The coffee percolated on the back burner, the pot chugging softly to itself. The eggs whispered in the skillet. I reached for the pepper grinder and nearly knocked over the salt shaker, catching it with my fingertips before it tipped.
My hands were not cooperating today. My hands were remembering things the rest of me was still trying to process, and the disconnect was making breakfast complicated.
Footsteps echoed on the stairs. Heavy, unhurried, the particular tread that belonged to one person in this house and only one.
Mitch appeared in the kitchen doorway with his hat on and his hair doing something sideways underneath it that suggested the hat had gone on before anything else, including consciousness. He crossed to the range in three strides, reached past my shoulder, and lifted the coffee carafe directly off the burner while it was still brewing.
I brought the spatula up in one smooth motion and tapped the back of his hand.
“Ow,” Mitch said, without sounding injured.
“That’s stealing.”
“I’m not stealing. I’m expediting.”
“The coffee expedites itself. That’s what the pot is for.”
He poured coffee into a mug that said“BEEF: IT’S WHAT’S FOR DINNER”in peeling letters and wrapped both hands around it like he was afraid someone might take it back. The steam rose around his face, and he closed his eyes and inhaled like a man receiving communion.
“Morning,” he said, eyes still closed.
“You slept in the hat,” I pointed out.
“The hat is comfortable.”
“The hat is a cry for help.”
He dropped into a chair at the long table, stretched his legs out, and fixed me with a look that was pure, undiluted satisfaction. His hazel eyes caught the stove light and held it, green-gold and entirely too aware of what they were looking at, which was me standing at the range and my internal organs doing something complicated behind my ribs.
I turned back to the eggs. Reached for the salt. Shook it over the skillet and kept shaking until I realized I’d been shaking for approximately six seconds too long.
I pulled the shaker back. Set it down. The eggs were probably ruined.
Mitch’s grin widened. I could feel it without looking.
“Don’t,” I said to the skillet.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to say something.”
“I was going to say the eggs smell great.”
I pointed the spatula at him. “That is not what you were going to say.”
He sipped his coffee and arranged his face into something approximating innocence, which on Mitch Pruitt looked about as convincing as a three-dollar bill. His eyes were doing the thing—the specific, pleased crinkle at the corners that meant he was replaying last night in high definition and finding nothing about it worth criticizing.
I was also replaying last night. The hallway. Sterling against the wall. The sound he made when he came, low and broken and entirely, devastatingly real. His hand finding mine on the blanket. The weight of it, warm and certain, like something I’d been carrying for months without knowing it.
I flipped the eggs. They landed with a soft thud, the yolks miraculously intact.
Mitch watched me from his chair, both hands cradling his stolen coffee, and the warmth in his expression was the kind that had nothing to do with teasing and everything to do with the particular pleasure of watching something you’ve wanted for someone else finally happen.
The kitchen doorway filled.
Sterling stood there with his hat on and his jaw dark with stubble, his hair pushed back from his forehead like he’d run wet fingers through it and called it good.
He was dressed—jeans, boots, the gray henley that made his shoulders look broader than they had any right to—and he looked, for approximately half a second, like a man who had slept better than he’d expected to and was quietly, comprehensively annoyed about it.
