Chapter 4 #3
I should lie and tease him, keep it light the way I usually do when I don’t want to give anything real away, but my body is still pulsing from what he just did and my focus won’t hold long enough to pull it off.
“I think you know,” I whisper, my lips brushing his ear.
His hands tighten on my waist. “I want to hear you say it.”
I swallow hard, my pulse hammering. “I want to feel you inside me.” The words come out lower than I intend, which I attribute to the fact that his thumb is tracing a slow line up the inside of my thigh while I'm trying to speak and the combination isn't conducive to dignity.
He makes a low sound of approval that I feel more than hear, and I reach between us, my fingers finding the bulge in his pants, tracing his hard length. He hisses, his hips jerking forward.
I smile, slow and wicked.
“Condom,” he grits out, his hands shaking as he fumbles for his wallet. He pulls out a foil packet, tearing it open with his teeth, and I watch, my breath stuttering, as he rolls it down his length.
Then he’s back, his hands on my thighs, pulling me to the edge of the counter. The head presses against me, hot and heavy, and I whimper, my nails digging into his shoulders.
"You've been thinking about this," he says, and it isn't a question.
"Don't flatter yourself," I wrap my legs around his waist and pull him closer. “Fuck me.”
He doesn’t need to be told twice. He thrusts inside me in one smooth motion, filling me completely, stretching me around him.
I cry out, my head falling back, my body adjusting to him.
“Fuck,” he groans, his forehead pressing to mine. “You feel amazing.”
I can’t speak. I can only feel him, thick and buried deep, the way my body clenches around him, the drag of his length as he pulls back and thrusts in again, slower this time, like he’s savoring it.
“More,” I gasp, my heels digging into his ass. “Harder—”
He obeys, his hips snapping forward, driving into me with deep, punishing strokes that have the counter creaking beneath us. The impact jolts through me, my grip tightening on his shoulders as I try to find some kind of rhythm inside what he’s setting.
Each thrust lands in the same place, precise and unrelenting, and I track it for a second before I can’t, my thoughts dropping out as my body takes over, my nails dragging down his back because I need something to hold on to.
His pace falters, his thrusts turn erratic, and I can feel him swelling inside me, his body tensing.
“Come for me,” he demands, his voice raw. “I want to feel you come on me.”
I’m already there, my body coiling tight, my breath coming in short, sharp gasps. The orgasm rips through me, my back arching, my body clamping down around him as I cry out his name.
“Callum—!”
The control he’s been holding slips, not all at once but enough that I feel it in the way his grip tightens and his breath breaks, and he buries his face in my neck with a groan, his hips stuttering as he comes.
I can feel him through the condom, the heat of his release, the way his body trembles against mine.
We stay like that for a long moment, our breaths ragged, our skin slick with sweat.
Then he presses a kiss to my shoulder, his lips soft, almost reverent, and the ordinary world reasserts itself in the form of the cold counter beneath me, the state of my hair, scattered inventory sheets, and the faint sound of Pancake snoring in the front of the store.
I find my flannel and he finds his jeans.
Callum crouches, gathers a few loose pages from the floor, and sets them on the counter before he disappears into the bathroom.
I turn and recognize my own margins before I read a word, the red edits, the phrasing I cut and keep and cut again.
My hand goes to the edge of the counter and stays there, fingers pressing into the laminate while I track the top page and realize what he just picked up.
Lara Vaine on the header. My sentences underneath. My body in the scene.
I straighten the stack without thinking, sliding the corners into alignment, and I keep my eyes on my manuscript page.
The bathroom door opens. He comes back out, dries his hands on a paper towel, and tosses it in the trash.
I watch his face while he crosses the room, waiting for something to surface that I can use but nothing does.
He sets his palm on the counter near the pages and looks at me with the same even expression, like he read what was there and filed it somewhere I can’t see.
“This didn’t fix my reserve stock problem,” I say, defaulting to the kind of throwaway line I use when something in my chest tightens and humor feels safer than explaining why.
He looks at the shelf.
“You want me to apologize or move the box?”
“Box.”
I hand him another from the floor.
“Emotionally and literally.”
His mouth shifts like he’s trying not to react to that. He reaches past me, takes the box, and puts it on the top shelf without needing the stool. I hand him two more and he puts those up too without comment.
For a moment we’re just two people shelving boxes in a storeroom, which is somehow the strangest part of all of it.
I hand him the next box and nod toward the door.
“If you need to get back to buying neighborhoods or mysteriously improving people’s commercial real estate situations, I can finish this. Last of the inventory shows up tomorrow.”
He sets the box on the top shelf. “You say that like it’s evil.”
I hand him another box. “You’re right. I meant suspicious.”
His mouth shifts like he almost smiles, taking the box from me and putting it up without looking.
“Text me if you need anything,” he says.
“I won’t,” I say, turning back to the shelves.
He’s quiet for a second. “I know.”
I look over.
He sets the last box on the top shelf and finally meets my eyes. “You should anyway.”
Then he leaves and the storeroom settles after the door clicks, the hum of the lights loud.
I stop in the bathroom first long enough to splash cold water on my face, fix my mascara with the pad of my thumb, and stare at myself in the mirror like I might suddenly become a person with a better handle on what just happened. I don’t.
I head back to the front counter and open my laptop. My fingers hover over the keys for a beat before I start typing, because my novel is the only thing here that behaves how I tell it to.
I initiated the sex and I'm not sorry. What I can't quite process yet is the way he looked at me before he left, like he'd already come to a conclusion I wasn't part of, and the fact that it stayed with me longer than it should have.
The scene I drafted last night is on the screen. I read it now and my jaw tightens with a feeling I can't define.
The woman in my story accepts the help and it costs her nothing, she simply lets herself be helped and the narrative moves forward with no internal accounting, no careful calculating of what she'll owe, no need to establish that she could have handled without it.
I close my laptop.
I've got to tell Cordelia what just happened. I pick up my phone and open our text thread, but I type nothing and lock the screen again instead, which is a first in twenty years of friendship and feels wrong in a way I don’t have time to unpack.
I set my phone on the counter beside me, and a second later it buzzes like she somehow sensed the silence.
Cordelia: You're being suspiciously quiet today. What are you up to?
Me: I moved some boxes
This is technically true. However, when my phone rings fourteen seconds later I realize how transparent my response was.
"What aren't you telling me?"
"I'm just moving inventory onto the floor.'"
"Aves," she says, with the particular precision of a woman who has decoded my deflection vocabulary across two decades and multiple time zones, "You only get that specific when something happened that you're not ready to discuss."
"I'll see you tomorrow."
"Tonight. I'm bringing panang curry and wine I've ben saving for a full debrief." A pause, and then, "Whatever it is, I support it. I also want everything. I'm bringing good wine."
She hangs up before I can argue, which is such a Cordelia move, and I sit in the quiet for a moment, feeling something that might be gratitude and might be the specific relief of knowing my person is coming over and she won't require me to have this figured out.
I'm still in the back of the store knowing I should move because the inventory isn't going to shelve itself, when my phone buzzes again.
Jonah: Cal says the move-in at the pop-up is going well. You opening it soon?
I stare at the message for a long time with my brother's voice in every word of it and "Cal" sitting in my text thread like a stone dropped in still water.
They spoke, and whatever Callum chose to say was careful enough to give Jonah nothing while still telling him exactly what to ask me next, which leaves me staring at a question I should be able to answer and can’t.