Zoey Morning arrived slowly. Awareness came back in layers. First the warmth, then the faint sound of Markie shifting somewhere in the apartment, then the quiet hum of the refrigerator down the hall. Then the very immediate realization that I was not alone. I opened my eyes. For a moment, I didn’t move. I just stayed there, taking inventory. A large arm rested across my back, heavy and relaxed. One of my legs was thrown over his hip. My face was pressed into the center of Liam’s chest, and I could hear the steady rhythm of his heartbeat beneath my ear. Right. Memory returned in a sequence that felt almost rude in its clarity. The couch. The ice cream. The stupid reality show. The moment when everything tilted and never tilted back. My stomach tightened. I raised my head and looked at Liam. He was still asle ep. Up close, he looked younger. Not softer, but unguarded in a way he didn’t show when he was awake. His hair was a mess from my hands. He had one hand spread across the middle of my back. The other rested loosely against my hip, fingers curved into my skin. At some point during the night, I had migrated fully on top of him. Excellent. Outstanding decision making, Zoey. I stayed still for another second, staring at the scar just below his collarbone. I had traced it last night. I remembered telling him I wanted to make someone pay for it. Which, in hindsight, was possibly a little intense. My brain started running again. That was the problem. For the past two days it had been quieter than usual. My constant mental checklist had eased up, as had the running tally of everything I was responsible for. Work tickets. Customer escalations. My mother’s increasing chaos. The constant sense that if I stopped paying attention for five seconds something in my life would catch fire. With Liam around, that had all faded to the background, and I barely heard the noise. He checked things, and it wasn’t annoying when he did it. He noticed details and fixed problems before they became disasters. He paid attention to things I usually had to monitor myself.
I hadn’t realized how exhausting that constant vigilance was until someone else started carrying some of it without asking. It explained why kissing him had felt less like a reckless decision, and more like the inevitable result of several days of my nervous system quietly surrendering to the conc ept of not being the only adult in the room. I shifted slightly against him, and his arm tightened automatically, which made something uncomfortable happen inside my chest. Fucking fantastic. Attachment. My favorite. I closed my eyes briefly. You absolute stupid bitch. The words arrived with that casual cruelty my brain had perfected over the years. You moved to a new town two minutes ago and immediately climbed into bed with the first extremely competent mountain man who offered you terrible breakfast. Incredible strategy. I pressed my forehead against his chest. This was exactly how women ended up ruining their lives. They relaxed for five minutes, allowed someone to take care of them for a day or two. That, in turn, led to their brains being flooded with extremely stupid hormones and feelings about safety and stability, then suddenly they were rearranging their entire emotional infrastructure around a man who probably just thought this was a pleasant detour. My throat tightened. I hated that feeling. The stupid fragile one that lived right under my ribs and always appeared when something good happened. My brain immediately started calculating how long it would take before it disappeared. Because it always did. I lay there another moment, very still. Liam’s hand moved absently over my back before settling on my waist again. The quiet steadiness of that movement made something in my chest hurt. I stared at the wall. Why was my life so fucked? I exhaled slowly and dropped my face back against Liam’s chest. Apparently my coping strategy this morning was going to in volve pretending I was still asle ep on top of a man who made my brain stop screaming for five consecutive minutes. Which, frankly, was ridiculous enough on its own. But I stayed there, listening to the steady rhythm of his heart and breathing in his scent. If I stayed here, I could pretend this was a completely normal way to start the day.
“BREAKFAST.” Markie’s timing was impressive. I stared at the wall for another moment. Right, gotta feed the parrot. I slid carefully off Liam, inch by inch, moving with the slow precision of someone attempting to exit a high stakes crime scene without leaving evidence. He didn’t stir. The man had the sle ep instincts of a tranquilized bear. He was sprawled across my mattress with the relaxed confidence of a man who had clearly decided my bed was structurally sound enough to support him, one arm still stretched across the space where I had been a moment ago. His hair was a disaster, but his face looked calm in a way that felt de eply unfair. He had no right to look that peaceful after what we did last night. “BREAKFAST!” Markie screeched. “Yes,” I whispered sharply toward the doorway. “I heard you.” I grabbed a pair of panties out of my dresser and pulled them on before I slipped out of my bedroom. When Markie saw me, he slammed his beak against the bars, then leaned forward, his posture suggesting he had been conducting a detailed overnight surveillance operation. He tilted his head and looked at me, then peered in the direction of the bedroom. The bird had the expression of someone holding classified information. “Do not,” I said immediately. He leaned farther forward. “DOG!” “Stop calling him that.” “DOG!” I opened the cabinet and grabbed his food container. “This is none of your business.” Markie watched me scoop pellets into his dish, his head tilted in the other direction. He looked pleased with himself. I situated the bowl where he liked it. Markie climbed down immediately and began eating with focused determination. I leaned one shoulder against the counter and watched him. “You don’t understand the situation.” “GUEST.” “Yes.” “DOG.” “No.” “GUEST DOG.” “That is not helpful.” He returned to his food with great enthusiasm.
