Chapter 12
Callie
Something had shifted, and the whole town knew it.
I walked into Dottie's Diner on Tuesday morning, and the Book Club Coven tracked me from the door to the counter like I was the season finale of their favorite show.
"Morning, Callie," June Parker said. Butter wouldn't melt. "How's Clay doing?"
"Fine, I imagine."
"You imagine." Clara Mae's eyebrows did something architectural.
I ordered my tea and took Maisie to our usual booth and pretended I couldn't feel six pairs of eyes cataloguing my expression for signs of a woman who'd recently been kissed until she forgot her own postcode.
Maisie was oblivious to the surveillance operation. She was drawing Starlight on the back of her placemat and narrating to nobody in particular. "And this is Clay teaching her to be brave because sometimes horses get scared, but Clay says that's okay because even cowboys get scared —"
I listened to my daughter talk about this man the way she talked about the weather. Factual. Permanent. A feature of her world so established she'd stopped noticing it was new.
I'd caught myself humming at the kitchen sink that morning. I didn't hum. I was not a humming person. But there I'd been, and Maisie had looked up from her cereal and said, with the devastating clarity of a five-year-old:
"Mommy, you're happy. "
She said it like it was new. Like she'd never seen it before.
Maybe she hadn't.
It reached me on Thursday.
"I'm going to tell you something," Bev said, setting tea on my desk at ten past nine, "because I'd rather you hear it from me."
My stomach dropped.
"Amber Dawson was all over Clay at Cooper's General this week. Touching his arm, talking about their history. You wouldn't know her — she's been in Austin. She's back, and she made sure half the store saw."
I kept my face still. My jaw locked. My hands went flat on the desk — a position I'd perfected over years of Dallas dinner parties.
"Okay," I said.
Bev watched me. "You want the rest, or are you going to sit there metabolizing that with your jaw wired shut?"
"I'm fine."
"You're performing. There's a difference."
Bev sat on the edge of my desk.
"He told her no. Publicly. Removed her hand from his arm, polite as Sunday church, clear as glass.
Mrs. Cooper said he looked her dead in the eye and said, 'That man's not available anymore.
' She said he wasn't mean about it. Just done.
" She paused. "Clara Mae was there. She had a bag of birdseed and a front-row seat.
Her exact quote to me was: 'That boy shut it down like a screen door in a hurricane. '"
She squeezed my hand once. Held my gaze.
"Don't give that man in Dallas the power to ruin this, too."
She went back to her desk. Started typing like she hadn't just performed open-heart surgery without anesthesia.
I picked up my tea. Drank it. The Preston program that had been running in my head all morning — the jealousy, the suspicion, the of course he's not really yours — went quiet. Not gone. But quiet.
That evening. Maisie in bed. The house settling around me.
I should have been working. Discovery documents, Savannah's notes on a land dispute. I opened my laptop.
Instead — without fully deciding to — I typed UT Law School admissions into the search bar.
The page loaded. I didn't close it.
I read the requirements. The deadlines. The tuition. I clicked on the curriculum and felt the part of me that Preston had locked in a box shift and stretch and press against the lid.
I could do this. Savannah had said it last month: "You should think about law school, Cal. You'd be terrifying in a courtroom." And I'd laughed it off, because wanting things for yourself was the luxury Preston taught me I couldn't afford.
I read about the online program — designed for working adults, most coursework remote. Financial aid. Application timeline. I sat at my kitchen table and let myself want this.
I closed the laptop. Not because I was shutting it down, but because I needed to sit with how big this felt.
My phone buzzed. Clay: Coming over if that's okay. I have news.
I typed back: Door's open.
He walked in smelling like hay and soap. His boots came off at the door — my door, where his boots now had a spot — and he padded into the kitchen and stopped when he saw my face.
"What's wrong?"
"I'm scared," I said. "Not of you. Of how much I want this."
He didn't move. Didn't close the distance. Just held the counter and held my gaze and let the words sit between us without rushing to fix them.
"I heard about Amber Dawson," I said.
"I shut it down."
"I know. Bev told me." I pressed my palms flat on the table.
"That's not the point. The point is that for about forty-five minutes today, my brain convinced me you were just like Preston — untrustworthy.
And I know you're not him. I know that. But the wiring doesn't care what I know. It just fires."
