15. Callum #2
“Um, actually? A lot of people?” She rolls her shoulders, leaning back on her hands. “I hate the feeling of clothes when I sleep, and I run hot. So yeah. You just better make sure that wall stays right where it is.”
“You cannot be serious right now,” I mutter, rubbing a hand down my face.
“Oh, I am deadly serious.”
She slides her legs off the edge of the mattress and stands up.
I try to keep my eyes locked strictly on her face, but my gaze betrays me, dropping down the line of her long, tanned legs.
The thin black ink of that snake tattoo winds its way up her right thigh, disappearing right under the hem of her oversized sweater. My throat goes dry as bone.
She reaches over to the bedside table and flicks the lamp switch, plunging the room into darkness save for the pale moonlight filtering through the lace curtains.
“There,” her voice floats through the quiet. “Now you don’t have to see a thing, and I can sleep in peace.”
I stand there in the dark, listening to the soft rustle of sheets as she climbs into her side of the bed.
The real issue isn’t even that she’s sleeping naked five feet away from me. The real issue—the one that’s the most unsettling—is that I don’t actually find it to be a problem at all.
I shake my head, pulling my clothes out of my duffel bag before heading into the small bathroom.
I turn the shower on hot, letting the steam fill the room while I wash off the sweat from my run.
I pull on a pair of grey sweatpants, skip the shirt, and dry my hair with a towel before cracking the bathroom door open.
When I step back into the bedroom, the glow of a cell phone screen lights up her face in the dark. Winifred’s pulled the duvet all the way up to her chin, wrapped tight like a cocoon.
“You really don’t find it strange?” I ask, pulling my side of the covers back and sitting on the edge of the mattress. “Sleeping completely naked next to a guy you barely know?”
She scoffs, her fingers moving fast over her screen. “Why should I? It’s just a body. I’ve got a massive moth tattooed right in the center of my chest between my tits, and a snake crawling all the way up my ass cheek. I stopped giving a shit what anyone thinks about my body years ago.”
My brain hits a hard wall. The visual of that ink trailing up her hip and over her ass hits me like a physical punch, and before I can stop it, my dick starts to get a mind of its own. I hiss out a quiet breath through my teeth, staring fixedly at the floorboards between my feet.
I need a distraction. Immediately.
“Why a moth?” I ask, my voice rougher than I want it to be as I slide under the covers. “Why not a butterfly?”
The mattress dips under my weight. The pillow wall sits right between us, a lumpy white border. I stare at it in the dark, a reluctant smile pulling at the corner of my mouth.
“Moths don’t lose their memories when they transform,” she murmurs.
“Inside the cocoon, their whole bodies break down into a liquid goo, but somehow, they hold onto what they learned before. They survive being completely unmade and rebuild themselves around the parts that mattered. Everyone loves butterflies for how pretty they look, but a moth carries every hard thing it went through in the dark and flies anyway. I kind of love them for that.”
“Hmm,” I murmur, settling my head onto the pillow. “Didn’t know that about them.”
Suddenly, she shifts under the duvet. She grabs the top pillow of our makeshift wall and tosses it down to the foot of the bed. In the dim moonlight, I can just make out the dark outline of her head resting on her arms, looking right over the lowered barrier at me.
“What about you?” she asks.
“What about me?”
“You got any fun tattoos?”
“Define fun.”
“I don’t know,” she says with a little shrug. “Do you have JUICY tatted across your ass or something?”
A bark of a laugh rips out of me before I can catch it. “Do I look like the kind of man who’d get JUICY tattooed on his ass?”
“You’d be surprised,” she says, and I can hear the smirk in her voice. “It’s always the broody, mysterious ones who end up being the biggest freaks.”
I smirk back into the dark, even though she can’t see it. “Oh, I never said I couldn’t be a freak. But there is no universe where I’m getting JUICY inked anywhere on my body.”
“What if it was your lover’s dying wish?” she asks quickly. “She’s on her deathbed, gasping for air, and she whispers, Callum…put JUICY on your left ass cheek, just for me…”
“Has anyone ever told you that you have a fucking demented, overactive imagination, or do people usually just nod and back away slowly?”
Winifred bursts out laughing—a big, loud, messy sound that bounces right off the thin drywall. It completely fills up the dark room, and hearing it right then just knocks all the air out of my lungs, taking the edge off a day that was starting to feel way too heavy.
