Page 104 of Cattle Stop

“Hi,” Cooper says again.

“Hi yourself.” Drew finally lets Cooper go. “Good trip?”

“Good to be back.”

And it’s so damn true. He glances toward the door and Whit’s still there, bent over to take off his shoes with Cooper’s bag balanced across his back. Cooper wants to hold Whit’s hand again. It’s weird, isn’t it, with Drew in the room? He takes a breath. Cooper’s going to get used to this. Someday, it’ll be old hat.

Cooper grasps the cuff of Whit’s sleeve and tugs at it. “I’m going to go put my stuff down.”

Drew raises both eyebrows. “Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”

“You wouldn’t even know, you cheese-making monk,” Cooper says.

“Go unpack”—Drew makes air quotes—“and then we’ll eat.”

The stairs squeak the same as they always do beneath his and Whit’s feet. Cooper wants to walk up, back down, and up again, just to get to listen to it. In his room—his old room—the bed is set up. It’s where it should be, the headboard pushed up against the far wall, and the nightstand sits in its proper place. Though still, the room looks different. Odd, with fresh, new paint. Drew must’ve redone the floors, too, because they’re brighter and far less scuffed.

“Nice,” Cooper says. He runs his hand over the door trim. “Damn, Drew.”

“He’s going to do the rest of the house too,” Whit says. “Not all at once, but room by room.”

“He said he’s working on Penny’s?”

“He’s almost done,” Whit answers.

The view from Cooper’s window is even prettier with snow coursing down, the sky the deep, dark blue of late evening, the moon shining over the barnyard and the bare, snow-lined branches of the maple trees.

Cooper opens the drawer of his dresser and closes it again. Slowly, he sets his bag down and turns around again, taking the room in. The bed’s already made, he realizes. Neatly, too. He smiles.

“My, ah, parents were asking about you,” Whit says.

“Yeah?”

“They want you to come by for dinner sometime,” Whit says. He’s talking just a touch too fast. “If you want.”

They’re really doing this, him and Whit. That warm, soft hum rises through him, same as he’s felt whenever he’s seen Whit’s name on his phone screen. Focus, he spent weeks telling himself, but more than once, he’d been feeding the herd and realized he was staring into nothing, goats nibbling his boots and his mind far from the barn he stood in. “That’d be nice.”

“And—” Whit pauses, his eyes on the snow falling past the window, as if it’s really that interesting. “Well, Drew wants to redo my room too. I told him it didn’t matter to me how it looks, but insulation, and heating costs, and all.”

Cooper takes Whit in, standing in his socks and a flannel shirt. It looks so good on him. It’d look good on the floor too, Cooper lets himself think.

“How practical,” Cooper says.

“He wants to do it soon, before spring comes, and we’re all that much busier.”

Yeah, that shirt would look real, real good on the floor, Cooper thinks. “Oh, really?”

“So.”

It’s cute that Whit’s even asking. “So?”

Whit finally looks at Cooper, a slight twitch at the side of his mouth. “So maybe I could crash in here?”

“Hmm, maybe,” Cooper says. Fuck yeah, he thinks. Whit in bed next to him, snow falling outside the window while they lie skin-to-skin under quilts and blankets. He drapes his arms around Whit’s shoulders and steps into him. “My room’s kind of small, I don’t know.”

“Think about it.”

Cooper drags his nails up the back of Whit’s neck. “I am thinking about it.”