Chapter 20
CAL
She has mascara smudged under her eyes. Her hair is everywhere, across the pillow, over her shoulder, strands stuck to her sweaty neck in ways that shouldn't look as good as they do. Her lips are swollen and she's staring at the ceiling with a small, satisfied smile that I put there.
I'm propped on my elbow, and I cannot stop staring. Nothing prepared me for this Lily. Naked and spent and sprawled across a bed too small for both of us, completely at ease and utterly shameless.
I trace the birthmark on her ribs that I'd found an hour ago, letting my fingers move slowly across the dip of her waist, past the bruise I left on her collarbone. I should feel bad about that, but I don't.
I push a strand of hair off her face and she turns her head, eyes still glazed, the corner of her mouth pulling up.
"You're staring."
"Yeah."
"You've been staring for a while."
"I'm aware."
She smiles fully, and I lean down and kiss her because I can't stay away. She tastes sweet and right.
Her hand comes up to rest on the side of my neck, warm fingers and light pressure and no urgency, just touching me because she can.
I feel like a teenager. Fifteen years old after my first real make-out session, where kissing is the whole event and three inches of air is physically unbearable.
I haven't felt this in years. Maybe ever. I've had good sex with women I liked and respected, but I've never come out the other side unable to stop kissing someone.
I kiss the corner of her mouth. Her face. The spot below her ear that made her gasp earlier.
"Callahan," she says into the space between us, and even now my full name hits me deep.
"Hmm?" I'm already tracing down her throat, already lost.
I keep kissing her because I have no defense against any of this, and when she smiles against my lips, I'm happy.
I pull back. She chases my mouth for a second before settling, eyes half-closed.
”Hi," she smiles.
"Hi," I smile back.
Her body is a problem I hadn't accounted for. I’ve spent months catching details here and there.
The strip of skin between her shirt and jeans when she reached for something high.
That sweater slipping off one shoulder, exposing a collarbone I'd had entire conversations with the ceiling to avoid staring at.
I'd done a lot of imagining at two in the morning, in bed, in the shower, in the car after dropping her off. I'd built a version in my head, filling in the unseen parts, and my brain had been generous. Reality is better.
She has a body that makes sense to me in a way I can't explain. Not short, not built the way magazines say, just soft where soft should be and firm where firm should be and warm everywhere.
I can't stop thinking about the specific way she fit against me when I lifted her, her legs around my hips, the whole weight of her like she'd been designed to be carried that way.
She watches my hand the whole time, eyes tracking my fingers like she's curious what I'll do next.
Her back arches slightly when I reach her breast, and I stay there. I cup her, let my thumb find her nipple and circle it lazy and slow. I'm not trying to start anything. I'm just touching her because I want to and she's letting me.
She lets me have all of it. Every part, no flinching, no adjusting, no pulling the sheet up when my eyes travel somewhere new. That kind of trust from a naked woman at four in the morning could ruin a man if he thought about it too hard. I'm thinking about it too hard.
My thumb keeps circling. Her nipple pebbles under my touch.
"They're too small."
I glance up. She's not meeting my eyes. She's studying my hand on her breast with an expression I haven't seen before, something almost shy, and that's a word I would never use for her until this exact moment.
I keep my thumb moving in slow circles and even pressure, watching her nipple peak under my touch. She watches, too.
"See?" I murmur. "Perfect."
She lets out a giggle, light and surprised, and I lean down and kiss her, catching the end of that sound against my mouth.
"Are you okay?" she says a while later.
I scoff. "I should be asking you that."
"I asked first."
"I'm fine, Lily."
"You don't look fine." She tilts her head, studying me. "You look like a man who's thinking."
She's not wrong. I'm in the bed of a woman I promised her brother I wouldn't touch, instead regretting every second I didn't for almost a year. The math is not great.
"I'm good. Are you?"
She rolls her eyes so hard I feel it.
"Callahan. I have been ready for this since the staircase. You understand that, right? Since the literal first second I saw you. I have been standing right here, the entire time, while you fought with yourself and Rome and the concept of age gaps."
She ticks off on her fingers. "The firehouse. You kissed me and left. The porch. You kissed me and told me to go inside. The car. You kissed me and drove me home and sat outside like a security detail."
Her gaze is steady and unflinching.
"I have never once been the one with the problem."
"I know."
"So when you ask if I'm okay, just so we're clear, I have been okay this whole time. I have been very, very okay. I've been so okay it's been boring."
Of course. "Boring, huh?”
"Incredibly boring. Do you know how boring it is being ready for someone who won't stop being noble about it?"
"I wasn't noble. I was trying not to get buried in concrete by your brother."
"Rome isn't going to bury you in concrete."
"You didn't see his face outside the firehouse that day."
She waves a hand, dismissing Rome and his face and whatever he'd said with a single gesture, and I realize I need to say something I should have said a long time ago.
"There is nothing wrong with you in all of this."
She has a lot to say, but I keep going because I need her to hear it before she makes it a joke.
"Lily. Listen to me. There isn't a single thing wrong with you.
There never was." I hold her gaze, willing her to understand.
"I'm the one who's wrong for you. It's not because you're twenty-two, it's because I'm twenty-nine.
It's not because you're leaving, but because I'm staying.
The problem is not you being his sister. It's me being his friend."
