7. Nadia
7
NADIA
Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, and one.
The shrill ring of the bell filled the room and the halls. I’d been counting down the seconds to the end of the school day. Now that it was here, I was seriously regretting my decision not to go home and change at lunch.
I was on pick-up line duty today, so there was a very good chance I would be seeing Callum again, and I was wearing blue jeans, a white shirt, and an oversized, sage, chunky cardigan. I was dressed like a teacher— a real teacher, not the sexy Halloween version. Why did I have to be wearing this the first time we saw each other after all these years?
Today had been a little bit of a blur. It felt as if I was living in a surrealistic painting. Or maybe it was as if everything around me was happening at regular speed and I was either standing still or going at hyper speed; I wasn’t sure which.
This morning, when I’d come face-to-face with Callum and we locked eyes, I thought I was going to pass out. All of the oxygen was sucked out of the room. I wasn’t sure how long I’d stood there in shock without speaking, but I did know that after Principal Lewis and Callum left, the kids thought that Callum and I had had a staring contest, and I won. I went along with it because I didn’t have another explanation. I even let them break up into teams and have their own staring contests. To be honest, that had helped me out. I needed a moment, or a hundred, to compose myself.
Callum Knight at twenty-three was five-alarm fire hot. Callum Knight at thirty-three could register himself as a lethal weapon, and I wasn’t talking about his fighting skills in the cage. No. He had dangerous levels of pheromones and sex appeal—Elvis Presley at his peak—when girls used to faint at his shows.
It wasn’t just his physical attractiveness, which was off the charts. His thick brown hair that my fingers were still itching to run through. His dreamy, copper eyes that in the sun had flecks of gold floating in them. His strong jaw peppered in stubble. His sensual lips were not too thin, not too plump; they were the Goldilocks beds of men’s lips, the perfect size. And I knew what he could do with them.
He’d become a man in the time we’d been apart. Which, of course, he had. Not that he wasn’t before, but there was a big difference between twenty-three and thirty-three. His shoulders were wider. His arms and chest were filled out. I’d also noticed some new tattoos on his neck and a few on his hands. I’d always loved his tattoos. He’d only had a few when we were together. Seeing the ones today that were visible with clothes on made me wonder what more he might have.
“Okay, everyone, push in your chairs and grab your backpacks from your cubbies on the way out.” I grabbed my lanyard and slid it over my neck. I could feel my pulse in my entire body. My heart was pounding so hard against my chest I was worried I might have internal bruising. Each step I took to the classroom door was taken on shaky legs that felt like walking on sticks of Jell-O. When I reached the door, I took a deep breath and did my best to compose myself and not show any outward signs of my internal panic attack.
“Single file line,” I instructed before pushing open the door.
The kids began to pour out into the hallway, seamlessly merging with the other students. I kept an eye on Matty not only because he was Callum’s son and was the spitting image of him, but also because I always kept a close eye on any new student the first day. I needed to make sure they always knew where they were going and didn’t feel confused or disoriented.
Thankfully, Matty seemed to be adjusting with no issues. He was tablemates with Ashley’s niece Luna, Callum’s friend Mark Lyon’s son Bryce, and Heather Dempsey, whose parents owned the drive-in movie theater. I’d watched the four of them playing hopscotch, wallball, and tag at recess. They’d all eaten together at lunch. And they were walking out together in a group now.
They were the brightest kids in the class, which meant he was most likely bright as well. I’d found that highly intelligent kids tended to gravitate toward each other.
“I have a new baby brother,” Luna told Matty proudly. “He’s three months old.”
“I have a new aunt.” Kids always had to one-up each other. Matty saw Luna’s baby brother and raised her an aunt. “Her name is Chloe. She’s thirteen.”
My heart ached to hear Matty talk about Mr. Knight’s love child so casually. Callum finding out his dad had a daughter with Danielle Marsh had blindsided him. He’d spent most of his life trying to earn his father’s approval only to find out that his dad wasn’t the man he, or any of us, thought he was.