I rubbed my face. “This may have been a mistake.” Markie chewed. “This may have been a huge mistake.” Crunch. “I just moved here.” Crunch. “I have been in this town for approximately ten minutes.” Crunch. “And I’m already sle eping with the first extremely competent mountain man who takes care of me and fixes plumbing.” Markie looked up. “GOOD PLUMBING.” I closed my eyes. “This is not a healthy dynamic.” “GOOD DOG.” “I’m not ke eping him.” Markie continued eating. Sighing, I pushed away from the counter. “Finish your breakfast.” “BREAKFAST.” “Yes. Eat your breakfast.” His head lifted slowly, then he tilted it toward the bedroom. “OOOH.” I froze, then very slowly turned my head toward my asshole bird. “You didn’t just do that.” Markie puffed slightly. “OOOH.” I pointed a finger at him. “Mind. Your. Business.” He leaned closer to the bowl and took another bite, then he raised his head again. I walked to my desk and opened my laptop. The machine took approximately two seconds to wake up, then the notifications poured in. Slack exploded across the screen. Messages stacked instantly. Ticket alerts. Customer escalation flags. Internal threads. Someone had already tagged me three times in the span of ten minutes. I stared at the screen as my brain tried to boot up fully. It made a sound somewhere between a groan and a prayer. “Oh my god.” Another Slack ping. Then another. And another.
My shoulders sagged. The peace that had enveloped me upon waking vanished immediately as the full weight of my normal operating system slammed back into place. I closed the laptop. No. Absolutely not. Not until coffee. I pushed away from the desk and walked into the kitchen. Water first. Then coffee. Then whatever counted as breakfast in a household that had clearly prioritized ice cream over responsible grocery shopping. I opened the cabinet and stared inside. Protein bars. Peanut butter. Half a bag of questionable granola. Good enough. Behind me, from the bedroom, I heard the groan of my bedframe. I reached for the coffee grinder and poured in a scoop of beans. The machine rattled loudly against the counter while I leaned my hip against the cabinet and waited. Markie crunched through his breakfast with impressive commitment. When the grinder finally stopped, I dumped the grounds into the filter and filled the kettle at the sink. The apartment stayed quiet exc ept for the sound of water and Markie chewing. I poured the water into the machine, pressed the button, and stood there for a moment watching the first drops fall into the pot. Progress. A few minutes later, I filled a mug and took a long sip, staring into the cabinet while my brain attempted to reassemble itself into a functioning adult. My brain had just reached the stage of consciousness where it was considering the possibility of cooperating when footst eps sounded behind me. I turned. Liam stood in the doorway to the kitchen, fully dressed. Jeans. Boots. Shirt. His gaze moved over me slowly. And that was when I realized I was standing in my kitchen in nothing but black panties, holding a mug of coffee. I looked down at myself, then back at him as I took another sip of coffee. Well. There were two options. Option one: panic and sprint out of the room. Option two: behave like a woman who had very recently climbed this man like a tree and therefore had nothing left to prove. Shrugging internally, I chose option two. I leaned one hip against the counter and took another drink. “It’s morning.”
He was still looking at me, but not in the crude way I had come to expect from men who suddenly found themselves confronted with unexpected skin. His expression had gone still, focused. He was looking at me the way he looked at something he intended to remember. The attention rolled across my skin, making goosebumps jump up along my skin. My body reacted before my brain could intervene. A dangerous amount of heat pooled low in my stomach, and I had the immediate and de eply inconvenient urge to jump him again. Stop it. I scolded myself. Absolutely stop that. Liam moved again; three calm st eps carried him across the kitchen. He stopped in front of me. Up close he smelled like what I had come to know was him. Soap and cedar. Clean, salty sweat. Before I could react, his hand was on my waist, and he was kissing my cheek. “You’re stunning, Zoey,” he murmured. I smiled. Just enough. “Thank you.” That was it. Because if I gave him even one inch of emotional engagement right now, my brain was going to start doing extremely irresponsible math about the rest of my life. He watched me for a moment, then st epped back. “I should get back to Pine Hollow,” he said. “I’ve got a few things to check before guests start moving around.” Relief and something else I didn’t want to think about twisted together in my chest. “That makes sense,” I said. He nodded once. Then his attention shifted to my laptop. “Work waiting?” “A horrifying amount.” His mouth curved slightly. “Good luck.” “I’m going to need it.” He grabbed his keys off the counter and walked to the door. “Can I text you later?” My brain attempted to overanalyze that question immediately. I shut it down. “Sure,” I said. “But I’m going to be buried in tickets all day.” “I figured. No rush to respond.” From the living room, Markie shouted suddenly, “BYE, DOG.” Liam looked over. Markie leaned forward on his perch. “GOOD DOG.” Liam nodded once in solemn acknowledgment. “Bye, Markie.” Then he looked back at me. “Bye, Zoey.” “Bye.”
