Owen looks up from his screen.
"Fifteen minutes of screen time." He looks at his watch. "Starting from when you opened the laptop." His eyes come back to mine. "I'm watching the clock."
Yes daddyarrives fully formed at the front of my mouth.
I hold it there.
I look at my screen. The fox kit looks back at me, one paw forward, not quite ready to commit to whatever comes next.
I understand entirely how it feels.
9
MAYA
I'm standing at the kitchen window with the mug pressed between my palms, and I've been here long enough that the steam stopped rising. I haven't moved. I don't particularly want to.
Three days. I've been in this house for three days, and the thought of leaving it produces a physical response like the kind of contraction that happens when someone pulls a blanket off you in the cold.
I try to think about it practically. The cabin is still there. My things are still there. There's no real reason I can't go back.
Except that every morning here starts with Reid across from me at the kitchen table while the coffee brews, talking about the day ahead the way people do when they are comfortable with each other. He tells me what he has planned at the wolf center. I tell him what I'm trying to finish for the illustration project.
And the afternoons in Owen's office, both of us at our respective work, the only sound the scratch of my pencil and the occasional measured tap of his keyboard. Sometimes an hourgoes by without either of us speaking. I hadn't understood, until this week, what it felt like to be in a room with someone and have the silence be company instead of pressure. I steal glances at him sometimes without meaning to. He has good hands, careful and deliberate, and occasionally he'll look up and catch me, and his eyes hold mine for a second longer than necessary before he looks back down.
I've started saving those moments. Filing them away in a mental drawer for later.
Dinner is a different energy entirely. Jace brings chaos in the best way. He sits down and immediately the room gets louder without him actually being loud. He asks too many questions, argues with Owen about things that don't matter, and last night he made me laugh so hard I nearly choked on my water. Reid watched from the end of the table with his knowing patience.
Outside, the rising sun is casting white-gold light through the tree line, turning the snow into a surface too bright to look at directly. Reid and Owen are in the clearing beyond the back porch, in the area the men have built up into something that functions as an outdoor gym. Half a tractor tire buried in the frozen ground for box jumps. A TRX strung between two pines. A second tire lying flat in the snow with ropes coiled beside it for drags. Not polished but effective.
Reid and Owen are sparring. Jace went for a run, the way he has every morning since I've been here.
They've been at it a while. I can tell by the quality of their focus, the way they've stopped needing to communicate between exchanges and started reading each other through the rhythm itself. Reid's footwork has gone loose and economical. Owen's counters have gotten sharper. Reid has a couple inches and forty pounds on his nephew, and it doesn't seem to matter much. Owen doesn't try to overpower him. He waits. Reads the combination as it's thrown and rolls left, watches the misswithout expression, and adjusts. Two steps. A shift in his weight. Patient.
The thud of leather on leather carries through the glass.
I notice things I have no business noticing. The flush in Reid's skin from the cold, high across his cheekbones. The specific quality of stillness that comes over Owen when he's choosing his moment, the way his shoulders draw tight in the second before he moves, every muscle in his back visibly loading. The way Reid controls something in himself when he connects. A deliberate pulling of force before impact, the kind of precision that requires more effort than swinging hard.
I take a sip of cold coffee.
I am ogling them. There is no other word for it.
It surprises me. That something in me is still capable of noticing a man's shoulders or the way he moves across cold ground in the early light without my brain immediately filing it under threat assessment. I thought Daniel had taken that too. The way fire ruins everything it burns through.
But here I am. And the thing I feel watching them isn't fear or the careful assessment I've been running on every person I've encountered since Los Angeles. It's simpler than that and more uncomfortable.
Want.
Outside, they stop. Reid says something, low enough that I can't make it out, and Owen nods. They separate, and Reid moves to the wooden tub at the edge of the clearing. I know he filled it before they started, packing snow that has since half-melted, the surface glassy and still in the cold air.
Reid peels off his shirt.
My grip tightens on the mug.
I knew he was built. You can't spend three days in close proximity to a man that size without acknowledging that. But knowing it and watching him in the cold morning light withouta shirt on are two experiences that have nothing to do with each other. His chest is broad and heavy with muscle, dark hair across the pectorals narrowing as it tracks down his stomach.
He strips down to his boxers, drops his clothes on the bench, and steps up to the edge of the tub without hesitation. No preamble. No bracing himself. He steps in.
