"Was it accurate?"
"It wasaspirational."
Owen's fork pauses midway to his mouth. He sets it down. Looks at Jace with an expression so perfectly flat that it takes me a second to realize it's the driest possible form of disapproval. Jace catches it and his grin widens. Reid shakes his head with the expression he reserves specifically for Jace's stories, the one that looks like patience but is actually affection in disguise.
I watch them. The ease of it, the rhythm they've built across years of shared meals and familiar arguments and the specific, practiced love that doesn't announce itself. Jace fills the room. Reid anchors it. Owen observes it from the edges with a quiet attention that misses nothing.
And I am sitting in the middle of it with Reid's knee against mine and the taste of Owen's cooking on my tongue and Jace making me fight a smile.
The ridge comes back to me. Not as a complete memory, more like a color. The burnt umber of the cedar bark. The cold blue of the sky behind Reid's head. The warm gold of his eyes when he pulled back to look at me, stripped of every careful layer he wears in front of other people. I came apart in his arms and he looked at me like I was already his. Like I had always been.
He held me afterward. Not like something fragile. Like something found.
I glance at him beside me. The silver threading his temples. Those hands around a fork, the same hands that held my face and kissed my name into my skin. Reid doesn't perform tenderness. He justistender, underneath the stillness, underneath the quiet authority, and I felt it on the ridge and I feel it now in the warm pressure of his leg against mine. Asking nothing. Offering everything.
My gaze drifts to Jace before I can stop it. He's gesturing with his fork now, building toward another punchline, auburn curls falling across his forehead. And I think about the kiss that we shared on the porch.
That kiss was different. Not less.
Where Reid is depth, Jace is ignition. The match-strike, the sharp breath before the flame catches. He needles me and pushes me and finds the cracks in the careful architecture I've built and pries them wider, not to hurt but because he is genuinely, infuriatingly interested in what's behind the wall. Every time I snap back at him, his eyes light up like he's been looking for exactly that. He doesn't want the measured version of me. He wants the real, the warmth, the temper. The parts I locked away because the last time I let someone see them, they were used as a weapon against me.
He finds those parts delightful. And something about being wanted for the pieces of myself I tried hardest to bury makes my ribs ache in a way I can't rationalize away.
"Maya."
Owen's voice cuts through both memories at once. Low, measured, arriving without preamble.
I blink. He's standing now, a small bowl in his hands. Roasted beets, sliced thin, drizzled with balsamic.
"I made this for you. You mentioned you liked beets."
I did. Once. A passing comment while putting groceries away.
"Thank you, Owen."
I take the bowl. Our fingers brush, brief, accidental, and the small shock of contact travels up my wrist and invades my chest.
Owen doesn't rush. Doesn't reach. He occupies space with a certainty that makes me feel, against every trained instinct, that I don't have to perform a single thing. He remembers what I say. Acts on what he notices without making it a production, without requiring acknowledgment, without extracting a cost.
His jaw tightens. Barely. Then he turns and goes back to his seat.
Three men. Three completely different palettes. Reid is cadmium blue, deep and steady and immovable. Jace is burnt sienna, all heat and motion. And Owen is raw umber, quiet and warm and the kind of color that makes everything next to it appear more vivid without drawing attention to itself.
I am sitting here painting them in my head like they're a composition.
Stop.
I have no business doing this. I carry enough wreckage to poison every good thing within reach.
I should not be getting involved with anyone. Whatever is growing between me and these men, whatever quiet impossiblething is taking root in this kitchen, I have no right to let it keep growing.
And three men.Three.I can already hear my mother's silence, the specific quality of it. Not disapproval. Worse. The careful blankness of a woman choosing her words. I don't need to add to the list of reasons people whisper my name.
But.
The word sits in my chest. Warm and stubborn.
But what if.