The moment the door closed behind him, silence descended on my apartment. I stood there, holding a mug of coffee and wearing nothing but underwear while my life attempted to reorganize itself around the conc ept of that man walking out the door. “DOG,” Markie said thoughtfully. “Yes,” I muttered. I stared at the closed door for one more second, then I walked back to my desk and opened my laptop. Slack exploded again immediately. Exactly what I needed. Work. Work was safe. I was knee de ep in a ticket when my phone buzzed on my desk. I glanced down automatically. Mom. I stared at the screen for a moment. The cruise had apparently reached cell service again. Markie leaned over the back of the couch. “INCOMING PROBLEM.” Apparently, he could sense my emotional state. “Accurate,” I muttered before I answered, “Hi, Mom.” Her voice arrived at full volume. “Zoey! Finally. I’ve been trying to reach you for ages.” I checked the call log. One missed call. “Yes,” I said. “It must have been a very dramatic forty-five minutes.” “I was worried,” she said immediately. “You never don’t answer your phone.” There it was. Not hello. Not how are you. Immediate escalation into concern, which in my mother’s hands usually meant I was about to be made responsible for managing the fact that she had feelings. I rubbed my forehead. “I’m at work.” “You work from home.” “Yes.” “So, you’re home.” “That’s... technically correct.” Markie flapped his wings once. “TECHNICALLY.” I shot him a look. On the other end of the line, my mother sighed in the long-suffering way that suggested she had personally carried the burden of my entire personality for twenty-seven years. “You should see the boat,” she said suddenly. “It’s enormous. Twelve restaurants. Twelve, Zoey. I didn’t even know what to pick.” “That sounds very stressful.” “I had to make reservations three days in advance.”
My Slack notification pinged again. Mom continued talking without pause. “And the buffet is unbelievable. Seafood, carving stations, desserts everywhere. I ke ep thinking you would love it.” She paused briefly. “You should have come.” The familiar tug of guilt slid quietly into the conversation. Not enough to be obvious. Just enough to hook. That was one of her better skills. She rarely came at me directly. She preferred implication. A soft little line laid across the doorway so I could trip over it myself. “I’m glad you’re having a good time,” I said carefully. “Well,” she said, “it would be better if you were here.” Markie leaned forward. “GUILT DETECTED.” “Please stop narrating my life,” I hissed. “What was that?” my mother asked. “Nothing.” She sighed again. “I just hate the idea of you all alone out there.” I stared at the wall. “I’m not alone.” “Well,” she said, in the tone that meant she absolutely believed I was. “You know what I mean.” Yes, I did. My mother had spent most of my life treating solitude as a temporary problem that needed solving. She preferred solutions that in volved me rearranging my life around whatever situation she currently needed help with. It had been like that when I was a kid too, just in smaller, meaner ways. We were “close,” which in practice often meant she had access to me at all times. My attention. My labor. My ability to stay calm when she was not. My willingness to handle all the practical things she didn’t want to deal with. The story she liked best was that it had always just been us. The less flattering version was that “just us” had mostly meant there was no one else between me and the responsibility. “Anyway,” she continued, “I was thinking you could come stay with me for a while when I get back.” I closed my eyes. There it was. The reason for the call. “Mom,” I said gently, “we talked about this.” “I know, but n —” “I moved here because I needed some space.” There was a short silence. My mother was very good at hearing boundaries. She was less enthusiastic about respecting them. “I just don’t understand why you’d want to be so far away,” she said. I wanted to be so far because if I stayed close, every small crisis would become my responsibility again. Because I had spent years solving problems that were never actually mine to solve. Because sometimes loving someone meant not letting them lean on you for everything.
None of those explanations would get me anywhere with her. “I’m doing well here,” I said instead. Another pause. “Well,” she said finally. “If you say so.” She’d perfected that particular sentence over decades. It meant I disagree and will revisit this later. It also meant I was being filed temporarily under difficult, ungrateful, or confused. “Text me when you’re done with work,” she added. “Okay, Mom.” “All right,” she said. “I love you.” “I love you, too.” Slowly, I put my phone down. Markie tilted his head at me. “SUCCESS.” “That felt suspiciously like setting a boundary,” I said. “BOUNDARY.” I rubbed my face with both hands. The conversation hadn’t been dramatic. Still, I could already feel the familiar aftertaste of guilt settling somewhere in the back of my brain. It was amazing how a five-minute phone call could make me feel like I had just failed a test I didn’t remember signing up for. My laptop chimed again, and only then did I realize I had been pacing. Right. Slack, work. Normal life. I exhaled slowly and picked up my coffee.