The teasing drops away from her and what's underneath is raw and young in a way she usually hides well. For a second I see the girl who grew up on dig sites with parents who forgot to call, the one who wanted a kitchen table more than a plane ticket.
Then the moment passes and Lily comes back. The composure slides into place, chin lifting, spark returning to her eyes.
“You done?"
"Yeah."
"Good. Because that was the most long-winded, self-pitying load of bullshit I've ever heard, and I've listened to Rome give speeches about grout."
"Trouble, you're not listening."
"Oh, I'm listening," she counters. "I'm just not agreeing. There's a difference, and you of all people should know it since you've been not agreeing with me for a year."
This impossible woman who won't let me martyr myself in peace, who gives herself to me so freely that I feel like taking it all and never letting it go. I need to take this back on safer ground, where feelings are far away, and I keep some sort of distance.
"Instead of running that mouth," I say as I move her underneath me, "you should be fucking grateful I can keep my hands to myself when I'm this close to your cunt."
I watch the flush start at her chest and climb up her throat. She stretches, her back arching off the mattress in a way that's absolutely sinful. I stop breathing as her legs fall open, all of it aimed at me.
"Who says you need to?"
I should have more self-control. I just had her a second time less than an hour ago. I should be spent, thinking responsibly about the morning.
Instead I'm hard again, and she knows it, and she's watching me with her legs open like she knows exactly what she's done and is waiting to see what I'll do about it.
I move over her slowly, one hand beside her head, the other on her ribs. I kiss her mouth first because I always want to kiss her mouth first and I'm done pretending otherwise.
I feel her pulse under my lips, fast and hard, and I stay there for a moment just feeling it.
Then I go lower. Her collarbone, where the mark is already darkening. I put my mouth on it again because I need the reminder to be darker.
She makes a sound, half gasp and half sigh, and I take my time with her breasts.
Longer than needed, because she said they were too small and I have a point to make.
I cup one, take her nipple into my mouth, and suck until she arches into me and her fingers tighten in my hair.
When I pull back and blow cool air across the wet skin, she swears at me, and I smile against her.
I press my lips to the spot below her navel, and she knows where I'm going. Her fingers are in my hair, trying to push me lower, and I resist gently.
"Ask me."
My mouth is against her hip bone. I can smell her, warm and salt and sweet, and my cock is aching against the mattress, but I don't care because this is more important.
"You know what I want." Her voice is thinner than a minute ago. The brat is still there but losing her grip, the composure starting to slip.
"I do know." I kiss the inside of her thigh, watch her hips shift toward me. "I want to hear you say it anyway."
"Callahan."
"Ask me, Lily."
I can feel the war happening above me without looking.
This girl who never backs down, who called me a good boy to my face, who spent a year tormenting me across every room in this town.
She's lying here with my mouth three inches from where she needs it, trying to decide if her pride can survive the asking.
"Please." The brat is gone, replaced by something honest and open that hits me like a fist. "Please. I need your mouth on me."
"Good girl," I murmur, pressed into the crease of her thigh.
I put my tongue on her pussy and everything else stops. She's wet and warm and swollen from earlier, and the first broad stroke of my tongue pulls a sound out of her that I feel belongs to me only.
I grip her hips with both hands because she's already moving, trying to grind against my face, and I hold her still because I want to do this right.
I want to take my time. Learn her. Figure out every single thing that makes her break. I won't rush just because she's impatient. I am also just not ready for my mouth to part from her.
I lick her slowly, long flat strokes, base to tip, learning the shape of her while she curses above me and pulls my hair and tells me things that would make me blush if my face weren't otherwise occupied.
I find the rhythm she likes. It doesn't take long. She tells me with her body, with the way she moves when I hit the right spot. I memorize the coordinates and stay there, circling with the tip of my tongue, but it has to be soft. Her hips buck against my hands.
"Stay still," I say against her, and the vibration makes her whimper. "Let me eat you like I want to."
She does not stay still. She tries. I can feel the effort in her thighs, her hips straining against my grip. Every few seconds she loses the fight and rolls up against my mouth, and I pin her back down and start over.
"Callahan." My full name, barely recognizable. "Please, I can't, I need you to..."
"You can. And you will." I press a kiss to her inner thigh, almost sweet, a counterpoint to everything else. "Be good for me."
She moans at that, nothing like the composed girl who holds court at Ruth's diner on Saturday mornings. I take that sound and add it to the collection of things I can obsess over.
I go back to her, and this time I don't hold back.
I suck her clit into my mouth and push two fingers inside her, curling them up, finding the spot that makes her back arch clean off the bed.
Her thighs clamp around my head and her hand in my hair goes so tight it hurts, and I groan against her because I like the pain, like that she can't be gentle right now even if she tried.
"I'm going to... Cal... I'm..."
She never calls me Cal. That alone tells me how far gone she is, the full name reduced to a single syllable because she doesn't have capacity for more.
I work her through it, tongue and fingers focused on destroying her as thoroughly as she has destroyed me. She comes hard, her whole body locking up, my name tearing out of her in a raw, high, broken voice that sounds like it surprised her.
I hold her hips and stay with her, gentling my mouth through every tremor, until she sags and her hand loosens and her breathing comes in ragged pulls.
I kiss my way up her body slowly because I like the journey and she's trembling under me. When I reach her face she pulls me in and kisses me, deep and graceless, tasting herself on my tongue.
And I lose myself in her, over and over again.