10. Charli
10
CHARLI
I push the lace into the boots, pinching my tongue between my teeth as I line it up with the holes. Callum pulled them out of storage for me, a pair that were too small for him, since all the shoes I have are those little kitten heels I wore for the wedding. While these boots are still way too big for me, I know I don’t have much of a choice of clothing here—I’ve been wearing Callum’s jeans and shirt for days now, hardly my sexiest outfit choice…
Not that it matters about looking sexy here, of course. That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway. Because there’s no way I’m going to start worrying about what I’m wearing while I’m staying in this place, right? I’m on the run from my damn ex, doing everything I can to keep my head down and avoid landing in any more trouble, praying that he’ll lose interest in me and move on with his life, and yet…
And yet, that kiss with Dax has been the only thing I can think about these last few days, and I don’t know when that’s going to change.
I still don’t know how the hell it actually happened. I keep running it over and over again inside my head, the argument we were having before we started making out, and that sudden shift that seemed to happen in the same moment between us, when his lips were on mine and all I wanted in the world was more.
I haven’t been kissed like that in a long time. By someone who really seems to want me, desire me, from some place deep down within them. Not since Callum, actually, and that’s screwing with my head even more.
Because why would I want something like that with Dax? Is it because he looks so much like Callum? I’ve been trying to tell myself that’s all it is, my mind getting wires crossed staying here with these siblings, but honestly, I’m starting to doubt that. Because Dax is so different from Callum, so it’s not like I could get the two of them mixed up. I know it’s Dax I want, specifically, and…
And not just him. Being so close to Callum again has made my head spin. Brought me back to those days we spent together when we were dating, when I wanted nothing more than to spend my life with him. Sure, I was young then, but the connection I felt was real. I had to convince myself it was just a fiction I’d invented in my mind in the years that have passed since, but now that I’m back in his presence, I can’t argue with myself any longer. That chemistry is still there, as it always has been, and that’s…that’s kind of a lot to wrap my head around.
And then there’s Chuck. Chuck, who’s sweet and settled here. Who cooks and gardens and generally seems like the most relaxed out of the three of them. I like him a whole bunch too. But is it desire, is it relief, is it something else entirely? I’m not sure I know.
I’m not sure I want to know.
Finally, I stab the lace through the last hole, and let out a sigh of relief as I wind it through. I’ve had to re-lace the boots to give them any chance of fitting, but at least now they’ll have a better chance of not slipping from my feet every time I take a step.
I slip the other boot on and get to my feet—they actually don’t feel too bad. And, truth be told, I’ll swallow whatever pill I have to in order to go outside again. It’s been way too long since I’ve been cramped up in this place, and while I know they’re just keeping me here to make sure I stay safe, I want to go out into the world again, just a little.
I open the bedroom door and step out—and Callum glances up from beside the main entrance, offering me a quick smile.
“What do you think?” I ask, striking a playful pose in my new boots.
He chuckles. “Not bad,” he replies. “How do they feel? Are they comfortable?”
“I don’t know yet,” I reply. “I’ll need to wear them out first. Where are you going?”
He glances outside. I can tell he doesn’t want me coming with him, but if he thinks he can get rid of me that easily, he has another thing coming.
“I was going out to check on some of our traps,” he replies.
“Can I come with you?”
He looks me up and down for a moment. There’s something about being under his gaze that makes it hard for me to think straight—I know I shouldn’t let it get to me, but it’s hard not to.
“I don’t know. You’re still healing?—”
“I’m fine,” I reply, waving a hand and trying to ignore the small jolt of pain that runs up my side at the motion. “I need to get out. Please, Callum. Let me come with you, even just for a little while?”
I bite my lip and widen my eyes at him—a dirty trick, since I know this is exactly what worked on him when we were first together. He pauses for a moment, and then sighs, shaking his head.
“Come on,” he tells me. “It’s warm enough out for now. Might as well test those new boots…”
I clap my hands together and grab a spare jacket from the rack next to the door, before following him out into the forest. It’s actually really pretty out here, now the snow has melted—it’s not exactly balmy weather, but it’s sunny, and the light dapples through the leaves to create delicate patterns and shadows everywhere we walk.
“It’s beautiful out here,” I remark as I do my best to keep pace with him. “I can see why you moved out here.”
He glances over his shoulder at me, as though surprised to hear that.
“What?” I laugh, slightly nervous. I still feel out of place here—no matter how pretty this place is, I can’t help but wonder if danger is just waiting for me around every corner, ready to spring out when I least expect it.
“Nothing,” he replies. “Just not often that people say we’re anything other than crazy for coming out to this place by ourselves.”