Even in the shadows, I can see the pale outline of her smile, white teeth catching the faint moonlight. I know there’s a tiny, dark mole sitting just above the left corner of her top lip, and for some reason, my brain pinpoints exact coordinates for it in the dark.
“No, actually,” she says, with feigned superiority. “People usually tell me I’m a genius superfreak.”
I scoff, turning my head slightly on the flat pillow. “Then the people you hang out with are completely cracked.”
“You’d be so much fun at a real slumber party, Cal,” she muses, shifting under the duvet. “We could paint our toes, braid hair, talk about our deepest, darkest fears…”
“Yeah, well. Thankfully, I’ll never have to find out.”
“If it was a real sleepover, I’d definitely brush your mustache,” she says.
I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing out loud, my mouth twitching. “Really? That’s what you’d wanna do? Brush my facial hair?”
“Oh, trust me, loverboy,” she says softly. “There’s a lot of things I’d love to do with you. But yeah. Brushing your mustache is definitely on the list.”
My Adam’s apple bobs as I swallow hard.
I hate feeling off-balance. I’ve spent my entire adult life keeping my feet planted firmly on the ground, being the reliable one.
But Winifred just throws out these casual, flirty jabs without even blinking, and somehow, she manages to tilt my whole world on its axis.
I lie there in the quiet, wondering what the hell would happen if I actually flirted back, just once.
If I stopped holding back and let go. The thought feels dangerous.
Whatever’s brewing between us would spark so fast it’d burn the whole room down.
I can’t go there. I need to focus on why I’m here, clear this mess up, and get back to my normal life back home. No matter how distant and blurry that life is starting to feel.
“Can I touch it?” she asks suddenly.
I furrow my brows, glancing over the lowered white pillow barrier. “Touch what? What are you on about?”
“Your mustache,” she says, like it’s the most logical request in the world. “I want to touch it.”
My hand instinctively comes up, my thumb brushing the coarse hair above my lip. “Are you out of your mind?”
“Well, yeah,” she admits easily. “But I still want to see what it feels like. Honestly, Cal, it’s one of the most perfectly groomed ones I’ve ever seen. Just once. Come on.”
I narrow my eyes at the dark outline of her face, letting out a long, defeated breath through my nose. “One touch. That’s it. You get five seconds.”
She lets out a giddy little giggle, shimmying closer to me on the mattress and shoving the middle pillow completely out of the way. She bridges the gap between us, bringing a wave of her vanilla and strawberry scent with her.
Her hand comes up into the space between our faces. Her index finger is soft and slightly hesitant as she glides it along the trim line of hair just above my top lip. Her skin lightly grazes mine, the pads of her fingers tracing the curve of my mouth before sweeping across the mustache again.
My whole body locks up. My chest stops moving.
She has no fucking clue that all I can think about is leaning forward half an inch, wrapping my hand around her wrist, taking that index finger into my mouth, and sucking it.
My jaw clenches so tight my teeth ache as I force myself to remain completely still, staring right into her eyes in the dim light.
Christ. She’s just touching my mustache. It’s a stupid joke. It shouldn’t be anywhere near enough to completely unravel me, but my heart’s pounding hard enough I’m actually sweating.
She pulls her finger back, but she doesn’t go back over to her side of the bed. She stays right there, resting her chin in the palm of her hand, her face inches from mine.
In the dim light and with her this close, I can see every little detail of her face.
The faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose.
The dark, messy strands of hair clinging to her cheek.
That tiny beauty mark sitting right above her top lip, almost like a secret.
She isn’t polished or necessarily put together, by any means.
She’s a little chaotic, and so ridiculously pretty it makes something in my throat nearly close up.
I’ve met plenty of people who don’t understand the concept of personal space, and usually it drives me up the wall.
But this doesn’t feel like someone invading my bubble.
It feels…intimate. Her eyes drift over my face—my forehead, my nose, the line of my jaw—tracing me with a curiosity I’m not used to receiving from anyone.
“What’s your deepest, darkest fear?” she asks softly.
I pull my gaze back to hers. “Why?”
She shrugs, her shoulder rising under the oversized knit of her sweater. “Why not?”
Can’t argue with that logic, I guess.
I let out a slow breath, turning my head slightly to look toward the window, watching the shadow of thick branches dance in the wind before looking back at her.