"I'm scared too," he said. Low. "I've never done this before — not real, not like this. I've never had something I was terrified of losing." He uncrossed his arms. "But I'm not going anywhere. You set the pace."
I studied him. The green eyes. The jaw with a day's worth of stubble. The hands — big, scarred, hands that had held my face and my daughter and my entire catastrophic world with the same care.
The threat assessment came back clean. Not absence of danger clean. This is the safest place you've ever stood clean.
I crossed the kitchen.
This kiss was mine.
I kissed him like a woman who had stopped asking for permission and started taking what she wanted.
My hands went to his shirt — fisted in the cotton, pulling him down to me — and his hands went to my waist and then my hips and then he gripped me hard enough that a sound came out of me, low and raw, and he caught it in his mouth and gave it back.
"Tell me this is okay," he said against my lips.
"This is so far past okay."
"Tell me what you want."
"You. All of you. Not careful. Not slow. Just — you. "
Something gave. The restraint he'd been wearing like a second skin since the day we met — the patience, the carefully controlled Clay who always let me lead — it slipped.
His hands tightened. His mouth moved to my jaw, my throat, the spot behind my ear that he'd discovered the other night and apparently catalogued for future devastation.
I gasped. He smiled against my skin — I felt it, the curve of his lips, and it was wicked and knowing, and it undid me.
"There," I managed.
"I know." Low. Rough. Entirely too confident. "I remember."
"That's — very presumptuous."
"That's observant. There's a difference." His teeth grazed my earlobe, and my knees buckled. His arm caught me — one arm, around my waist, like I weighed nothing — and he hauled me against him. "I pay attention to you, Callie. I pay attention to everything."
"I've noticed."
"Good." He pulled back just enough to look at me. His eyes were dark, his breathing ragged, and the naked want on his face — unhidden, unperformed — sent heat cascading through me. "Now. Your room, or right here?"
"My room. Maisie's door is —"
"I know where Maisie's door is."
He kissed me again. Deeper. His hands slid under my shirt, and the feeling of his palms on my bare skin lit up nerve endings I'd forgotten I had.
I arched into him. He made a sound in his throat — guttural, involuntary — and then his hands were under my thighs and I was off the ground and my legs were around his waist and he was carrying me down the hallway.
Past Maisie's door. Past the bathroom. Into my room, where the lamp was still on, and the bed was unmade, and there was nothing staged or perfect about it, and that was exactly right. This wasn't choreography. This was two people who were done waiting.
He set me down on the edge of the bed. Stood over me. His shirt was untucked where I'd pulled at it, and he looked at me with an expression that held so much intensity it should have scared me.
It didn't scare me. For the first time in as long as I could remember, nothing about a man standing over me in a bedroom scared me.
"Last chance," he said. "Tell me to stop, and I stop. No questions."
I reached up and undid the top button of his shirt. Then the second. My hands weren't shaking, and that felt like its own kind of revolution.
"Clay."
"Yeah?"
"Stop talking."
His grin broke across his face — the real one, the one I'd fallen for — and then he was on me. Over me. His mouth found mine and his hands found the hem of my shirt and he pulled it over my head and the air hit my skin and his eyes dropped and his breathing changed.
"Jesus, Callie."
"Is that a compliment or a prayer?"
"Both." He traced a line from my sternum to my navel with one finger, slow enough to make me writhe. "Definitely both."
I pulled at his shirt. He shrugged it off, and I ran my hands over the scars I'd traced in the dark the other night — the raised line along his ribs, the starburst on his shoulder.
This time I could see them in the lamplight, silver-pink against tanned skin.
I pulled him down and kissed the starburst. Felt his breath stutter.
"I want you," I said against his shoulder. Not a whisper. Not tentative. "I want all of it. Everything you held back the other night — I want that too."
He pulled back enough to look at me. His eyes were almost black. "You're sure."
"I have never been more sure of anything in my life. Now get down here."
He laughed — rough, breathless — and then his mouth was on my neck and his hands were unhooking my bra and his fingers were doing something that made my spine arch off the mattress and the laugh died in my throat and became something else entirely.
He kissed his way down. Collarbone. The space between my breasts. The soft skin below my ribs where his stubble scraped and I hissed and grabbed his hair and he looked up at me from under his lashes with an expression that was pure, concentrated intent.