Page 70 of Last Flame
I go back to the coffee. I finish the coffee. I drink some of the coffee out of a plastic wine glass because it’s the last thing I have. It’s fine. A wine glass is just a mug with ambition.
I’m standing at the counter with my back to all of them, because boundaries. I’m aware they don’t exist right now but it doesn’t stop me from trying.
The mugs from last night are still on the coffee table when I come out — three mugs and the measuring cup, huddled together like survivors. My hand barely picks up the first mug before Brock is just there.
“Let me.”
“It’s fine, I can—”
“Let me.” He insists, warm and apparently immovable on the topic. The mug is already out of my hand, the rest are already gathered, and he’s moving to my sink with purpose. The water is running now, like he’s washed dishes in this kitchen a hundred times.
Gunnar makes a noise.
Brock ignores it with his entire body.
The water eventually shuts off and then everyone’s moving at once. Rayner is collecting the pieces of my door off the floor like they weigh nothing, because to him they probably don’t. Gunnar is putting the bed back together — straightening the pillow wall, squaring the corners, restoring it to code. Erik is folding the throw.
I swear Gunnar is putting it together exactly how it was before they ever stepped foot in here, and I know how ridiculous that sounds.
They just move around each other, four very large men in my very small apartment, like they’ve done it a thousand times.
Three hundred chapters of men brooding on battlements, and not one of them ever washed a dish. The genre has failed me.
Houseguests. Extremely industrious houseguests. Somewhere in the Dopamine archive there’s a listicle about this. “Ten Signs Your Houseguests Were Raised in a Cult. Number Four Will Surprise You.”
“Come on.” Erik has his jacket on. When did he put on a jacket? “We’re going to the hardware store.”
“For what?” I ask, into my coffee.
“We need to replace a door.”
“What door?”
He looks at me and his mouth tilts up. Looks at the hole where my front door used to be. Looks at the room.
“The one you broke,” he says. To all of them.
“Technically, Rayner broke it,” Gunnar says. From inside the blanket fort, where he has relocated with his coffee like a man planning to homestead.
“I did,” Rayner says. He says it like an accomplishment.
“Up,” Erik says.
“I just got it back together.”
“Up.”
“There’s no door. What exactly would we be—”
Erik grabs his wrist and pulls, which is apparently a thing that works on Gunnar, because a very large man comes up out of my blanket fort pouting. Actually pouting. Lower lip and everything.
Then Erik is herding all of them toward the hole where my door used to be, one at a time, because it’s the only way men that size fit through a doorway, and the apartment gets bigger and quieter with each one that goes.
Brock is the last one out. He stops in the doorway and winks at me. Then he’s gone around the corner.
Heat climbs up my neck without asking permission.
Dammit.
