Page 21 of Claimed on the Ridge

The almost-smile I've been tracking since the porch makes another appearance. "That spice rack has survived without intervention this long."

"It shows."

He pours his coffee without responding, but the almost-smile lingers longer than it has before.

We end up in the main room. I take the chair by the fire.

He takes the end of the couch, legs spread, one arm stretched along the back, taking up space the way he always takes up space, as if furniture were built to accommodate him rather than the other way around. His coffee rests in his other hand, held loose against his thigh.

The remaining firelight paints his forearms in shades of bronze and burnished gold. I've spent an unreasonable portion of the last few days failing to ignore his forearms, and they're worse by firelight, which is information I didn't need.

The silence stretches between us. We haven't been here long enough for silence to feel like this, warm and loaded, filling itself with every glance that lands and holds.

"The kitchen," I say after a while, because looking at his forearms is becoming a tactical liability. "It hasn't been remodeled."

"That a complaint?"

"An observation. Most people would have updated it by now. New counters. Better lighting."

"Most people didn't grow up eating breakfast on that counter." He takes a sip of his coffee, and his eyes stay on me over the rim. The steadiness of that gaze at this hour, unhurried and warm, makes my breath go shallow.

"My mother made pancakes on the griddle hanging above the stove. Cast iron. Weighs more than a cinder block. She'd flip them one-handed while holding a baby on the other hip."

The sentence starts easy. By the end, his jaw has tightened around the last few words, a visible flinch of muscle that tells me this came out without his permission.

He looks away. His thumb traces the rim of the mug. The gesture is the first thing he's done that looks like fidgeting.

He doesn't elaborate. He doesn't explain what happened to her or when or how. He gives me the image, the griddle, the pancakes, the baby on the hip.

The past tense hangs in the air the way it does when someone has surrendered a piece of themselves they weren't planning to give.

"Careful," I say. "That almost sounded personal."

"Must be the hour." He takes another sip. The jaw relaxes, but something behind his eyes hasn't recovered.

"My mother had a cast iron skillet she'd had since college." The words come before I've decided to offer them. I had a deflection ready, something dry about his decorating philosophy, and instead the truth walks out of my mouth.

"She seasoned it for years. My father threw it out when she left because it took up too much space."

His gaze comes back to me. The look isn't the careful observation I've grown used to. It's open in a way that changes the shape of his face.

His mouth is slightly parted, and I'm staring at his lower lip in the firelight. The inappropriate specificity of where my attention has landed is fully apparent to me. I don't redirect it.

"You don't talk about your family much," he says.

"Neither do you. That might be the most personal thing you've said since I got here."

"You keeping score?"

"Hard not to when the list is this short."

"Yours is shorter."

The accuracy of it lands, and the laugh that escapes is quiet and genuine.

His eyes follow it to my mouth, and the air between us changes temperature.

"We should probably stop talking about our mothers," I say. My voice is steadier than the rest of me.