Two Sugars

Two Sugars

POV: Bash

"You're making it too sweet again."

Rhys didn't look up from his phone when he said it, but he didn't have to. He knew the exact number of sugar spoons before the metal even hit the ceramic. That's how it always went in this kitchen — him narrating my life back to me like I hadn't lived it myself, like I was a guest checking in and he was the one holding the reservation book.

"Maybe I like it sweet," I said, stirring anyway, just to have something to do with my hands.

"You don't. You like it bitter, and you pretend you don't because it makes you feel like less of a mess." He finally looked up. "Drink it your way if you want. I'm just telling you what's true."

The grinder kicked on again behind him, filling the small kitchen with a low mechanical hum that vibrated up through the floor tile and into the soles of my feet. Our kitchen wasn't big — it had never needed to be, just the two of us — but some morning, it felt like the walls had crept in an inch overnight. Rhys took up more space than his body should've allowed. He always had.

I reached past him for the mug on the drying rack. He didn't move.

"Excuse me," I said.

He shifted, but not enough. My shoulder brushed his chest on the way past, and I felt the heat of him through my t-shirt like a brand. He smelled like cedar soap and coffee grounds, and for one stupid second, I forgot what I'd reached for in the first place.

Rhys wasn't my blood. Never had been. We'd been adopted eight months apart, same house, same parents who'd never once treated us like anything but sons — which was probably why nobody outside this kitchen had ever once questioned how we lived, or why they should have. He was twenty-six now. I was twenty-three, though most days I felt like whatever version of myself had never actually finished growing up in this house.

That was the thing nobody would ever understand if I tried to explain it. It wasn't that he scared me. It was that he didn't have to.

His hand landed on the small of my back.

Not soft. Not a brother's hand, if brothers still meant anything to either of us. It was heavy, deliberate, the kind of weight that wasn't asking permission — it was just informing my spine that it existed. My whole body went still the way prey goes , and every nerve lit up and screamed move, and instead, I felt myself lean back into it a fraction of an inch, traitor that I was.

"Relax," he said, low, right against my ear. "It's just coffee."

It was never just coffee.

I could feel his pulse where his wrist pressed against my hip, slow and even, completely unbothered, while mine was doing something closer to a drumroll. The silence between us stretched out, thick and specific, the kind that isn't peace so much as a held breath. I counted the seconds without meaning to. One, two, three. His thumb moved once against my shirt. Four, five. The kettle clicked off.

My phone rang before I could figure out what my body was going to do next, and I nearly knocked the mug off the counter, grabbing for it.

Marion's name lit up the screen like a small mercy.

"Hey, Mom," I said, and Rhys's hand slid away from my back like it had never been there, like the last ten seconds hadn't happened at all. He went back to leaning against the counter, arms crossed, watching me with that patient, unreadable calm that never once looked away.

"Morning, baby." Marion's voice was warm and a little too bright, the way it got when she'd already rehearsed the conversation in her head. "Is your brother there with you?"

"He's right here."

"Good. Good, I like knowing you two are together." A pause, the sound of a cabinet closing on her end. "You two are still taking care of each other, right?"

One tile line. Two. Three cracks ran through the grout by the stove where the house had settled years ago. I found myself staring at them, tracing them with my eyes like a rosary while my mother's voice kept going, soft and relentless.

"We're fine, Mom."

"I just worry when I don't hear from you for a few days. That's all. I don't want us to get complicated, you know? We're not a complicated family."

Four. Five. Rhys's eyes hadn't moved off me once. I could feel them the same way I'd felt his hand — a pressure with no visible source. Six seconds, he's been standing there. Seven. I dug my thumbnail into the pad of my finger under the counter's edge, just enough to feel it, just enough to have something real to hold onto that wasn't the sound of my own pulse in my ears.

"We're not complicated," I repeated and hated how easily the lie came out.

"I know, sweetheart. I just need to hear it sometimes." Another pause, gentler this time, the kind that used to make me feel safe before I understood what it was actually doing. "Put your brother on for a second?"

I held the phone out. Rhys took it without breaking eye contact with me, like he could carry on two conversations at once, and I was still the main one. "Hey, Mom," he said, easy, warm, a completely different voice than the one he used on me two minutes ago. That was the part that unsettled me most — how fluently he could be two people and how I was apparently the only one who ever saw both.

I turned away and pretended to check the coffee maker so I wouldn't have to watch him do it.

"...no, everything's good here," he was saying. "Bash is just being dramatic about the coffee, that's all." A beat. "I know. I tell him that, too."

Eight cabinet handles in this kitchen. I counted them without turning around, my eyes moving left to right along the row like it was the only stable thing in the room. Nine. Ten. Somewhere behind me, Rhys laughed at something Marion said, low and unbothered, and the sound of it crawled straight up my spine.

By the time he handed the phone back for me to say goodbye, my hands weren't quite steady.

"Love you, baby," Marion said. "Tell your brother the same."

"I will," I said, and hung up before she could hear whatever was happening in my voice.

The kitchen went dead silent. Not comfortable-silent — the kind that has weight, that sits in the room like a third person nobody invited. Rhys was still watching me, unmoving, arms crossed, his expression giving away exactly nothing, which somehow always told me everything.

I busied myself with the mug that had started this whole thing, finally pouring in the too-sweet coffee out of pure spite, and that was when my phone buzzed against the counter.

An unfamiliar area code lit up the screen. My thumb hovered over it, my whole chest going tight and hopeful in a way I didn't have a name for yet.

"Who's texting you at seven in the morning, Bash?" Rhys asked, his voice entirely flat from the doorway.

I didn't answer him. I just stared at the notification.

"Hey, it's Julian from shift yesterday. Are you free for lunch today?