6. Clara
CLARA
Three days of this, and I still haven't figured out how to act normal.
That's the part nobody warns you about—not the guilt, not the complexity of sleeping with your stepbrother, but the sheer performance of ordinary life afterward.
The way I have to remember to pass the salt without letting my fingers linger on his hand.
The way I stare at my phone under the dinner table, reading his texts and keeping my face perfectly blank while my mother talks about her weekend plans across from me.
You looked incredible in that blue sweater today.
I type back: Don't text me at dinner.
His reply comes before I can set the phone down: Then stop wearing things that make me want to peel them off you.
He doesn't look up from his plate. Not once. Just reaches for the bread basket like he said nothing at all, and I have to press my knee hard against the table leg to stop myself from reacting.
That's the dangerous high I've gotten addicted to in three days.
The closeness of it. The invisible current running underneath every ordinary moment in this house—the stolen hand on my waist when he passes me in the hall, the way he angles his body in doorways so I have to brush past him.
He makes the mundane feel electric, and I hate that I love it.
Tonight, though, the house is ours. Mom and Edward left this afternoon for a weekend trip—some anniversary thing at a winery two hours north—and the moment their car backed out of the driveway, the air in the house changed. Got quieter. Fuller.
I'm standing at the stove when Callum comes into the kitchen, still in the clothes he wore all day, his sleeves rolled to the elbow and the dark ink on his forearms catching the light.
He takes one look at what I'm doing—garlic browning in a pan, pasta water just starting to steam—and comes to stand directly behind me.
"You cook," he says, like it's new information.
"I manage." I keep my eyes on the pan. "Go sit down, you're in my way."
He doesn't sit down. He puts both hands on my waist and stays exactly where he is, and his chin drops to my neck—not a kiss, just a presence, just the warm pressure of his mouth against that spot below my ear—and my whole body reacts before my brain gets a vote.
The tingle starts instantly. Low and spreading, like a valve releasing, and within seconds I feel the familiar wet heat building against the fabric of my bra. My milk letting down, completely unbidden, just from the contact of his lips against my skin.
It happens every time now. Every single time. I don't know what he's done to me.
"Callum." I set the wooden spoon down on the counter.
"Mm."
"That's not—I'm trying to cook."
"Cook, then." His hands tighten on my waist. "I'm not stopping you."
He absolutely is stopping me. He knows it, and he's choosing not to acknowledge it, which is its own kind of maddening. I pick the spoon back up, stir the garlic I'm about to burn, and breathe through the ache spreading across my chest.
We eat dinner at the kitchen table without the usual architecture of our parents between us.
He sits across from me and actually talks to me—not the careful, neutral conversation of family dinners, but real talk, easy and unhurried, about a documentary he watched last week and a road trip he took years ago through Montana and whether I prefer mountains or coastline.
I say coastline without thinking. He files it away, I can tell—that particular quality of attention he has, like everything I say gets catalogued somewhere permanent.
After dinner, he clears the plates without being asked. I watch him from the table, chin in my hand.
"You don't have to do that."
"I know." He stacks the bowls and runs the tap.
The domesticity of it lands somewhere I'm not prepared for.
The two of us in this house, the dishes, the low light over the sink.
It feels borrowed. Like we're playing house in a life that doesn't quite belong to us, in a home that's half theirs and half ours and entirely complicated, and I should be more disturbed by that than I am.
I'm not disturbed at all, actually. That's the problem.
We end up in his room the way we always do—not dramatically, not with a decision I can point to, just a gradual gravitational pull that I've stopped pretending I'm going to resist. He closes the door. Turns on the lamp on the nightstand, which throws a warm amber light across the bed.
He sits on the edge and holds out his hand, and I take it, and he draws me in close and looks at me the way he always does—that full, unblinking attention that makes me feel like the entire scope of his focus has narrowed to me specifically.
"Hi," I say, because sometimes the weight of his gaze requires a verbal punctuation mark.
The corner of his mouth lifts. "Hi."
He undresses me slowly. Unhooks my bra with one hand and slides it off, then hooks his thumbs in the waistband of my shorts and takes everything down in one smooth motion.
He isn't frantic about it. He's never frantic.
