Chapter Eight
Max
Callan catches the door before I can close it behind me as I step out of Richard’s office.
“You know,” he says, falling into step beside me, keeping his voice low, “you could have asked for something really unreasonable, and he still would have said yes.”
“Like what.” I’m staring straight ahead, with no direction or destination in mind, just following the wall.
“I don’t know.” He considers for a moment. “For Patrick to be kept in a cage.”
I stop walking. “Any room with him in it is automatically a cage anyway.”
I glance at him and he smiles.
“His cell is over there,” he whispers it and lifts his chin to gesture across the office.
I look—past the cubicles, past the desks, past Jenni who is pretending to look at her computer but glances at us every few seconds—all the way to the far corner where a glass-walled office sits at the opposite end of the floor. I can barely see it from here.
Something loosens in my chest. Not much. But something.
I look around at the rest of it—the high ceilings, the good light, the stacks of files that are probably real, meaningful files, the kind of work that actually—
“The Sullivan grandparent case,” I say. “From my old firm. It’s two foster kids that need to end up with their grandparents. It was a pro bono case Carla took on because the grandparents couldn’t afford to pay an attorney. Is that something—”
“Already on my desk.” He says it simply, like of course it is. “We already went through the firm’s cases, and I was hoping you’d want to keep that, because it’s something I’d like to take on. But I do have an interesting case of my own. I’d like your take on it when you’re ready.”
The loosening thing in my chest does it again, oxygen coming to my lungs a little easier as I realize the shallow breaths I had been taking this entire time were not working.
“Show me my desk,” my voice is small, my authority spent.
He walks me a few paces forward to a desk.
It’s outside what I assume is his office—another corner office, slightly smaller than Richard’s, as far away as possible from Patrick’s—and the desk sitting in front of us is dark wood with notebooks and supplies cleanly organized.
He leans on the open door of his office. His arms cross.
I look at him.
This is the first time I’ve seen him in full daylight, properly lit, without the warm blur of bar lighting or the bite of night air.
His jaw is sharper than I remember. The beard is darker.
The curl of his hair is more pronounced in the morning.
There’s a slight shadow under his eyes like he didn’t sleep much either this weekend, which does something to me I refuse to examine right now.
His shirt is white and it fits the way his shirts always fit, which is to say, too well, sleeves rolled to the elbows to show ink running down both beautiful forearms. The muscles tense in their crossed position.
I think about seven years. Seven years of not knowing he existed in this specific form, not knowing what I was missing. The version of him I didn’t get to know, and now that chance has come back around.
I think about Patrick. The five and a half years and the heels and the pencil skirts and the corner desk facing his glass office.
I think, not for the first time, that I owe Patrick Ellison nothing, least of all my sanity and even less—a second of my thoughts.
“Thank you,” I look up from his tanned arms to his eyes. “For in there.”
“You were doing fine without me.”
“I forgot you were in the room.”
He chuckles, the sound of his laugh does the thing to me again. “I figured, I am pretty forgettable.”
No, Callan Reed, you are the opposite.
He pushes off the door and tips his head toward his office as he turns to step inside. I do a once over, feeling inappropriate but doing it anyway. His pants fit like they were tailored to his body (and they probably were), hugging his thick legs and the curve of a mighty fine a—
Someone behind me in the office bellows a laugh and it shakes me out of the stupor Cal’s hard body has put me into and pushes me forward to follow Cal in.
It smells like him—leather and cedar and something that I have apparently decided is just the smell of things being okay, burned salt or smoke—and the furnishings are magnificent without being showy.
Dark wood, clean lines, a bookshelf that has books he’s likely actually read.
His black, likely expensive, suit jacket is hanging on the back of his chair.
He picks it up, shrugs it on, and does the button in one fluid motion in that confident way guys do. “I’ll need a new laptop,” I say slowly, recalibrating. “And I want to see your active caseload.”
His face does the thing—the thing I saw through the glass a few minutes ago, the beginning of the smile he couldn’t help. Except this time he lets it finish. And his smile burns a hole in my brain. I swear the picture will never be erased, because it’s a smile I didn’t know I was missing.
“Yeah?” He looks down and then steps closer to me, meeting my eyes with his, crinkling at the corners.
“Don’t look so pleased with yourself.”
“I’m not.” His smile gets bigger, and with a wink, his eyebrows raise suggestively. “You wanna see my caseload, Sims?”
“You absolutely are, and yes.”
He holds out his hand. I stare at it for a second.
“Welcome back, Counselor,” he says.
I roll my eyes, realizing for a second that he must realize I didn’t finish law school and that nickname doesn’t apply to me anymore.
I shake his hand anyway, and he runs his thumb up the side of mine in a slow, deliberate motion that makes me forget what we were talking about.