27. Calliope
Calliope
By Friday, I’ve made it through three days back on campus.
The department meeting runs late because everyone suddenly has strong feelings about assessment language, and I stay through the final argument instead of using exhaustion as an excuse to leave.
By the time Dash pulls into the driveway, the house is dark except for the lamp in the living room and the low glow spilling from the kitchen.
Sloane and Idris had offered to wait in the lot again, but I asked Dash to drive me alone today because I wanted one ordinary commute without anyone turning the campus into a perimeter.
My whole body feels wrung out from holding itself upright for too many hours.
I’ve smiled, nodded, argued professionally about curriculum sequencing, eaten half a dry sandwich over a stack of papers, and pretended my hands didn’t shake every time my phone lit up on the conference table.
Now the silence inside the car feels too large, and the sight of the house makes my chest hurt in too many directions to name.
My phone buzzes while Dash pulls into the driveway.
Mara: Did the meeting survive you?
Mara: Did you survive the meeting?
Mara: Important distinction.
The last message is a picture of the chipped blue mug sitting on her desk, angled like she staged it for evidence.
Mara: Joint custody continues.
I stare at the picture until the tightness in my chest eases by a fraction, then lift my travel mug and take a photo before Dash finishes parking.
Me: Home. Meeting survived. I’m less sure about me.
Her heart reaction appears almost immediately.
Mara: Good enough. Text me later if you can.
Dash turns off the engine but doesn’t get out right away.
He keeps one hand on the steering wheel, his profile soft in the dark, and gives me the quiet without making it feel empty.
“You made it through the whole day,” he says, voice low enough that it doesn’t bruise the night.
“That doesn’t mean you owe anyone a stronger version of yourself when you walk inside. ”
I nod because answering would take more energy than I have.
My satchel sits heavy against my hip when I climb out, the strap cutting into the same shoulder where Sloane’s old bite has been aching since sunset.
Dash takes the bag only after I hand it to him, and the smallness of the courtesy nearly undoes me.
There are so many ways to be loved. There are so many ways to be trapped.
I’m still learning the difference by the shape of someone’s hands.
Inside, I shed my shoes by the door and stand there in my stockings, staring at them like they might tell me what kind of woman I’m supposed to be next.
Professor Monroe is somewhere in the bottom of my bag, folded between meeting notes and a half-marked essay.
Callie is in the hall with her feet cold and her body humming from a day of restraint.
The air smells like coffee gone lukewarm, Dash’s cedar shelves, and the faint lingering warmth of the people sleeping deeper in the house.
Sloane is awake in the living room, sitting on the floor near the coffee table with a blanket folded across his lap and a notebook open beside him.
At first, I think he’s reading legal notes, and my whole body starts to brace before my eyes catch the shape of what he’s written.
Coffee. Water. Granola bars in the left cabinet.
Theo takes hot water before breakfast. Callie freezes if people stand in doorways.
Ask before dimming lights. Set things down within reach.
Something soft and terrible opens under my ribs.
He looks up when he feels me there, and for one suspended second, neither of us moves.
His hair is a mess, one side crushed from where he must have tried to rest on the couch and failed.
His eyes are red with exhaustion, but they find me with such immediate, helpless relief that I have to put one hand on the wall.
He closes the notebook slowly, palms visible, as if even paper could become pressure in the wrong hands.
“Hi, baby,” he says, voice rough from waiting up. “You’re home.”
The words are too simple. They hit too deep.
I cross the room before I can talk myself into being careful, before I can measure what wanting him means, before I can remember all the reasons my body is supposed to be afraid of reaching first. Sloane rises only when I’m already there, and then my hands are in his shirt and my mouth is on his.
The kiss isn’t careful.
It starts that way for half a breath because Sloane is trying.
I feel him hold back, feel the tremor in his hands where they hover near my waist, feel the apology already forming in the way he doesn’t take.
Then I make a broken sound against his mouth, and his restraint shifts into something warmer.
His hands settle at my sides without closing too tight, and he kisses me like a man who’s been starving at the edge of a locked room, like every answer he needs is in the press of my lips and the fact that I came to him.
I kiss him harder, rising on my toes and dragging him down with both hands fisted in his shirt. The scent of him wraps around me, smoked cedar and brown sugar, familiar enough to ache in my teeth. My bond mark throbs under my blouse, and Sloane makes a sound when he feels me shiver.
His forehead drops to mine when I finally pull back.
His breathing is unsteady, but his hands loosen immediately, giving me the space before I have to earn it with words.
“I’m going to be very honest,” he whispers, his mouth still close enough that I feel every syllable.
“I don’t want to let this goodnight be small. ”
My laugh comes out wet and almost soundless. “I don’t know how to make anything small right now.”
“Then I will.” He brushes his thumb along my waist once, only once, then lets his hand fall. “Goodnight, sweetheart. I’m right here if you need me. I’m still right here if you don’t.”
What breaks me a little is the fact that he lets the moment end without making the ending feel like rejection.
I step back, and he stays where he is, throat working, eyes bright.
I want to crawl back into his arms so badly my whole body feels pulled forward by it, but I make myself turn toward the hall.
The bedroom door is half open.
I should keep walking. I know that. I have my own room here, Dash’s room, the place where I learned to sleep without flinching at every sound. But the hallway light falls across the bed, and the sight inside roots me in place.
Idris is on his back with one arm folded beneath his head, asleep or close enough to it that the room has softened around him.
Theo is half sprawled across his chest, dark hair messy, one cheek pressed over Idris' heartbeat. His hand is curled near the temporary bite at his shoulder like even sleep wants to guard it. He mumbles something I can’t make out, a sleepy, irritated little sound when Sloane steps in behind me, and Idris' hand shifts automatically to Theo’s back.