He takes his time looking at me with that warm, steady attention while I stand in the amber light of his room and try not to cross my arms over myself—a reflex I'm still fighting.
"Don't," he says quietly when my hands start to move.
I stop.
"Good girl."
I reach for the hem of his shirt in return, and he lets me pull it over his head.
The tattoos across his chest are dark and complex in the low light—I don't trace them, not tonight, but I notice them the way I always do, the way they reframe his body as something both imposing and strangely intimate, like a map of a life lived before I arrived in it.
He lies back on the bed and watches me, and I'm aware that I'm standing here naked and he's waiting, and the patience in him is somehow more overwhelming than urgency would be.
"Come here," he says.
I kneel beside him on the bed, and he guides my hand down across the flat of his stomach, past the waistband of his jeans. I help him with the button, the zipper, and then he's in my hand—thick and heavy and warm—and I stare at the ceiling for approximately one second while I recalibrate.
"Just like that," he says, low. His hand covers mine, adjusting the grip. "Firm. Yeah."
I start to move, tentative at first, watching his face for information. His jaw tightens. His chest rises.
"That's it."
The permission in his voice unlocks something. I find a rhythm that draws his breath out longer, and I watch him—this massive, immovable, endlessly confident man—come undone by increments under my hand, and the knowledge of that sits in my chest like something warm and significant.
"Clara." His voice has dropped to a rough register I haven't heard before. "Come here."
He draws me up toward his face, mouth brushing my temple, and his hand curves around the back of my neck. He doesn't push me anywhere. He tilts my chin with two fingers, and when I realize what he's asking—what direction he's pointing—my stomach swoops hard.
"I don't—" I start.
"I know." He's perfectly calm. "You'll tell me if you want to stop."
I don't stop. I move down the bed, heart hammering so hard I can feel it in my throat, and the scent of him—salt and musk and something darker—fills my senses as I settle between his thighs.
His cock is right there, thick and flushed, and I realize with a sharp jolt that I have no idea what I'm doing.
He talks me through it the entire time—low, steady, almost gentle, which is not an adjective I've ever associated with Callum but fits perfectly right now.
"Slow," he says. "Just lick first. Get used to the taste."
I do. I drag my tongue along the underside of his shaft, and the taste is salt and skin and something uniquely him. My hand wraps around the base because I need something to anchor myself, and his breath hitches.
"Yes. Like that."
I lick again, bolder this time, tracing the thick vein that runs along the length, and his thigh tenses under my palm. The weight of him in my hand is substantial, and I feel the pulse of his heartbeat through the heated skin.
"Now the head," he says, voice rougher. "Just the tip if that's all you want."
I part my lips and take him in—just the head, just like he said—and the stretch of my mouth around him is immediate and overwhelming. I taste salt more intensely now, the bead of moisture at the tip, and I hear him groan low in his chest.
"Fuck—Clara?—"
His hand rests light in my hair, no pressure, no direction except the occasional flex of his fingers when I do something that lands right.
I try to take more, bobbing my head carefully, and the fullness makes my jaw ache almost immediately, but I don't stop.
I can't. The sounds he makes vibrate through me—low and involuntary and profoundly satisfying—and I realize I'm getting wet from this, from the taste of him and the weight of him on my tongue and the knowledge that I'm the one making him come apart.
"God, your mouth—" His breathing is ragged now. "So fucking good?—"
I pull back slightly, sucking just the tip, and his hips jerk up involuntarily before he stills himself. My hand strokes what I can't fit, and I try to find a rhythm—awkward and uncertain but improving with every pass as I learn what makes his breath catch, what makes his stomach muscles tighten.
"Just like that—don't stop?—"
Eventually I pull back, jaw sore and breathing hard, and he draws me up alongside him immediately, pressing his mouth to my forehead. His breathing is rough, and his hand cups my face with a tenderness that feels too big for the moment.
"Good," he says, very quietly. Not good girl right now, just good, and somehow the plainness of it means more.
He rolls me onto my back and looks at my breasts—full and aching and visibly taut, the conditioned response to his proximity and his hands and his mouth having built steadily the entire evening. He cups one in his palm.
"You're so full," he says, like it's something to admire.