Chapter 4 Callie
By the fourth morning at Kane's house the routine has a shape: I wake before he leaves for the garage, hear the floor creak under his weight in the hall, hear the cabinet open in the kitchen and the slow drip of his coffee maker counting down.
By the time I come out of my room in jeans and an old sweatshirt of mine, he has put a second mug on the counter beside his, the cream out of the fridge, the bowl of fruit from the table moved closer to the toaster.
He doesn't say good morning. He nods, and the nod is enough for me.
I take my mug and a banana. He stays at the counter to drink his coffee black, looking at the window over the sink instead of at me.
That's how each morning goes. He's at the garage by eight, back at six, never one minute earlier or later, and he doesn't ask what I did with the eight hours in between.
I read and I study. Toby brought my rental and my suitcase out the morning after I arrived.
He left under Kane's flat stare without staying for a second cup of coffee, and I haven't called him since because I have everything I need.
The textbook for my exam is open on the coffee table by eleven each morning.
I make my own lunch and clean up after it.
I walk the length of his property in the afternoons because I'm not allowed off it, and the property is bigger than my last three apartments stacked end to end, so the walking is real.
He has a creek at the back of it that I have started sitting beside in the warmest part of the day.
In the evenings he comes home, we eat a simple dinner together, he sits in his chair by the stove with his piece of pine and his knife, and I sit at the far end of the couch with my book. We talk. I keep asking him the questions he doesn't want to answer.
Last night, with the textbook open on my lap and his knife working a curl off the pine, I tried again.
"Kane."
"Yeah."
"You said this is about how Danny died and that you needed me close to handle it. I've been here four days. Tell me what part of it has to do with me."
He didn't look up from the wood. "There's a piece that touches you. I'm not telling you what part tonight."
"Why not?"
"Because I haven't worked out yet how to tell you without making it harder than it has to be."
"Harder for me, or harder for you?"
That made him look up. He held the knife still for a second before he answered. "Both. Mostly you."
I didn't push him further. I can hear when he's trying to find the right words instead of dodging the question, and the difference is enough to make me let it go.
The other nights go the same. On night two I ask him if there's any danger I need to know about, and he says no.
On night three I want to know how he and Danny met.
He gives me three sentences and goes back to the wood.
That's the pattern with him. He gives me a piece, then closes the door on the rest.
I keep asking because I don't know how to stop.
I also know I'm not getting it before he is ready to tell me.
What keeps me from making it a fight is that Danny chose him, and my brother didn't choose easily.
The letter was for him. The last instruction Danny ever wrote was for me to find him.
Whatever Kane is holding back, he isn't hiding it from me. He just isn't ready to put it down.
What I've started doing instead is studying him.
I study people for a living, or I will if I finish my degree.
I read hands that move when they don't want you to see what their owners are thinking, weight held on one foot for too long, a true sentence that dodges the question.
I'm decent at it. I was decent at it before I got grad-school-bound at twenty-one.
I picked it up early. The adults in my life weren't paying attention, so I had to.
Kane gives away more than he thinks. The closed mouth that holds longer than it should, the eyes that follow me whenever I look away, the hands he keeps busy with the knife and the pine so they don't go anywhere else.
But it's still not enough to put together a full picture of him.
For every tell he lets slip, there are ten more he's keeping locked down.
What I can read clearly is the operational pattern of him.
Every night before he turns the lamp off in the living room he walks the house: front door, back door, every window on the ground floor, the latch on the bathroom.
The same route every time. I lay awake the second night and listened to it end to end, and he hasn't broken the pattern since.
On the third evening he asked me to bring the list of phone numbers he'd given me the first night down to the dinner table.
He wrote a seventh in pencil at the bottom and slid the page back to me.
Last resort, he told me. You only call this if nobody else answers.
Don't ask who it is. I didn't. I took the list back to my room and put it on the dresser with the rest of my things.
He hasn't told me what he's protecting me from, but every move he makes around me is shaped to keep me safe. I can feel that he wants me safe, and that is enough to make me trust him with the rest until he's ready to tell me himself.
By day four I'm starting to think there's more behind his distance than the situation he called me here for. I don't have the full picture yet.
Then there is the letter. Danny's letter is in the top drawer of the dresser in my room, exactly where I put it the first night.
Kane knows it exists. He knows it's meant for him.
He hasn't asked for it once, and I haven't given it.
Not yet. The letter is the one piece of this house that's mine to play, and I am not playing it until he tells me what he called me here for.
Another thing I keep to myself is how I've started thinking about his body.
I'm twenty-two and I've never been with a man.
The girls in my class were figuring out their first crushes while I was watching my grandmother get sick.
By the time she was gone I didn't have the energy to look up.
But I know my own body. I know the heat that comes between my hips when I want something, and it's been coming for him since the second night under his roof.
It comes when his sleeves are pushed up to his elbows and I can see the line of veins in his forearm.
It rises if he stands close enough to set a plate beside mine.
It floods through me when I walk past him in the hall after a shower and his eyes drag down the length of my robe before they snap away.
I don't act on any of it. He's in a fight he isn't telling me about, and I am not going to be one more thing he has to fight. But I'm not going to pretend the feeling isn't real, either.
***
On the night of day four he gets back later than six. He brings home a wax-paper bag from the Rusty Anchor and sets it on the kitchen table without saying what's in it, and when I open it there's a slice of apple pie wrapped in foil with a note in handwriting I don't know. Eat it, sweet pea. Lou.
I look up at him.
He shrugs. "She put it in my hand on the way out. Told me it was for you and to make sure you ate it."
I smile. "She's a treasure."
"She is."
I unwrap the foil. The pie is still warm. "Want to share it?"
He gets two forks out of the drawer, puts them on the table, and sits across from me.
He pushes the bag closer to my side and waits.
The pie is good. He eats two bites of his half and pushes the rest to me, the same gesture from the night we sat in Mama Lou's booth.
I take a forkful. The apple is sweet on my tongue, and I think, on the inside where he can't hear me: I'd rather be tasting him.
I take the last bite slowly. I see his eyes drop to my mouth and stay there until I lick the apple off my lower lip with intention, and then they snap to the window. The heat between my hips arrives on cue.
I carry the plate to the sink. He stays at the table but I can feel him watching me from it. I turn the water on cold and stand there with my fingers under it until my pulse is back under my own control. I turn off the tap and dry my hands on the kitchen towel. When I turn back he's standing.
"Going to call it a night."
"Oh. Okay. Good night, Kane."
"Good night, Callie."
He goes down the hall. I hear his door close and then nothing.
I stand at the sink another minute. Then I walk to my own room with my pulse still hammering between my hips and humming through the rest of me, close the door behind me, lie down on top of the bed with the light off, and slide my hand inside my underwear.
I think of his hands, the strength I've watched in them all week, what they could do to me if he stopped holding them so still.
His mouth on me, anywhere he wants to put it.
The weight of him on top of me, pressing me into this mattress.
The walls in this house aren't thick, so I try to be quick and quiet about it.
I don't manage the quiet part all the way. When I come, a sound gets out before I can catch it.
Tomorrow morning he'll put a second mug on the counter beside his. I'll take it, drink my coffee, and pretend tonight didn't happen.