Chapter 6
Avery
By the time the dessert menus arrived, I had become fluent in pretending I was not affected by Callum Rowe.
I smiled at the waiter and studied the menu as though the difference between chocolate tart and crème br?lée required legal counsel.
I kept my hands folded in my lap because they had started doing embarrassing things whenever I let them exist freely on the table, like tapping the stem of my wineglass, smoothing the napkin, or touching my throat.
Across from me, Callum leaned back with the easy control of a man who had never once been personally threatened by dessert.
His jacket had fallen open, one arm resting on the table, the other hand loose near his glass.
Everything about him looked unhurried, intentional, and infuriatingly composed.
The old brass light of the restaurant caught the silver at his temples and the clean line of his shirt collar, and I hated, with a sudden and useless fury, that he could sit there looking like that while I was trying not to imagine what his hands would feel like on my waist.
Not that I was imagining it.
I was absolutely not imagining his hands there, broad and warm, fingers pressing into the soft give of me through the navy dress Jules had loaned me.
I was definitely not imagining him pulling me closer with that same measured firmness he used when he told me to say more than yes.
I was a serious future employee. Serious future employees did not sit across from their new CEO, who also happened to be their godfather, and wonder what his palm would feel like wrapped around their throat as he pinned them to the wall and kissed them breathless.
My core fluttered again more intensely this time, and I took a quick sip of water because wine was clearly no longer my friend.
Callum noticed because why wouldn’t he.
“Too warm?” he asked.
“No.” My voice came out normal enough to be miraculous. “Just realizing Jules was right about the moral geometry.”
His brow lifted. “Should I be concerned that I understand less of this evening every time Jules is mentioned?”
“She has that effect. She’s less a person than a weather system with lipstick.”
He smiled, and the pressure in my chest eased slightly. Banter helped. Banter was safe, mostly. It let me stand close to dangerous things and pretend I had only come over to admire the architecture.
“Is she the one who made you write the email?” he asked.
“Bullied me into it, more like, but yes.”
“Then I owe her dinner.”
“You absolutely do not. She would become unbearable.”
“She already sounds unbearable.”
“She is. But in a load-bearing way.”
His smile deepened at that, and I felt absurdly pleased to see it.
“Good friend, then.”
“The best.” I looked down at my water glass, rolling the stem between my fingertips. “She’s the reason I came today. I probably would’ve talked myself out of it otherwise.”
“I suspected as much.” His deep voice was mesmerizing me and I was having to apply more focus to continuing to breathe than should be required.
A fork dropped somewhere behind us. A waiter murmured near the bar. Someone at another table laughed too loudly and was politely ignored. Callum was looking at me with a restraint so visible it began to feel like its own form of confession.
He didn’t look away.
Neither did I.
Then the waiter arrived with dessert, and I nearly thanked him.
The chocolate tart was beautiful, a dark glossy round with a scatter of sea salt, a swipe of cream, and a few berries placed on top of it.
I picked up my fork because it gave me something to do.
Callum’s pear cake arrived with powdered sugar dusted over the top, and his espresso sat in a small white cup that looked ridiculous in his hand.
He took a sip, and I watched the motion despite every sane instinct I possessed.
His mouth on the rim of the cup.
The slight hollow of his cheeks as he drank.
How his throat moved when he swallowed.
My thoughts went straight from that to his mouth on my neck, slow and hot, just below my ear.
I imagined him there with such vivid force that my hand tightened around my fork.
His breath against my skin. His lips pressing once, then again.
The scrape of the stubble of his beard. His hand at my nape, holding me still because I could not be trusted to remain upright.
Need pulsed through me again, annoyingly insistent. Humiliated by my own body, I forced my attention to the tart and cut into it with the grim focus of a surgeon. I took a bite.
“Good?” he asked.
I closed my eyes before I could stop myself. “Ooohh…”
The tart was bitter and rich and smooth, salt catching at the edge of the chocolate, cream softening everything just enough. The taste of it was almost indecent. Or maybe I had made myself so sensitive that dessert had joined the conspiracy against me.
When I opened my eyes, Callum was watching me.
Something hot and quiet moved across his face, gone almost before I could identify it.