“Really? I thought it was a lot of people’s fantasy, you know, taking off into the woods, never to be seen again…”
“Maybe in theory,” he replies. “But in reality, not many people can hack it. It takes a lot of preparation. A lot of focus. A lot of effort. Most people get bored of it after a few weeks, maybe a month or two. And they start missing how easy everything was in the outside world.”
“The outside world,” I tease. “You make it sound like another planet.”
“It is.”
He doesn’t sound like he’s joking. He pauses in a clearing between a few trees, and drops down to check a trap—it’s empty, and he replaces and resets it swiftly.
“You really feel that way?” I ask him as we start to walk again. “About it being another world, I mean?”
“Yep.”
“You didn’t say anything like that when we were together,” I blurt out, before I can stop myself. As soon as the words are past my lips, I wish I could reel them back in. The two of us have been doing a damn good job of pretending we don’t remember anything that went down between us all those years ago, but we both know it’s there.
He slows slightly, shaking his head. “I didn’t want to admit it, back then,” he confesses, finally. “Not when I was with you. I guess…”
He trails off. I reach out to touch his arm, just slightly—I need to know what the truth was. I’ve been wondering about it for years, what drove him away from me all those years ago.
“Was it something I did?” I ask him finally. That’s the part that’s been tormenting me the most, wondering if there’s more I could have done to make him feel at home. When I first met him, he was just a few months out of the serve he’d performed in Eastern Europe, and he barely spoke about it. I never pushed him for more information, figuring he would share it with me if he wanted to, but maybe it seemed to him like I just couldn’t handle hearing it from him.
“What?”
He rounds on me, stopping dead in his tracks. The way he’s looking at me, it’s as though he thinks I’m insane.
I blink, staring back at him. “I mean—I mean, the reason you left,” I continue. “Was that because of something I did?”
He shakes his head slowly. “No. Jesus, Charli, no, it never had anything to do with you,” he murmurs, and he takes a step toward me. There’s a look in his eyes that I can’t read—almost angry, but not aimed at me, aimed at himself. Like he’s furious to think that I might have thought that way about myself because of him.
“Then why?” I whisper, my voice cracking slightly. I didn’t realize how much emotion was tied up in all of this for me, not until this instant. I can’t believe I finally have the chance to get some answers—but he’s still staring at me as though he can’t give them to me.
He grits his teeth, draws his gaze away from me, and takes a deep breath. “Does it really matter?”
“Yes, it matters,” I shoot back. “Because you leaving me like that—it’s part of the reason I’m here right now.”
He frowns. “What?”
“Tell me,” I plead with him. “Please, just…just tell me what I did wrong?—”
“Charli,” he cuts me off, grabbing my hand and squeezing it tight. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Ever. You were perfect. It was me. I was the problem. I was always the problem.”
“How can you say that?” I demand. “I—we were happy together, Callum. At least, I thought we were, I don’t?—”
“I was happy with you, Charli,” he murmurs, tightening his grip on my hand, as though he’s reaching back all those years to keep hold of me. “Really happy. But that was…that was the only time I was truly happy.”
He pauses for a moment and looks away from me, gathering himself before he goes on. I can tell this is tough for him to talk about, but I need to hear it. I need to know what happened all those years ago.
“Because I never felt like myself again after I came back from service,” he murmurs. “After we lost our dad that year, I…I just couldn’t stop thinking about the shit he’d been through. The shit he had survived, and how it was too much for him. I never felt like I belonged with anyone my age, apart from you. Like they just looked right through me.”
Swallowing hard, he went on. “And when I took you to the cabin, the place where I’d always been happy as a kid,” he continues, “that was my last chance. The last chance I was going to give myself to feel normal. And if I didn’t, I wasn’t going to burden you with the weight of it, everything I’d been through, it just wasn’t fair. You were young, you were so free, you had your whole life ahead of you, and I wasn’t going to bring you down with me. So…so I left.”
I stare at him. All this time, I had wondered why he walked away from me like he did. I wondered, torturing myself with questions, about what I could have done to change things. And now he’s telling me that it was nothing to do with me? That it was all in his head? I want to scream. I want to hug him. I want to tell him that he’s the biggest fucking idiot on the planet…
But as I open my mouth to say something, a noise catches my attention—a slight whistling, followed by a bang and a crack.
Callum’s head whips around—my gaze follows his, and I see a small gash in the edge of a tree beside us, splinters still falling to the ground around us. I’m about to ask him what the hell is happening, when he grabs my shoulders and lets out a panicked roar.
“Charli, get down!”
He pulls me to the ground just before another bullet whistles through the air, slamming into the tree next to us and ricocheting onto the soft earth next to me. My eyes widen as it hits me—we’re being fired at!
