Chapter 12
twelve
CALLUM
Four-fifty-two in the morning and I was wide awake, staring at a woman who'd upended every blueprint I'd ever drawn for my life.
Willow slept on her stomach—always on her stomach, one arm shoved under the pillow, the other flung toward my side of the bed as if reaching for me even in sleep.
The sheet had slipped to her lower back, exposing the valley of her spine, the small constellation of freckles on her left shoulder blade that I'd kissed so many times I could map them with my eyes closed.
Her breathing was deep and even. Mouth parted.
Hair a dark, tangled mess across the pillow.
She'd gone to bed with it still damp from the shower, which meant it would dry in a shape that defied geometry, and she'd spend ten minutes in the bathroom cursing about it while I stood in the doorway pretending I didn't find the whole production magnificent.
I didn't move. Just lay there on my side, one arm bent under my head, watching her.
This was becoming a problem.
Not the watching—though that was its own brand of pathology. The problem was what happened in my sternum when I did it. A tightening. An expansion. Two opposing forces at war inside the same cavity, as if my body hadn't decided whether to hold on or run and was trying to do both at once.
Is this what it's supposed to feel like?
The question had been rattling around in my skull for days.
Not idle curiosity. Not philosophical musing.
An honest, almost desperate need to know if what I felt for the woman sleeping beside me was the real thing or just another miscalculation by a man with a well-documented history of getting it wrong.
Fifteen years of marriage to Jessica, and I'd never once lost sleep over watching her breathe.
I'd loved her—or I'd told myself I had. She was smart and driven and we made sense on paper, the couple people described as a power match.
We built a life together, had a daughter together, stood at a hundred dinner parties together and performed the choreography of two people who'd chosen each other.
But I'd never lain awake at four in the morning cataloging the freckles on Jessica's back.
I'd never felt my throat close up at the sight of her sleeping in my t-shirt.
I'd never been afraid—genuinely, irrationally afraid—that I'd wake up and she'd be gone.
With Willow, the fear was a living thing. It sat on my ribs at night and pressed down.
Forty years old. Award-winning architect. Founded a firm. Survived a divorce. Raised a daughter—badly, according to said daughter, but she was alive and functioning and only moderately resentful, which I counted as a partial success.
And here I was, undone by a twenty-three-year-old barista with an ancient Honda and an opinion about everything.
The irony would've been funny if it hadn't been so goddamn unnerving.
I reached for her. Not with purpose—just need. My fingers traced the line of her shoulder, down the warm skin of her arm, back up again. A mapping exercise. An act of memorization disguised as tenderness.
If she leaves, I'll still know this. That's what my fingers were doing. Building a sensory archive. Filing away every dip and curve and warm, smooth inch of her. Just in case.
Just in case she woke up and realized she was twenty-three with her whole life stretching out in front of her, and that the forty-year-old man sharing her bed came with enough baggage to fill a cargo terminal.
Just in case she met someone her own age who wasn't already broken in and held together with routine and control and the stubborn refusal to feel things too big.
Just in case.
She stirred under my touch. Made a sound—not awake, not asleep, somewhere in the in-between where her guard was down and her body responded to mine on pure instinct.
I shifted closer. Pressed my mouth to her shoulder.
Warm skin. A faint trace of her body wash—coconut and vanilla, which I'd mocked relentlessly the week she moved in and now associated so powerfully with her that I'd caught myself standing in the drugstore aisle staring at the bottle with a level of yearning that should've triggered an intervention.
My lips moved across her shoulder blade. Along the ridge of freckles. Into the curve of her neck, where her pulse beat against my mouth—calm, trusting, oblivious to the storm happening inside the man kissing her awake.
She made a sleepy, pleased sound that vibrated against my lips.
"Mmmm." Her body arched, a lazy stretch that pressed her back against my bare torso. "S'early."
"I know." I kissed the spot behind her ear. The one that made her shiver every time, reliable as gravity.
She shivered.
“You’re incorrigible,” she mumbled into the pillow.
“I am,” I agreed.
“Is that a complaint?”
She rolled onto her back. Her eyes were still half-closed, cheeks creased from the pillowcase, hair a glorious disaster. She looked rumpled and soft and so far removed from the sharp-tongued woman who terrorized me across a coffee counter that it made my ribs ache.