I had seen it, though. I knew I had seen it.
It was the same small fracture I had noticed in his office when I said I understood it was a real job.
The same reset. The same intentional return to control.
My body answered before I could stop it.
I pressed my thighs together again beneath the table and looked down at the plate.
“So very good,” I answered, too late.
“I gathered.”
His voice was slightly rougher.
It had to be the espresso.
It was not the espresso.
For several minutes, we were both saved by chocolate and old stories.
He told me about a dinner my parents had hosted when I was little, one I barely remembered, where my father had tried to grill in a storm because he had ‘already committed to the steaks emotionally.’ Callum and my mother had watched from the kitchen while Dad stood outside under an umbrella, swearing at lightning as if it could be negotiated with.
I remembered flashes of it from my mother laughing into a dish towel, to thunder shaking the windows, and my father coming inside soaked and triumphant with a plate of perfectly cooked steaks.
Callum told it better than I remembered it.
He told it like he had loved my father, but not in the vague, honorary way people loved their friends’ dead relatives after enough years had softened them into anecdotes.
He remembered the cadence of Dad’s voice, the exact ridiculousness of his confidence, and how my mother would press two fingers to her temple when she wanted to appear exasperated but was secretly delighted.
Listening to him felt like finding a box of photographs I had not known existed.
Each story hurt a little, but the hurt was like pressing a bruise I wished was a tattoo.
“I forgot about that one,” I laughed, after one story about my mother hiding my Christmas presents in the dryer because she knew I never did laundry voluntarily.
Callum smiled into his wine. “She said it was the safest place in the house.”
“She was correct.”
“You were fourteen. Laundry was apparently an ideological issue.”
“I had principles.”
“You had a floor wardrobe.”
I laughed. “She told you that?”
“Your mother told me many things.”
The softness in his voice pulled the desire out of the dark place where I had tried to keep it and wrapped it in tenderness, which made it much harder to dismiss as simple lust. I wanted him, yes and that was bad enough, but I also wanted him to keep talking.
I wanted every memory he had. I wanted the version of my parents he carried inside him.
I wanted his steadiness, his attention, and how he could make me feel less alone without crowding me.
And then, because my body was an idiot, I also wanted to crawl into his lap and find out whether all that restraint would break if I gave him a reason.
I took another bite of tart and nearly hated myself. He was my godfather. He was my new boss. He was the man who had been kind to me when I asked for help.
Those facts should have stacked into a wall. Instead, they made a door I kept trying not to open.
“Do you ever think about him?” I asked. The question came out quieter than I meant it to. “Dad, I mean. Just randomly.”
Callum looked at me for a long moment. “Yes.”
“When?”
“When something goes wrong on a project and I know he would have had a terrible joke at the ready. When I see someone wearing those old canvas boat shoes he refused to throw away.” His thumb moved once along the base of his wineglass. “When I worry about you.”
My breath caught and he seemed to realize the weight of that last sentence after it was already said. His gaze moved briefly away, toward the restaurant window, then back.
“I mean that in the way I always have,” he clarified.
A line, gently drawn, but still drawn between us.
I should have been grateful. Part of me was, but the rest of me felt a stupid, irrational sting, as if I had been caught wanting to be seen differently and then reminded of my assigned seat at the children’s table.
“Right,” I agreed. “Of course.”
His eyes narrowed slightly, not in anger, but with attention. “Avery.”
I looked at my plate. “It’s fine.”
“That usually means it isn’t.”
“You’re not the only one committed to accuracy.”
There was a pause. When he spoke again, his voice was low enough that it slid under the noise of the restaurant and reached only me.
“You are not a little girl to me.”
My fork stilled over my plate.
“I need you to understand that,” he intoned with seriousness.
The room seemed to pull inward around us as I lifted my eyes to his.
“I have known you since you were born,” he explained. “That matters. I won’t pretend it doesn’t. I won’t insult either of us by acting as though this is simple. But I also know you are an adult woman sitting across from me. I can see that. I can see that clearly.”
There were sentences that entered the body through the ears and went no further. There were others that slid between the ribs and took up residence.
This was the second kind.