Page 58 of Ghost’s Awakening

CALEB

The potatoes hit the bacon fat and the whole kitchen woke up.

That hiss. Six in the morning, and I stood over the widest pan on the line and let it fill the room. Potato this time, sliced thin, fried until the edges browned and curled, then into the eggs with the onion and the last of the parmesan. A shake of dried chili from the back of the pantry. My mother's winter version, for when the peppers ran out and the money was headed the same way. She told us the chili was there so nobody noticed what wasn't.

I'd woken at six, an hour and a half later than my first morning in this kitchen, with Ghost wrapped around me. One arm over my chest and one leg hooked over my knees, his face pushed into the side of my neck and breathing slow and warm against the skin there. His hair had smelled like cold air and exhaust. He'd come in from a long way off, and he smelled like it.

I'd slept light my whole adult life. A door two rooms down used to put me on my feet. And a man had come into this room in the dark and gotten into a bed with me, boots off, everything off, and I had not moved. He'd told me once he could cross a floor of two hundred drunks without one pair of eyes sticking to him. I hadn't understood him until I woke up inside his arms with no memory of the arms arriving.

At two I'd gotten up for the bathroom and his side of the bed had been cold. So the night had run long. That was all the math I'd let myself do at that hour. The other math had no good numbers in it.

Then six, and the weight of him, and the relief came in so fast it hurt behind my eyes. No better report in the world than a cold nose against my neck.

"How'd it go?" I'd asked it into his hair.

"Mm." The arm across me tightened. "Fine. Went fine." Thick, half a yawn, the words sinking as they came out. "Tell you later. Sleep."

"Anybody see you?"

"Nobody sees me." His mouth moved against my neck on it, and then he was under again, gone the way he went, all at once.

Then I'd eased out from under him the way you'd ease a tray out of a hot oven. He'd reached for where I'd been, found the pillow, and kept it.

The eggs went gold at the edges, and my hands did the rest without asking me. That had always been the thing about cooking. The heat took the front of your head and held it, and whatever was left ran loose in the back. This morning all of it had the same face.

He'd put a phone in my hand on my second day here with my old number already on it, and gone red to the ears while I thanked him. He'd given me move in this kitchen so I wouldn't have to say please. And last night he'd stood in the dark beside that man's building because I'd drawn a rectangle with a question mark in it. He just did things. Then he came home and got into bed so quietly I didn't wake, and held on.

Something had happened to me at eighty miles an hour on the back of his bike two days ago, and it hadn't worn off. It sat low in my stomach, warm. My neck went hot with nobody in the room to see it. Twenty-seven years, and I'd never once built a plate for somebody and needed him to like it.

Irish came through the doors at seven, an hour later than the morning he'd caught me the first time, and I knew what the hour meant. Somewhere in his sleep he'd made peace with the coup. His face hadn't been told. He stopped four steps in, half of him walking into a kitchen that smelled like somebody's mother, the other half robbed in his sleep and still able to smell the thief.

"An hour!" He pointed at the clock, then at me. "I gave you an hour. Out of respect. For the coup. And you spent it on that!"

"Potato this time." I slid the first tray up onto the pass, brown on top and still moving in the middle. "Sit down before Nolan gets to your bacon."

"Nolan gets nothing! Nolan set off the smoke alarm with a pot of water last week." He took a plate anyway, and a fork, and cut a square out of the corner of the tray, slow, like it was a duty. He chewed a long time.

"I'm not enjoying this."

"Of course."

"Chili." He pointed the fork at the tray, then at me, and something in the pointing had gone soft even while the volume hadn't. "Sneaky. That's a sneaky move, Caleb." He carried the plate off to a table, and he didn't say another word about the kitchen, and that was the loudest thing he'd done since he walked in.

Ghost showed at half past and took the place beside me at the counter, hair flat on one side where the pillow had been. He built a plate and ate it fast, and something about the fast bothered me before I could say what.

Hawk came in at a quarter to eight, built a plate at the pass the way he did everything, once and without waste, and paused at the doors with it.

"Church at eight." He gave it to the room, and the room heard it. "Ghost and Blade have news, and a report to give."

Then his eyes came to me, one second over every head in the place, and I couldn't read it, and I read everything. Then he was gone toward his office.

"What was that?" I kept it low, for Ghost.

"You'll see at Church." He didn't look up from his eggs. "For now, eat. That plate's a piece of art and you made it, you should get to eat your own art once in a while, and—" His fork stopped. His eyes came up, and the speed had gone out of him. "Caleb. It all turned out fine. In the end. Okay?"

"Okay."

I didn't ask what it was. I'd learned by now that Ghost at double speed was Ghost fine, and Ghost stripped down to six words was Ghost carrying something.