“Shit, shit, shit,” Callum mutters, moving to block my body from the line of fire with his own.
“What the fuck is happening?” I hiss, and he shakes his head.
“We can work that part out later,” he replies. “Right now, we need to get out of here. Fast.” He catches my face in his hand and looks deep into my eyes, his gaze blazing with sincerity and concern. “You do exactly as I say, Charli. You understand?”
I nod. I can hear my heartbeat slamming against my ribs, the blood rushing through my veins. I know this is about me—this has to be. Out here, nobody would come looking for me if it wasn’t James. And I feel like a fucking idiot for being so naive. How could I think I would get away with everything so easily? Wandering around the forest, like I’m totally safe, like I don’t have a psycho on my tail willing to do whatever it takes to?—
Before I can linger any more in that line of thinking, Callum grabs my hand and pulls me forward. “The shooting’s coming from over there, down by the river,” he mutters. “We need to get to shelter…”
“Back to the cabin?”
He shakes his head. “We can’t risk leading them there,” he replies. “We need to lure them somewhere else. There’s a hollowed-out tree not far from here, I’ve camped out in it a few times while I’ve been hunting. That should give us cover for now…”
I nod, my eyes wide. Right now, my life is in his hands, and I know it. Another bullet whistles through the air, exploding a branch just above me into a shower of splinters.
“Now!” he hisses. Tugging on my hand, he guides me through the forest and toward safety.
He keeps low, making sure we don’t give whoever is after us a clear line of fire—I don’t know a damn thing about avoiding gunshots, but if there’s one person who does, it’s Callum. I grip tight to his hand as he pulls me from tree to tree, counting out three shots before he makes a move to the next one.
“They’re loading every three shots,” he mutters under his breath. “We can use that. We have ten, maybe twelve seconds between every third shot to move, and they won’t see us.”
“You think they’re on their own?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I have no idea, but there’s only one person shooting right now,” he replies. “There might be more people out in the forest, but it’s just one guy after us now…”
Suddenly, the third shot rings out, and he dives toward another tree. My whole body is numb, not just from the chill that’s still in the air, but the terror—and the knowledge that I’ve brought this down on his shoulders. He came out here to escape everything he’d been through before, and now, whether he likes it or not, he’s caught up in the midst of violence all over again…
I stick close by his side, and soon we’re just a few dozen yards from the hollowed-out tree—he points it out to me.
“There,” he murmurs. “You see the gap in the wood? There’s a bigger hollow inside there, we’ll both fit easily.”
“The opening doesn’t look big enough?—”
“We’ll have to go one at a time,” he replies urgently, glancing over his shoulder. “Wait till the third shot goes off, and then run.”
“But I?—”
“Run, Charli. I’m not letting anything happen to you, you hear me?”
There’s a ferocious protectiveness in his voice that catches me off guard for a moment—but, as he tightens his grip on my hand one more time and then releases it, I know he means it. I can’t fuck this up. It’s not just me I have to think of here, it’s both of us, and I’m not going to let him get hurt on my account.
Before I can stop myself, I plant a kiss on his cheek—and then, at last, the third shot rings out, and I take off toward the hollow.
I’m counting out the seconds inside my head—the boots slow me a little, big enough to throw my stride off. Ten, nine, eight…
I reach the edge of the hollow. I have to pry aside a few branches to widen it slightly, and there’s still some frost stuck to the wood, rendering it stiff and unyielding against my grip.
Seven, six, five…
Finally, I pull the branches back, and I force one leg inside—come on, come on—and then the other. The bark of the entrance scratches at my skin where the jacket has come away from my neck, but I ignore it.
Four, three, two…
Just as I hit my final second, I tumble into the hollow, finally concealed. I let out a breath I didn’t even realize I was holding—and then peer back out to make sure Callum is okay.
His eyes are pinned on the hollow, making certain I’ve reached it in one piece. I count out the shots again, waiting for him to come after me, and thank God I don’t have to wait long for him to do it.
He manages to enter the hollow a lot more gracefully than me, throwing himself over the threshold and diving into the small space beside me. It’s big enough for both of us to sit up, maybe lie down if we have to stay here longer, but honestly, I wouldn’t care if it was nothing larger than a broom cupboard. We’re out of sight, and there’s no chance the shooter will come looking for us here.
Callum grabs a couple of branches from around us and pushes them over the small entrance to hide us even more. It’s doubtful he would have come searching for us here anyway, but it’s still a good idea, making sure we’re not going to be busted.
In silence, the two of us hold our breath as we wait to see if the danger has passed—and if we are truly safe here.
Though the only thing I can really focus on is the pressure of his shoulder against mine, and the familiar scent of his skin just a few inches from my own.