2. Callum
CALLUM
I don't sleep.
Not for a single goddamn minute.
I lie flat on my back in the dark, one arm behind my head, staring at the ceiling while the house settles into its usual nighttime quiet—the hum of the refrigerator, the occasional creak of old pipes—and all I see is her.
The way her back arched off the mattress.
The way her fingers twisted into my hair and held me against her chest. The sound she made when my mouth sealed around her nipple and drew the first warm rush of milk across my tongue.
Sweet. She tasted sweet.
I press my tongue against the roof of my mouth and I can still catch the ghost of it.
Warm, thin, faintly sweet—nothing like I expected, not that I'd spent any time before yesterday imagining what my stepsister's breast milk would taste like.
But now the flavor sits in my memory like a brand, seared in, permanent.
The way it flowed when I sucked harder, how her body responded to each pull with a full-body tremble she couldn't fake.
Her nipple stiffening against my tongue, her ribs expanding with those sharp little breaths, milk spilling faster than I could swallow until it ran down my chin and dripped onto the towel bunched between us.
I scrub a hand over my face. Three months.
I've lived under the same roof as Clara Fielding for three months, ever since my father married her mother in that overblown ceremony at the botanical garden.
Three months of watching her pad through the kitchen in cotton shorts, barefoot, her black hair piled in a messy knot.
Three months of catching her scent—something floral, jasmine maybe, or gardenia—when she brushed past me in the hallway.
Three months of her sharp mouth and her sharper eyes and that stubborn little chin she lifts when she decides she's not going to do what I tell her to do.
I wanted her from the first second I saw her. Standing in the foyer the day I came home from a work trip, her brown eyes huge and wary, one hand gripping the strap of her backpack, and I remember thinking: This is going to be a problem.
But I kept it locked down. I kept my hands to myself, my expression neutral, my voice level.
I made her breakfast she refused to eat.
I photographed her class schedule from the magnetic whiteboard on the fridge and knew when she was home and when she wasn't without ever having to ask.
I catalogued every man's name that came out of her mouth—professors, classmates, the barista at the campus coffee shop who wrote smiley faces on her cup—and I filed each one away for future reference.
That was before yesterday.
Yesterday changed everything. Yesterday I had my stepsister's nipple in my mouth and her milk on my tongue and her fingers clutching my skull while she moaned my name, and something that had been straining at its leash inside me snapped clean off the chain.
She's mine. She doesn't know it yet, but she's mine.
I roll over, grab my phone off the nightstand.
2:47 AM. Her bedroom is twelve feet down the hall.
I could be at her door in four steps, inside in five.
I could sit on the edge of her bed and pull the covers back and check if she's swollen again, if the pressure's building, if she needs me.
Because she will need me. Whatever's causing the lactation—hormonal, medical, stress-induced—it isn't going to resolve overnight, and I am the only person who knows.
I am going to keep it that way.
The hours grind past. I get up at five, shower, make coffee, and sit at the kitchen island waiting for her.
She doesn't come down until seven, and when she does she's dressed in jeans and a loose, dark sweater—deliberately shapeless, I notice, baggy enough to hide any leaking through her bra—and she won't look at me.
She grabs a granola bar, fills a water bottle, and walks straight out the front door without a word.
I hear the bus rumble to a stop at the end of the street two minutes later.
Her car keys are still hanging on the hook by the door where she left them. She took the bus instead of driving, which means she has no way to redirect her route home, no detour she can take to avoid me. The realization settles in my chest with a quiet, steady certainty, and I'm already moving.
I grab my jacket off the back of the chair, lift my keys from the counter, and walk out to the garage. My car—a black Porsche 911, low to the ground—pulls out of the driveway with a sound like controlled fury. I take surface streets toward campus, unhurried.
I'm parked on the street half a block from the east entrance forty minutes later, engine idling at a low, patient rumble.
I know her Tuesday schedule from my photo of her whiteboard calendar: last class ends at 3:40, bus stop is a three-minute walk from the humanities building. I angle my mirrors and wait.
She appears at 3:48, cutting across the grass toward the covered bus shelter. I watch her through the windshield and my chest constricts.
