Page 96 of Shades of Grey & Gold

I am in the kitchen when she comes home. I made dinner—the one Mom taught me, the one with the sauce that takes two hours and is worth the time, and I didn’t have a choice because if I didn’t have something to do with my hands, I would have driven down to campus and thrown her over my shoulder to drag her back home myself.

I’m at the stove when I hear the door, and then her footsteps, and then Bart’s nails on the floor running to greet her.

“Something smells incredible,” she calls out and my shoulders drop an inch in relief at her voice.

I know Nico took care of it. I knew she’d walk through the door and be perfectly fine. He fixed the problem and I had nothing to worry about.

“Twenty minutes,” I call back.

She appears in the kitchen doorway a minute later and stops. She looks at me. Her eyes go to my shirt.

I forgot about the shirt.

I look down. There’s blood on it—not a lot, just a streak across the front where I’d checked Nico when he came back, when I needed to know he was intact. He was. The plan worked cleanly and he came back whole. But the shirt is a detail I’d meant to deal with before she got home.

“Cal,” she says my name very carefully.

And I realize this is the first time; the first time she’s had to see shades of grey—shades of red—like this on me.

“I’m fine,” I respond carefully, watching for her reaction. “It’s not mine.”

She comes into the kitchen. She stops two feet from me, and she looks at the shirt again and then at my face and she’s doing what she does—reading, assessing, running the calculation behind those blue eyes.

“Is everyone okay?”

Something breaks inside of me. Because I know what she is saying. Everyone, meaning Gio, Rudi, Nico.

Meaning the people she has learned to think of as ours.

Not just my family, her family, too.

In a split second, I regret every selfish bone in my body that brought her here, that made her fall in love with this place and these people under such dangerous and wavering conditions. The greedy bastard inside of me revels in her presence, her falling deeper into the hole of this life. The other side of me wants to put her on a plane back to Abbott and find a way to keep her away from this forever.

The greedy side wins.

“Everyone is fine.”

“Okay.” She breathes out. “Okay.” She opens the cabinet and gets plates, pretending like this is normal. “Tell me when twenty minutes is up.”

I watch her set the table. My hands are still on the stove, turned toward the sauce, and I’m watching her move around the kitchen like she’s been here forever and I think:this is what I’m protecting.This specifically. This—her, barefoot in our home; Bart following her from cabinet to cabinet and the careful ease of a person who has decided to allow me to make her my home.

And maybe find a home in me, as well.

“Max.”

She looks up.

“I changed my mind,” I say. “Timer can pause.” I turn off the burner. “Come here.”

She steps tentatively towards me as I lift the shirt over my head and toss it in the corner. She puts her hands on my chest and I put my arms around her.

And I hold on, which is not something I do—holding on is not in the vocabulary of a man raised to show nothing—but I’m doing it anyway, and she lets me, and Bart sits on both our feet.

“It scared me a little,” she admits into my shoulder.

“I know.” I press my face into her hair. “And thank you for being honest with me about it. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.” She pulls back and looks at me. Her eyes are clear and steady. “Just promise to tell me when I need to know something.”