5. Callum
CALLUM
One week.
Seven mornings of listening to her set her alarm forty minutes early so she's already gone by the time I come downstairs.
Seven dinners where she sits at the opposite end of the table from me and talks to my father about her coursework with the focused intensity of a girl defusing a bomb.
Seven nights of lying in my bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the soft sounds of her moving around in the room next door—the creak of her desk chair, the faint music she plays when she studies, the shower running at eleven p.m. when she can't sleep.
She locked her door after the first night. I heard the click of it from the hallway.
I'm not angry. Anger would be easier—cleaner, more straightforward.
What I feel is something far more concentrated.
She came to me. She knocked on my door in the dark and told me she wanted me, and I gave her everything I had—slow and careful, every instinct in me fighting the urge to take her hard and fast the way I wanted to, because she was new to it and I knew her body needed time to adjust. I held her afterward.
I nursed from her while she was still soft and open from her orgasm and she let me, her hand in my hair, her chest rising and falling in the dark.
And then she disappeared.
I know why. I understand her reasoning the same way I understand the logic of someone stepping back from a fire—rational, self-protective, entirely missing the point.
Clara Fielding is twenty years old and she's trying to manage something she doesn't have the experience to manage.
She thinks if she creates enough distance, the thing between us will shrink back to something containable.
She doesn't understand that I've already decided.
My father and Carol leave at six-thirty. I hear the front door close, the sound of his car backing out of the drive. I finish my drink at the kitchen counter, set the glass down, and walk upstairs.
I wait in the hallway outside her door, my shoulder resting against the opposite wall, arms loose at my sides. Not pacing. Not tense. I've had a week to work through any restlessness, and what's left now is something much quieter and more permanent than impatience.
Her door opens at seven-fifteen.
Clara steps out in a pale yellow sundress, her hair loose, her feet bare against the hardwood. She's looking down at her phone and she almost walks straight into me before she sees me and pulls up short, one hand jumping to her chest.
"Jesus—" Her breath catches. Her eyes snap up to mine and then harden with immediate, defensive wariness. "What are you doing?"
"Waiting for you." I push off the wall and position myself across the narrow hallway, arms braced on either side of the doorframe at my back—not trapping her exactly, but making the choice to move past me something she'd have to decide deliberately.
"You've been avoiding me, little stepsister. That stops tonight."
The color that rises in her face is immediate and specific—not embarrassment. She's furious.
"Don't call me that." She straightens her spine. "And I haven't been avoiding you. I've been busy."
"You set your alarm at six-fifteen on a Saturday."
"I had?—"
"Clara."
Just her name. Nothing else. And the argument she's trying to construct visibly stumbles, because she knows I know, and she knows I know she knows.
She crosses her arms over her chest—over her breasts, which I can see even now are fuller than they should be, the fabric of her dress pulled taut across them in a way that tells me she hasn't let herself come to me even when the physical pressure would have made that the obvious solution.
She's been suffering through it alone for a week. The thought makes something tighten in my chest that isn't entirely gentle.
"What do you want me to say?" She lifts her chin and looks me straight in the eye the way she does when she's scared and refuses to show it. "That I panicked? Fine. I panicked. We—what we did—it was?—"
"Everything you wanted."
"It was a mistake." The words come out fast, almost rehearsed. "We're stepsiblings, Callum. Your dad married my mom. We live in the same house. If anyone found out?—"
"No one's going to find out."
"You don't know that." Her voice cracks on the last word and she stops, jaw tightening against whatever's rising up. "And even if they didn't—it's wrong. It should feel wrong. I keep waiting to feel like it's wrong and instead I just—" She stops again.
"Instead you just what?"
She shakes her head.
"Say it."
"I can't stop thinking about it." She says it in a rush, like if she doesn't get it out fast she'll swallow it back down.
"I can't stop thinking about you and it's ruining everything—my concentration, my sleep, every time I sit down to study I can't—" She drags in a breath.
"And that terrifies me. Okay? That's the truth.
