” Tristan said to her, with the air of a magician about to pull a rabbit out of his hat, “is Colby.” He paused, like the next words deserved their own spotlight. “He’s my mate.” The words rang out, clear and proud, and his eyes sparkled with joy.
Colby tried to smile, nervous because he knew Sam was important to Tristan.
“In that case, c’mere,” Sam said, and pulled Colby into a hug. “You’re family,” she told him.
Despite the fact she’d touched him, had taken him by surprise, he didn’t feel threatened. Maybe because she was about a foot shorter than him, or maybe because he wasn’t going to spend his entire life in fear anymore. He didn’t know. He just knew it feltgood.
“Jason works in the kitchen and—oh, hey, Riley!” Tristan called as Riley appeared through a swing door.
Riley sketched a salute at them on his way to customers at the other end of the diner.
It felt good to come somewhere and have it full of people he knew. People who were actually pleased to see him.
* **
The sidewalk outside the outfitters was cracked and sun-bleached. He stood with Tristan just outside the shop, hands in his pockets, watching the town go about its slow, easy business.
“So, I was thinking,” Tristan said, when he had a rare moment of not being hailed by passersby. “Maybe…” He hesitated so long that Colby wanted to reach for his hand but stopped himself, not sure how that would go down in town.
“Maybe?” he asked encouragingly.
Tristan’s eyes flicked up to his from the sidewalk. “Would you want to come and meet my mom? She’s not clean,” he added hastily. “So I don’t know… I never know how she’ll be.”
“I’d love to,” Colby said, and he meant it. He was in no place to judge anyone for choices they made or choices they’d had taken from them, and what mattered was that Tristan loved her.
Tristan smiled at him, his eyes glowing with happiness, before his attention was claimed by someone calling out to him from across the street. Something about a busted fence post and a bull.
As Tristan nodded enthusiastically at the lengthy story, Colby thought about his own parents, for the first time in a while. They weren’t the closest family—he’d never really known his dad, who was almost always on deployment—but three years without contact was… Well, even for them, it was a while. It was something he’d have to think about, but maybe not yet. Like he’d said to Tristan, one step at a time.
A sheriff’s department cruiser pulled up across the street, and a familiar figure climbed out.