She's about five-foot-four, and every inch of that frame is devastating to me.
Her black hair hangs loose past her shoulders today, catching the late-afternoon light with a blue-black sheen.
Her skin is warm brown, smooth, bare of makeup as far as I can tell—she doesn't need it.
She has the kind of face that belongs in a portrait hall somewhere: wide-set brown eyes framed by thick lashes, a straight nose, full lips that compress into a flat line when she's annoyed and part when she's surprised. Her jaw is delicate, her chin stubborn.
She's built small and compact—narrow shoulders, a defined waist, hips that flare just enough to make every pair of jeans she owns look like they were sewn specifically for her body—and she moves with this quick, contained energy, like a bird that's deciding whether to take flight.
Her fidgeting pulls me out of my thoughts.
She adjusts her backpack straps, shifts her weight from foot to foot, crosses her arms over her chest and then drops them again.
Her posture is tight, self-conscious, and I know exactly why: she's lactating again.
Her body hasn't let her forget it, and neither has mine.
I start to get out of the car.
Then a guy walks up to her.
He's young—her age, maybe a year older—sandy hair, backwards cap, one of those half-zipped athletic jackets that frat guys seem to think constitutes a personality.
He stops too close to her, leaning in with his shoulder angled toward her body in a way that boxes out the rest of the bus shelter.
He says something and she gives a polite half-smile, the kind she uses when she doesn't want to be rude but also doesn't want to encourage.
He keeps talking. He reaches out and touches the end of her hair.
My jaw locks so hard my molars creak.
I'm out of the car. The door shuts behind me with a solid thunk and I cross the pavement in long strides, my focus narrowed to a single point: the three inches of space between that kid's fingers and my stepsister's shoulder.
He's grinning at her, angling his body closer, saying something about a party this weekend, and Clara is doing that thing she does where she shifts backward without quite stepping away because she doesn't want to cause a scene.
I don't have that problem.
My hand lands on the small of Clara's back.
Heavy, deliberate, five fingers spread wide enough to span from her spine to her hip.
She stiffens under my palm the moment I make contact, her whole body going rigid, and her head snaps up fast. Her brown eyes go wide as they find my face, blinking once like she's not sure I'm real.
"W-what are you doing here?"
"Apparently, running a pickup service." I glance down at her, then back at the kid. "You're welcome."
The kid looks at me. His grin stalls out mid-watt, hanging on his face like a light bulb that's about to go.
"Hey." My voice comes out low and unhurried, the way it does when I'm not even slightly concerned about a situation. I look at him the way I'd look at a scuff mark on the heel of my shoe—registering it, deciding it isn't worth bending down for. "She's got a ride."
He glances between us, the easy, practiced confidence draining from his face as he takes in the full picture.
My height. My build. The fact that my hand hasn't moved an inch from her back and I'm not making any effort to pretend otherwise.
His mouth opens, then closes again without producing anything useful, jaw working silently like he's running through his options and finding each one worse than the last.
"I was just?—"
"You were just leaving."
He leaves. Doesn't even look at Clara again, just turns and walks toward the parking lot with his shoulders hunched. I watch him go until he rounds the corner, and then I steer Clara toward my car with steady pressure against her spine.
She lasts until I open the passenger door for her.
Then she yanks away from my hand, throws her backpack onto the seat, and climbs in.
I walk around to the driver's side and settle behind the wheel, pulling my door closed.
The interior of the car is quiet, warm, and small enough that her scent fills the space immediately—jasmine, laundry detergent, and underneath it, something warmer and softer, something that belongs only to her skin.
"What the hell was that?"
Her voice is tight. She's turned in her seat to face me, her cheeks flushed, her brown eyes blazing.
"That was me picking you up from school."
"That was you showing up out of nowhere and scaring the crap out of some guy who was just talking to me."
"He wasn't just talking to you. He was touching your hair."
"He barely—that doesn't give you the right to—" She stops, presses her fingers to her temples, and exhales through her nose. "You can't do this. You're my stepbrother. You don't get to show up at my campus and intimidate people."