I'm twenty years old and I have two more years of school and a whole life to build and you are my stepbrother and I am completely out of my depth and I don't know how to do this. "
The admission costs her. I can see it in the set of her shoulders—the way they've dropped half an inch from the defensive height she was holding them at.
I close the distance between us slowly, giving her time to see me coming. She doesn't step back, which tells me everything I need to know about what she actually wants regardless of what she's saying.
"You can't undo what we've done," I tell her.
"You already know that. And your body needs me, Clara—not because of some accident of biology—because you're mine.
You've been mine since the first morning I watched you standing in that kitchen trying to act like you didn't feel me looking at you.
" I reach up and touch her jaw, just my thumb against the curve of it.
"The fact that your mother married my father is the least interesting thing about this situation. "
"That's easy for you to say." Her voice is barely above a whisper. "You're not the one who has to sit across the dinner table from your mom and feel like?—"
"Like what?"
She closes her eyes briefly. "Like a liar."
"You're not lying to anyone. You're keeping something private that is no one's business but ours.
" My thumb traces along her jaw to her chin and tips it up slightly.
"You came to me, Clara. You knocked on my door and you told me what you wanted and I gave it to you and then you spent a week locked in your room pretending it didn't happen. That ends now."
She opens her eyes. They're glassy and wet at the edges and she is working very hard not to let that tip over into something she can't take back.
"I'm scared," she says. The last defense, stripped of everything else—pure, honest, and entirely insufficient to change anything between us.
"I know." I lean down and press my mouth to hers.
For exactly two seconds she doesn't move. Then her hands grip the front of my shirt and she kisses me back with the restrained, pent-up urgency of someone who's been holding their breath for seven days, and her whole body tips forward into mine like she's been fighting gravity this entire time.
I walk her backward through the doorway of her room.
She doesn't argue. She doesn't pull back. Her hands are still twisted in my shirt as I move her toward the bed and the door swings half-shut behind us on its own momentum.
I reach down and find the hem of her dress, pulling it upward, and she lets me—arms lifting as I tug it over her head and drop it.
Her bra is one of the stretched-out, practical ones she's taken to wearing because her breasts are too tender for anything with underwire, and even through the thin cotton I can see the two small, damp circles of milk that have already soaked through.
"You've been leaking," I say.
Her arms start to come up across her chest and I catch her wrists before they get there.
"Don't." I hold her arms at her sides and look at her. "Don't cover yourself from me."
Her breath is shallow and uneven. I reach behind her and unclasp the bra, drawing it off her shoulders, and her breasts fall free—heavy, full, the dark nipples already beaded tight, a thin thread of milk gathering at each tip that tells me she's been engorged for hours.
I cup her left breast in both hands, just holding the weight of it, and she pulls in a sharp breath. I press in gently, a careful, deliberate squeeze, and milk wells up from her nipple and runs in a warm stream over my fingers.
"Callum—"
I bend my head and seal my mouth around her nipple.
The sound she makes isn't quite a word. It's a gasp that breaks at the end into a soft, involuntary moan as the milk comes down in a fast, warm rush against my tongue.
I swallow and draw again, pulling deep and slow the way I know she needs, and her hand comes up and grips the back of my neck—not pushing me away.
"Oh god—" Her hips shift. "Ahh?—"
I drink from her steadily, one hand still supporting the breast, the other moving to the waistband of her underwear. She shivers when my fingers slide beneath the fabric.
She's soaking wet. The heat of her against my fingers pulls a groan out of me against her breast, and I feel her clench in response to the vibration of it.
I draw two fingers slowly up through her folds and she arches, her grip on my neck tightening.
"Ahh—please—Callum—please?—"
"That's it." I circle her clit with my thumb and she jerks forward into my hand. "Good girl. Let me feel you."
I work her steadily—fingers moving inside her, thumb pressing in slow, firm circles—while my mouth pulls from her breast in long, rhythmic draws. Milk flows warm and constant over my tongue and she is whimpering above me, a continuous, broken sound, her thighs pressing together around my hand.
"Ahh—I—I can't—ahh?—"