Chapter 38 Three in the kitchen

Chapter 38 Three in the kitchen
Luca's POV

I had not slept.

That part was not new. I had not slept properly since I moved back into this house and I had not slept at all since Mia had stopped pretending she was not falling for him. I had given up around four AM. I had lain on the bed in the dark and counted the cracks in the ceiling, and when I ran out of cracks I started counting reasons I should not get up and go down to her room. I made it to eleven reasons. The twelfth one was that she might be in there with him.

I got up.

I told myself I was going down for coffee. That was the entire story. I was going down for coffee. I had been telling myself versions of that story for two years and I was beginning to suspect I was not the audience.

I came down the stairs in my training jacket with my hair still flat from the pillow and I rounded the corner into the kitchen doorway and I stopped.

They were in the middle of something.

She was at the kitchen island with both hands holding the edge of it. Her knuckles were white. Her jaw was set. She was wearing her morning training clothes and her hair was up the way she did it when she was going straight to the rink without thinking, and she had been white-knuckling that island for at least two minutes because the color of her hands told me everything I needed to know about how long the conversation had been going.

He was at the counter with his back half turned. Cup in his hand. The kind of half-relaxed posture men used when they wanted the argument they were winning to look as if it was costing them nothing.

I stood in the doorway for two seconds. Two seconds was all it took for Mercer to set the cup down and look at her and say "Mia. He absolutely is," the way a man says something he has been waiting all morning to say.

I should have backed out.

I did not back out.

The thing about two years of not saying anything was that it built up somewhere I had not bothered to map. It built up the way pressure built up in a pipe with no release valve. I had been a calm man for two years. I had been the calm one in every room. I had walked away from arguments. I had taken the higher ground until the higher ground was a country I no longer recognized. And I had not understood, until that second in the doorway, that the calm had never been calm. It had been weight. It had been weight, and I had been carrying it, and I had been carrying it because nobody had asked me to put it down.

I put it down.

"She's right, Mercer. I'm not."

They both turned.

Mia's face did the thing it always did when she was caught in the middle. It went very still. Her hand stayed on the island. The other one was at her side, half-curled, the way it went when she was working out whether she needed to defend herself or me or him or none of us.

Mercer set his cup down on the counter. He did not look at her. He looked at me.

"Care to clarify?"

I came into the kitchen. I did not look at Mia yet. I was not ready to look at her yet. I went to the cabinet for a mug because if my hands had something to do, my mouth would be slower to do something it could not take back. I took down a mug. I set it on the counter. I did not pour anything into it. I stood there with my hand still on the handle.

"She walked away from me two years ago," I said. "We were never officially anything to walk away from."

Mia went still in a new way. Not the white-knuckle still. The kind where you stop breathing for a second because the air has been taken out of the room.

Mercer's mouth twitched.

"Interesting."

"Why is that interesting."

He picked up the kettle. He did it slowly. He did everything slowly. I had not figured out yet whether the slowness was a tactic or a personality. He poured a second cup. Not for me. He did not turn his head in my direction as he did it.

"Because if it was nothing," he said. "You wouldn't still be counting porch steps."

He picked up the second cup. He turned. He walked past Mia and held the cup out to her without breaking eye contact with me.

She took it.

That was the part I had not been ready for. I had been ready to see him hand her the cup. I had not been ready to see her take it without pausing first. Without checking with herself. Without looking at me to see if I was watching, because she had to know I was watching, and she had taken it anyway.

He looked at me one more time.

He did not smile. He did not need to.

He walked out.

The kitchen got smaller after he left. The kettle was still hot on the counter. The fridge hummed. The microwave clock read 7:09 in green digits. The whole room kept performing the small clean sounds of a normal morning, as if nothing in it had just been rearranged.

She was still holding the cup. Both hands now. Like the cup was the only thing keeping her vertical.

I looked at her properly for the first time since I had walked into the kitchen. I had been avoiding looking at her because looking at her was the part I knew I could not survive without saying something I was not ready to say. I looked at her now and I noted the things I had not let myself note. The way her hair was still wet at the nape of her neck. The way her jaw was working at the inside of her cheek. The way her eyes were on the rim of the cup and not on me.

I turned to her.

"Tell me he's wrong, Mia. Tell me right now and I'll drop it forever."