Chapter 6 #2
Heat bloomed under my skin. My pulse beat hard in my throat, exactly where I had imagined his fingers. My core fluttered again, helpless and greedy, because it seemed even reassurance could become erotic if delivered by Callum Rowe in a dark restaurant while his eyes refused to let me hide.
I wanted to ask what else he saw.
If he had looked at my mouth as many times as I had looked at his.
Whether his restraint felt as physical as mine, whether it sat in his hands and jaw and shoulders, and if he had to keep choosing it. Or whether, maybe, men like him were simply born able to lock doors inside themselves.
Instead, I said, “That makes it harder.”
“Does it?” he asked, his face flickering with something I couldn’t quite figure out.
“Yes.”
The honesty slipped out before I had time to disguise it. I could have pretended I meant grief, employment, growing up, or even the awkwardness of being known too well and not enough. All of that was true, but none of it was the whole truth.
Callum set his wineglass down with precise care. “Then we should be careful,” he replied.
The word should have cooled me. It did not. It made me think of the charity dinner again, his hand at my back. As if careful meant danger was close. As if careful meant he knew exactly how close.
“Yes,” I said.
Neither of us moved for a second.
Then he reached for the dessert menu, though we had already ordered, and adjusted it by less than an inch. It was such a transparent attempt to give his hands something harmless to do that a wild, nervous laugh nearly escaped me. I pressed my lips together.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I smiled.
“Avery.” His deep voice was like a warning.
The way he said my name made the need low in me turn over again.
“I was just thinking that you moved the menu like it offended you.”
A flash of amusement broke through the tension. “It was crooked.”
“It was not.”
“It was.”
“You build towers. I’m sure everything looks crooked to you.”
“Most things are.”
“Do I look crooked to you? Off by a little bit?”
The question was playful, but it was also reckless. I knew it as soon as it left my mouth.
Callum’s gaze moved over me once, controlled but no longer completely neutral. My face. My hair. The neckline of my dress. Back to my eyes. It was not enough to be improper, but it was enough to set my body on fire.
“No,” he said.
My mouth went dry.
The waiter returned to clear the plates, and I had never been so grateful to another human being. We both shifted back into civilized people. Callum asked for the check before I could pretend I might argue, and when I opened my mouth anyway, he gave me one look that closed it.
“Do not start,” he warned.
“I am capable of paying for my own tart.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Then—”
“Avery.” He spoke with a quiet sternness that made parts of me tingle.
I stopped.
He smiled faintly. “Let me have this.”
It should have annoyed me. It did, a little.
But beneath the annoyance was a much softer feeling, almost like the strange comfort of being taken care of without feeling handled.
That had always been the difference with him.
Even when he was firm, maybe even especially when he was firm, there was a steadiness underneath it that never seemed to require my humiliation.
“Fine,” I sniffed, but with a tiny smirk.
“Thank you.”
“But tomorrow I’m buying my own coffee.”
“Ambitious.”
“And lunch.”
“We’ll alert the finance department.”
I smiled despite myself and looked away because smiling at him too long felt like confession.
When we stood, Callum moved around the table but did not touch me.
I noticed the absence of it. It was humiliating, somehow, that my body had begun waiting for a hand at my back, a brief press at my elbow, some allowable brush of contact I could replay later and pretend had meant nothing.
He held my coat instead, and I slid my arms into it with him standing behind me.
For three seconds, he was close enough that I felt the warmth of him at my back. His hands lifted the coat lightly onto my shoulders, not lingering or grazing anywhere they did not belong. Still, my body reacted as if he had dragged his palms over my bare skin.
Need fluttered hard through me, and I clenched my fingers inside my sleeves.
He was forbidden, I reminded myself.
He stepped back.
“Ready?” he asked.
No, I thought.
“Yes,” I said.
Outside, rain had left the streets glossy and dark, reflecting gold from the restaurant windows and red from passing taillights.
The air smelled like wet pavement, smoke from somewhere distant, and the faint sweetness of spring trying to push its way through the city.
The driver brought the car around, but Callum paused beneath the awning with me while we waited.
For a moment, without the table between us, I immediately became aware of his proximity.
He was so close.