Sloane pauses at my shoulder without touching me.
He looks into the room, then at me, and something in his face changes when he sees what I’m seeing.
The bed isn’t peaceful. Grief is in it, exhaustion, the strange uneven breathing of people who have been afraid for too long.
But it’s warm. It’s real. Theo’s body knows where to go.
Idris' hand knows how to settle him. Sloane slips past me only after I step aside, and Theo reaches blindly for him before his eyes open.
“Sloane,” Theo mumbles into Idris' shirt, petulant and soft with sleep.
“I’m here, pretty boy,” Sloane whispers, climbing onto the mattress with the same careful heaviness he’s been using around all of us. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Theo makes a satisfied sound and hooks one foot over Sloane’s thigh like that settles the matter.
Idris opens his eyes just enough to look at me through the dim room.
He doesn’t ask me to come in. He doesn’t ask me why I’m standing in the hall with my heart in my throat and my hands still remembering Sloane’s shirt.
His gaze holds mine for one quiet second, then drops to my mouth and back up again with such controlled hunger that I feel it low in my stomach.
I turn away before wanting carries me across the threshold.
Dash’s room is warm when I reach it. He’s awake in the armchair by the window, book open against one thigh, glasses low on his nose.
The lamp beside him turns his hair soft at the edges, and there’s something about the sight of him waiting without waiting at the door that makes my breath stutter.
He knew I would come here. He gave me space to decide it anyway.
He closes the book when I step inside. “Come here,” he says gently, and the softness in his voice makes the last hour of holding myself together finally slip.
I go to him without ceremony. He shifts the book onto the table and opens his arms, and I curl into his lap with my knees tucked against the side of the chair and my face in his neck.
He smells like bergamot and sandalwood, warm skin, clean cotton, the faint trace of the coffee he must have reheated and forgotten to drink.
His arms come around me with the kind of familiarity that doesn’t ask whether it’s allowed because I’ve taught him this shape with my own body night after night.
Dash lets the silence sit until my breathing steadies.
Dash’s hand moves slowly along my back, over the blazer I never took off, down to the place where my shirt has wrinkled from sitting in meetings too long.
He eases the jacket from my shoulders only after I lift one arm, then the other.
It falls to the floor in a dark heap, and I should care about wrinkles. I don’t.
His fingers skim the nape of my neck, the side of my throat, the edge of my collar without hurrying toward anything. The touch is sensual because Dash never touches me like he’s absent from his own hands. Even comfort from him has heat in it.
“You kissed him,” he says after a while.
My eyes close. “I did.”
“Did it feel good?” His hand keeps moving at my waist, slow and warm, and the question has enough room inside it for the truth.
“It felt like I’d been holding my breath for three months,” I whisper. “It felt like my body knew him before my fear could stop it.”
His hand stills for half a second. Then it starts moving again, steady enough to keep me from apologizing before I’ve even finished telling the truth. “That sounds like a hard thing to punish yourself for.”
I lift my head. His face is close, his expression too gentle to hide the hurt in it completely. That makes it worse. I could handle anger. I could handle a boundary, a demand, something clean enough to push against. Dash gives me honesty and doesn’t make me bleed for it.
“I want them so bad,” I say, and the confession comes out ragged.
“I want Sloane. I want Idris. I want Theo in the middle of it like he belongs there because he does, and I hate that wanting all of that makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong to you.
I thought for so long that wanting them made me pathetic.
Then I thought wanting you meant I’d survived them.
Now I want all of you, and I don’t know how to hold that without turning it into something ugly. ”
Dash cups the side of my face. His thumb moves under my eye, catching wetness I didn’t feel fall. “Go to them, sweetheart,” he says, voice low and rough around the tenderness. “I can almost feel you wanting to.”
My throat closes. I shake my head, but the motion is weak because some part of me has already leaned toward the hall. “I don’t want to leave you here like you were temporary.”
His mouth tightens. He's hurt. Not cruelly, not dramatically, but honestly enough that I feel the flinch in his chest beneath my palm. Then he leans forward and kisses me, slow and deep and warm, his hand firm at the back of my neck.
When he pulls back, his forehead rests against mine. “Then don’t make me temporary,” he says. “Come back to me because you want me too. Don’t stay because guilt pinned you here.”
“Dash,” I whisper, and his name sounds like an apology I don’t know how to finish.
“The answer isn’t letting you punish yourself for wanting them.” His thumb brushes my jaw, and his voice goes quieter. “You learned how to survive by denying yourself the thing that hurt the worst to miss. I’m not going to become another reason you do that.”
I kiss him again because there is nothing else large enough.
He lets me. His hands slide under the hem of my blouse to the warm skin of my back, and for a few minutes, the room narrows to his mouth, his breath, the solid weight of him beneath me.
Heat gathers slowly, low and aching, and when I shift in his lap, he exhales against my lips like it costs him to keep his hands gentle.
“You’re allowed to want me here,” I tell him, because he deserves the truth too. “You’re allowed to hate sharing this moment.”
“I know.” His hands flex at my waist, then loosen. “I’m going to feel a lot of things, Callie. I’m not going to make every one of them your job.”
I stand on shaky legs, and Dash stays seated, his eyes following me with an expression I will think about for the rest of my life. Before I reach the door, he says my name.
I turn back to see he's still in the chair, one hand curled over the arm, the other resting against his thigh like he's keeping himself there by force. “Bring back the version of you who doesn’t feel ashamed for being loved,” he says.
I nod and walk down the hall.