"Zero complaints," she said, her voice husky with sleep. She reached up and ran her fingers along my jaw. "Hi."
"Hi."
"Come here."
I went.
The kiss was unhurried. Her mouth was warm, soft, tasting of sleep and the mango lip balm she applied with religious devotion every night. I kissed her upper lip. Her lower lip. The corner of her mouth. Taking my time. Not rushing toward anything.
Her hand drifted up the back of my neck and into my hair, nails scraping lightly against my scalp, and the sound I made was not dignified. A groan. Low, coming from deep in my gut, pulled out of me by the simple act of this woman's fingers in my hair.
I never made sounds with Jessica. The thought intruded, unwelcome but true.
Sex with my ex-wife had been competent and contained.
Two people going through choreography they'd perfected, arriving at the destination on schedule, rolling apart, going to sleep.
I'd kept quiet. She'd preferred the dark. We got the job done but there’d been an emptiness to the act that always lingered.
With Willow, I was none of those things.
With Willow, I was loud and greedy and desperate in ways that should've alarmed a man my age. I wanted everything. Wanted to taste every inch of her, hear every sound, feel every tremor. Wanted to crawl inside the moments where she came apart beneath me and live there.
It wasn't just desire—though, God, the desire was a living, breathing thing inside me. It was the need to prove, without a single spoken word, that she mattered. That her mind, body and soul mattered. That the pleasure I wrung from her was my answer to a question I couldn't ask out loud.
Stay.
Stay and I'll spend every morning showing you what I can't say.
I kissed down her throat. Found the hollow at the base, pressed my open mouth there, felt her pulse jump. She tilted her head back, giving me access, trusting me with the vulnerable length of her neck, and the trust cracked open a place in me I didn't know how to name.
Her t-shirt—mine, technically, an old gray thing from MIT that looked infinitely better on her—rode up as she stretched beneath me. My hand found the bare skin of her stomach. Flat, warm, rising and falling with quickening breaths.
"Callum." My name in her mouth, thick with want. The sweetest sound I'd ever heard.
I dragged the shirt up. She lifted her arms, let me pull it over her head. Tossed it. Gone. And then she lay beneath me in nothing but a pair of pale blue cotton underwear, the early gray light catching the planes and curves of her body.
Beautiful. The word felt insufficient but I'd never been a poet. She was beautiful the way a building was beautiful when every line served a purpose and nothing was wasted—all function and form, elegant without trying.
I kissed her collarbone. The swell of her breast. Took her nipple into my mouth and her back bowed off the mattress with a gasp that went straight to my cock.
I took my time. Circled with my tongue, drew her deeper, applied pressure until her fingers were digging into my shoulders and her hips were doing an involuntary roll that drove me insane.
Switched to the other breast. Same treatment. Same devotion. Her skin was flushed now, a pink that spread across her chest, up her neck. She was panting. I could feel the vibration of held-back sounds against my mouth.
"Don't hold back," I said against her skin. "Let me hear you."
She let go. A moan—uncensored, raw, pulled from somewhere primal. It poured into my bloodstream and ignited every nerve.
I kissed lower. Down the center of her torso. The soft plane of her stomach. The dip of her navel. Each kiss deliberate, each one a sentence in a conversation I was conducting without words.
Here. A kiss to her hip bone. This is what you do to me.
Here. My mouth at the edge of her underwear, breath hot through the cotton. This is how bad I want you.
Here. Fingers hooking into the waistband, pulling down. This is what I can't bring myself to say.
She lifted her hips, let me strip the last barrier away. I sat back on my heels and looked at her—naked in my bed, in the predawn quiet of a Saturday morning, chest heaving, eyes dark with want, watching me with an openness that hit me in a way I wasn't prepared for.
No performance. No pretense. Just a woman laid bare.
For me.
I pressed my mouth to the inside of her knee. She jerked.
"Ticklish," she warned.
"Noted." I kissed higher. The inside of her thigh. That impossibly soft skin where the muscle curved inward. She spread wider, an invitation I accepted with a reverence that probably would've embarrassed us both if either of us had been paying attention to anything except the current trajectory.
I settled between her thighs, my shoulders pushing her legs apart. Her hand found my hair again—not directing, not demanding, just present. A tether.
That initial taste of her obliterated rational thought.