Charles Knight was a larger-than-life figure in both stature and presence. He stood an impressive six feet six inches tall and had to be close to three hundred pounds. He was charismatic and had a magnetic personality that people were drawn to. He served as the mayor of Firefly Island for sixteen years, serving two four-year consecutive terms with a four-year break in between in which he served as city manager. He was loved, feared, admired, and respected, but he was not an easy man to please, especially if you were his son.
Callum spent most of his life trying to make his dad proud and never quite feeling like he did. He was good at football but not as good at football as Mark Lyons, who ended up playing in the NFL. He was a decent baseball player but not nearly as talented as Harlan Mitchell, who ended up pitching in the major leagues. He was smart, but his IQ was no match for Casper Montgomery, who graduated from MIT at age twenty with a degree in biomedical engineering, or Elias Russell, who graduated from Johns Hopkins with honors and two PhDs at twenty-four and was a pediatric heart surgeon.
Mr. Knight wasn’t thrilled when Callum left college before the end of his freshman year to pursue his MMA career. His dad, along with a lot of people from his generation, never understood the sport. Even though Callum was undefeated and had moved to pro in the short two years his dad was alive to see his career flourish, Mr. Knight made it known he considered Callum a failure and a disappointment. He never once attended a bout. Until the day he died, he maintained Callum was flushing his life down the toilet and was an embarrassment.
I spent years agonizing over whether or not Callum ever healed from the hurt his father caused him, if the inner child who was damaged by his upbringing had ever managed to make peace with his past. Not that it was any of my business.
“Cool,” Luna replied to Matty. “I have an aunt, too. Her name is Lee Lee.”
“I have an aunt named Leanne. She works here,” Bryce relayed proudly as he adjusted the straps on his backpack.
Leanne Lyons taught kindergarten at Firefly Elementary. She was three years behind me in school and had always had a huge crush on Callum. She was about as subtle as a bull in a china shop, but I still wasn’t totally convinced about her feelings since I did tend to lean toward the jealous side of things. Then one day I was walking down the hall when Leanne opened her locker, grabbed a book, and a bunch of stuff fell to the ground. I kneeled down to help her pick it up and saw a notebook filled with her writing the name Leanne Knight, Mrs. Leanne Knight, Mrs. Knight, over and over again, each name with a heart around it
The admiration didn’t stop there. She also made several collages of herself and Callum. One might ask how she could possibly have that many photos of the two of them together. Well, she didn’t. She superimposed her head on a bunch of photos of me and him. If she were an adult, it would have been considered stalking, but since she was fifteen, it was just a crush.
I’m sure she was more than a little ecstatic that he was back in town. Too bad for her, he was in a committed relationship and getting married. Too bad for me, too. Not that he’d ever forgive me. I’d made sure of that.
We stepped outside to the pick-up line, and I saw Amos waiting at the curb, which was suspicious since it wasn’t his day for pick-up.
“Hey.” I smiled as I slid my glasses onto my face. “What are you doing here?”
“Are you kidding me? I’m not gonna miss the most anticipated reunion since And Just Like That .”
Amos shared my fanatic love of Sex and the City .
“Technically, that was a reboot,” I corrected him. “And I already saw him.”
He smiled. “So did I.”
“You did?”
“Yes, we had a reunion of our own.”
“When?”
“During his tour of the school, right before he went to see you.”
“Why didn’t you warn me?”
“Where’s the fun in that?” He wagged his brows. “But seriously, you would have just freaked out more.”
He had a point. I’d nearly had a panic attack when I found out that his son was in my class. I don’t know why I hadn’t considered the possibility that either Callum or Matty’s mom, Felicity, would have accompanied Matty to the classroom. That just showed how much of a basket case I’d been since hearing Callum was back in town.
“It was better this way,” Amos continued. “So, what happened when you two saw each other? Were there fireworks? Grenades? Rocket launchers? Did you need a fire extinguisher to put out the flames?”
