20. Dash #2
“I know.” She draws my hand down to her waist, placing me where she wants me. “Come to bed.”
I let her pull me toward the mattress before I reach for the hem of my shirt.
We strip the rest of the way slowly, not with the frantic edge of the first night, but with the tenderness that has followed.
Her skirt falls over the chair. My shirt lands somewhere near it.
She laughs under her breath when I nearly trip over my own shoe, and I let the sound settle between us without turning it into a joke.
When we get into bed, Callie comes to me immediately.
She used to leave a careful inch between us, even after she chose my bed, as if some part of her still expected the mattress to become conditional beneath her.
Tonight she curls into my chest before I can reach for her, cheek settling over my heart, one hand tucked loosely against my ribs.
I hold her there and feel the last of campus leave her body by degrees.
All of it catches up to her while my hand moves along her back, and her breathing deepens against my skin. I kiss her hair once, then the warm curve of her forehead, and she makes a small sleeping sound that I have learned over the last few nights.
The buzz comes from across the room.
I go still before she does. Callie only shifts closer, her fingers tightening once against my bare chest before loosening again.
The sound comes from her bag on the chair near the dresser, muffled beneath folders and whatever book she was pretending she might grade tonight.
I wait through the first vibration, hoping it will stop.
When it starts again, sharper this time, I ease my arm from under her shoulders and replace my warmth with the edge of the blanket.
She doesn't wake. Her face turns into the pillow where my chest had been, and the sight of that nearly sends me back to bed instead of toward the phone.
I cross the room quietly, already irritated at whoever has managed to reach her this late and already planning to silence the damn thing before it pulls her out of the first peaceful sleep I have seen on her all week.
Her bag tips when I reach inside. A folder slides out first, then her wallet catches on the zipper and drops open against the floor with a soft slap. I find the phone by touch, still buzzing in my hand, but my eyes catch on the photo half-slipped from the clear pocket before I look at the screen.
Callie is laughing in it.
The sight holds me in place. She's younger, or maybe only less wounded, face tipped toward sunlight, freckles bright across her cheeks, mouth open in a joy I have only heard in fragments.
A man has one arm around her waist and his mouth pressed to her cheek.
He's younger too, hair a little longer, face softer than the last time I saw him across a family table, but the recognition lands without mercy.
Sloane.
My brother.
For a few seconds, the room stops making sense.
Then it makes too much. The old pack that didn't end cleanly.
The bond mark near her shoulder. The way she flinched from her phone.
The old messages she opened like punishments.
The weeks she spent learning how to sleep in a house where no one locked her in or out.
Every careful piece of her rearranges around the face in the photograph, and I have to close my hand around the wallet before anger makes me crush something that belongs to her.
The phone buzzes again.
I look down.
Sloane Rivera.
The full name burns on the screen, and I understand, with cold and sudden clarity, why Callie went pale over a piece of glass.
I look back at the bed. She's still asleep, curled around the space I left behind, hair loose over the pillow, one bare shoulder visible above the blanket.
She doesn't know the past has found the room.
She doesn't know I'm standing here with proof in one hand and my brother’s name in the other.
I step away from the bed before I answer. Only a few paces, enough to put my body between her and the door, enough to keep the first edge of my voice from cutting across her sleep. My thumb moves over the screen, and I lift the phone to my ear while watching her breathe.
“Callie?” Sloane’s voice comes through raw and wrecked, so unlike the brother I remember that some part of me almost stumbles over it. “Please. Callie, baby, please say something.”
“How the fuck did you get this number?” I keep my voice low, but there is no softness in it.
The silence on the other end lasts long enough for me to hear a sharp inhale, a rustle, the distant scrape of movement like someone has gone suddenly still and struck the nearest piece of furniture doing it.
My grip tightens around the phone. Behind me, Callie shifts in her sleep and settles again, trusting the room because she doesn't yet know whose voice is inside it.
The claim rises in me before I can make it decent, before I can make it measured, before I can remember that she has not given me the right to say it out loud.
“Tell me why the fuck you would be calling my Beta after what you did to her.” The words hit the room too hard, and I know it the second they leave me.
My Beta is premature. It is awkward and too possessive for the careful thing Callie and I have barely begun to name, but the truth under it has already come out, and there is no calling it back.
The line goes silent. I stand in the dark with Callie asleep behind me, the photo still open in my other hand, and listen to my brother’s breathing change as the pieces find him one by one. When he finally speaks, my name is barely more than a broken exhale.
“Dash?”