I could see the dense shadow of the stubble along his jaw, the small line near his mouth that deepened when he was amused, and how his gaze moved briefly over the sidewalk, the car, me, then away again.
“I had a good time,” I said, because someone needed to say something before I did something unforgivable like stare openly at his mouth.
“So did I,” he returned.
“Even with the orchid trauma?”
“Especially with the orchid trauma.”
I laughed softly and his gaze returned to my face, and then for one second, the city around us seemed to hold its breath. Then his gaze dropped and he cleared his throat.
“Tomorrow will be different,” he stated plainly.
“I know.” I wished my voice wasn’t quite so quiet but I couldn’t do any better.
“At work, I need distance.” It felt like his words were hammering nails into a coffin.
My chest tightened, though I had known this was coming. It was rational. It was the correct thing to do. I hated it anyway.
“Because of the job,” I said, sounding reasonable and mature, which was not how I was feeling.
“Yes.”
“And because of the godfather-goddaughter thing.”
His jaw tightened slightly. “Because of many things.”
I looked down at the wet sidewalk. “I can do distance.”
“I believe you.”
The car pulled up.
Silence passed between us for a moment before he started, almost like he was remembering himself. Then he opened the door for me, and this time, as I stepped forward, his hand did touch my back.
Just above my waist.
It was nothing. It was manners. It was guidance into the car, the kind of touch any man might offer any woman on any sidewalk after any dinner.
My body did not care.
Heat sparked from the place where his palm rested, spreading under the fabric of my coat, down my spine, low through my belly.
My core fluttered again so intensely that I almost missed the step into the car.
His hand withdrew as soon as I caught my balance, but the absence stayed behind, hot and cold and clear and maddening.
I sat down, smoothing my dress under my thighs, and stared straight ahead while he rounded the car because I needed the four seconds alone to remember how breathing worked.
The ride back to my apartment was quieter than the ride to dinner.
Callum asked me about Jules, and I told him stories safer than the ones Jules would have told about herself.
How we met in a campus laundry room when I had accidentally dyed half my clothes pink.
How she once convinced me to crash a graduate engineering party because the food was better and the men wore interesting glasses.
“She sounds formidable,” he said.
“She is.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“You need formidable people.”
“I have Benjamin now, apparently.”
“Benjamin is not a people. He’s an institution.”
“I would have to agree.”
His laugh was husky and warm in the dark car, and I felt it like fingers against my skin.
I crossed one leg over the other, then uncrossed it when the movement made the dress shift higher on my thigh. Callum’s gaze flicked downward once, so fast I might have missed it if I had not been watching him in the window reflection like a criminal. He looked away immediately.
My pulse leapt.
The rest of the drive, I became painfully aware of every inch of myself and him too.
My knee angled toward him. The hem of the dress.
The borrowed heel slipping slightly at the back of my foot.
My hands folded over my purse. His hand resting on his own thigh, fingers relaxed, thumb brushing once against the seam of his trousers.
I wondered what those fingers would feel like slipping beneath the hem of my dress.
I shut the thought down so hard I nearly gave myself a headache.
He was forbidden.
When the car stopped outside my building, I should have reached for the handle immediately. Instead, I looked at him.
“Thank you for dinner,” I said.
“You’re welcome.”
“And for today.”
His expression softened, and I almost wished it hadn’t. I was better equipped for the heat than the tenderness. Heat could be blamed on biology. Tenderness felt like something I did not know how to survive.
“You earned today,” he said.
I shook my head slightly. “You gave me a chance.”
“Yes. And you showed up for it.”
The words settled over me, warm and unbearable. I wanted, suddenly and fiercely, to be the person he seemed to think I could become.
“I’ll be there at nine,” I said.
“I know.”
“You sound very sure.”
“I am.”
“Benjamin will probably be disappointed.”
“Benjamin is nourished by disappointment. Don’t worry about him.”
I smiled, then looked toward my building.
The lock still looked terrible. The hallway light flickered behind the glass.
My apartment was upstairs, with its laundry chair and unpaid bills and the bed where I had thought about this man the night before with my hand between my thighs and shame burning under my skin.
The memory rose so abruptly that I stilled.
Callum noticed.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Avery.”
I looked back at him, and the car felt suddenly too small. There were so many things I could not say.
I was thinking about last night.
I was thinking about you.