Before teaching at Firefly Elementary, Amos taught at the high school, and he had a front-row seat to several of our fights. I call them ‘fights’; it was really just me getting upset and breaking up with Callum and him calmly not reacting. Looking back, I don’t know how he put up with me.
“No, nothing like that. We didn’t even talk, really. He just dropped off Matty and left.”
“Oh.” I could see the disappointment in his eyes.
He wasn’t the only one feeling deflated by the reunion after all these years. I’d definitely built up something cinematic-worthy in my head, and it hadn’t lived up to my expectations. I would have loved a Richard Gere Officer and a Gentleman moment. Callum comes into the classroom, picks me up, and carries me out. A Jerry Maguire You-had-me-at-hello moment, where he declares he’s always loved me and never gotten over me. Or even a Zach Braff not getting on the airplane at the end of Garden State .
Any of those would have been amazing, but instead, it was just a polite, slightly awkward exchange of hi.
The next ten minutes at pick-up went by in a blur. Every car that I didn’t recognize that pulled up had me holding my breath. Each time a new bumper came into view, my heart skipped a beat. The anticipation was building like helium filling a balloon. It was getting bigger and bigger, stretching to its limit. I knew any second it was going to pop.
“Bye Miss Nadia!” Kevin Hayes waved as he walked through the gate and climbed into his mom’s silver minivan.
“Bye.” I waved.
As it pulled away, a black Ford F150 pulled up, and I instantly recognized the rose tattooed on the back of the hand on the steering wheel. I’d been with Callum the day he got that tattoo. It was on his twenty-first birthday. I was visiting him in Phoenix, and we drove to Tucson so he could get inked by an up-and-coming tattoo artist who ended up competing and winning Ink Master named Anthony Michaels.
My stomach was doing more flips than Simone Biles on her floor routine at the Paris Olympics. The truck came to a stop, and I glanced down at the kids all lined up in a row, avoiding Callum’s gaze. His eyes were too potent. It was like staring at the sun. Every time I looked directly at him, his image was seared into my brain.
I inhaled a shaky breath as I called out, “Matty, your dad’s here.”
Luna, Heather, and Bryce all said goodbye to their new friend as Matty headed out through the gate.
“See you tomorrow,” I called out.
Matty turned around and waved. “Bye, Miss Nadia.”
I smiled and glanced up just as Callum was leaning across the console to open the passenger door. Our eyes met. The second I gazed into his endless whiskey pools, a tingle of awareness skittered down my spine and spread through my limbs. It consumed me from the inside out, starting at my core and spreading throughout my entire body.
Once again, not knowing what else to do, I lifted my hand and grinned. “Hi.”
He stared at me, and although I couldn’t hear him, I saw his lips move, “Hi.”
A loud honk sounded, and Callum blinked as if he’d been snapped out of a spell. He looked forward, breaking our eye contact. I exhaled and saw stars flashing.
Matty climbed up into the truck, and within a few seconds, he and his dad were pulling away from the curb. As they did, Callum’s head turned in my direction one last time.
This time when our eyes met, I watched as Callum’s perfect lips pulled at the edges into his Callum-Knight-bad-boy-half-grin?. It wasn’t actually trademarked, but it should be. I’d forgotten just how potent Callum’s smile could be. Some people might think it was a cocky smirk, but it wasn’t. It was born out of confidence, not conceit, which were two very different things. It was a smile that made ninety percent of the female population’s hearts explode and ovaries ache, myself included.
The next car pulled up, and I called Ingrid Reyes to come to the gate. As she walked through, I glanced over at Amos, who was looking me up and down. “What?”
“I was just checking for bite marks because that man just devoured you with his eyes.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“That boy’s eyes were hungrier than a Hasbro hippo.”
I chuckled at his board game reference but still shook my head. Amos was seeing things, or he was trying to make me feel better about the situation. I was sure of it. Callum was engaged. He had a son. There was nothing there. Not after all this time. I’d made sure of it. I’d made my bed, and now I had to lie in it, it just wouldn’t be not with Callum.