18. Freddie #2
Then his hands are over mine, swallowing my fingers whole. He guides my wrists through the correction in small movements, showing me the angle before he lets go and leaves me to try it on my own.
He doesn’t move as far away this time, though. He stays close, resting his forearm against his knee. “So,” he says quietly, “what’s your thing?”
I tilt my head slightly, skeptical, keeping my eyes on the wool. “My thing?”
“What you do to take the edge off. I’ve got knitting.” A small pause. “What do you have?”
“Oh,” I say, my voice softening as the defensive bite drains out of it. I focus hard on the knitting, trying not to mess up the next loop. “I used to play the guitar and sing. Occasionally the piano, if there was one around.”
Callum pauses. “You can sing?”
I shake my head a little, a faint, awkward half-smile touching my lips. “Used to.”
“Why’d you stop?”
“It’s…complicated,” I say, swallowing past a sudden tightness in my throat.
“My Resonance has always connected with music more than anything else, at least in terms of what makes me feel things deeply. Whenever something got to be too much, my immediate instinct was to pick up an instrument or sing it out. My mom says I’ve been like that since I was little.
It’s no surprise that I ended up working at a record shop. ”
I trace a thumb over the rough needle, avoiding his gaze. “But after everything that happened with Stella that day…it scared me. It scared me out of wanting to feel anything too much, you know? Feeling that deeply felt dangerous. So it kind of pushed me away from it.”
I take a quiet breath, clearing my throat. “Not permanently, though. I’ll still fiddle around with a guitar every now and then, or sing along to something, but…it’s not like it used to be.”
Callum doesn’t say anything right away. He doesn’t offer some tidy reassurance or try to smooth it over, which I appreciate more than he knows.
“Does it make you sad?” he asks quietly. “That you don’t sing anymore? Or play?”
I look down at the tangled mustard yarn in my lap, at the mess I’ve made and can’t quite fix.
“Yes,” I whisper. “It does.”
Callum gently reaches over, his thumb brushing a stray thread of yellow wool off my knuckle. “You’ll find your way back to it, Win,” he says. “One of these days, the joy will come back around.”
He pauses, a familiar smirk tugging at the side of his mouth. “Besides…the sun always comes out again, right?”
I look up, my breath hitching in my throat. Hearing my own words thrown back at me in that gravelly Scottish cadence hits way harder than it has any right to.
His face is right there—inches from mine in the pool of yellow lamp light. His eyes flick down to my mouth, lingering on my lips long enough that my entire body goes rigid.
Shit. Is he going to kiss me? Right now? Sitting on the cold floor in a comforter burrito with unbrushed teeth?
Callum blinks first. A flush climbs up his cheekbones and he pulls back that crucial extra inch, clearing his throat like it might cover for him. His shoulder finds the dresser again. “So. Any closer to sorting the Veil thing?”
I let out a breath that’s equal parts relief and something surprisingly close to disappointment, sinking back into my blanket cocoon. “I’ve been reading that book that Aria let us take nonstop,” I say. “Turns out there’s a real shortage of legal spellwork for breaking cosmic law. Shocking, I know.”
A low laugh rumbles out of him. “Shocking.”
“You know what we need?” I ask, unspooling my hands from the yarn and handing the needles back to him. “A break. A total reset.”
He looks down at the needles, eyebrow twitching up. “A break?”
“Yep.” I shuffle backward toward the bed, the comforter dragging behind me like a cape. “I’ve got something planned for you later today.”
His eyebrows pull together in that particular way they do—grumpy, meticulous, deeply suspicious of anything that doesn’t come with a printed schedule. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Too bad,” I say, hauling the blanket up over my shoulder as I climb back onto the mattress. “Goodnight, loverboy. Thanks for the knitting lesson.”
“Anytime, Win,” he says softly.
I pull the sheets to my chin and roll onto my side, eyes on the shifting shadows the lamp throws against the wall.
My head is spinning. It keeps rewinding to us on the floor—the warmth radiating off his chest at my back, the weight of his stare dropping to my mouth, the charged, unbearable nothingness that hung in the air right before he pulled away.
Does he actually feel that same pull towards me? Or am I completely out of my mind, misreading a guy who was just trying to show me how to hold a piece of string?
I press my face into the pillow, a knot forming in the pit of my stomach. I’m starting to really, really like him. And it’s the first time I’ve liked anyone this way in a very long time.
It scares the hell out of me.
In some weird, quiet way, Callum makes me want to be better.
He makes me want to face the stuff I’ve been running from.
But somehow, he also makes the mess of me right now feel like enough.
Like I’m not required to fix anything or perform some tidier version of myself just to earn a little space next to him.
The only other person who ever made me feel that safe is Stella.
And letting myself feel that way again—reaching for it, wanting it—feels like stepping out onto ice I already know is too thin to hold me.