Chapter Twenty-Eight
Max
Becca left after an awkward New Year’s Eve where Nico stayed across the penthouse from her at all times. I assumed it was because Cal had a talk with him, but we never discussed it, because all of a sudden I was thrust into prepping for my first week back at law school.
The thing no one tells you about going back to law school after a six-year gap is that the hardest part isn’t the material.
The material is fine. I was in the top third of my class when I left and the law hasn’t changed in ways that make my brain obsolete.
I have context now that I didn’t have then—years at Ellison, two years of watching Carla Sellers run a courtroom like she invented it, a few months of working alongside ‘Callan Reed’ on cases that matter—and that context makes the material richer, more three-dimensional, like seeing something in color that you’d only seen in black and white before.
No, the hard part is the small things.
The hard part is standing in the transcript office on the first day while the registrar pulls up my record and takes a long pause before saying everything transferred in cleanly, faster than she would have expected.
And trying not to do the math too obviously on what kind of contribution to a library fund would make university administration suddenly very cooperative.
The hard part is finding my seat in my first lecture—Evidence, which I’ve been dreaming about taking since I was twenty years old and reading case law on my own time before I even started the degree.
Because I realize very quickly I’m the oldest person in the room by at least four years and exactly nobody cares. Except me.
And the hardest part is how much I love it.
I forgot how much I loved it. I forgot that law school felt like someone finally handing me the instruction manual to a world I’d been trying to navigate on instinct—that I could sit in a lecture and feel my brain lean forward, feel everything sharpen, feel the satisfaction of something fitting into place.
I spent years telling myself I missed it but missing and remembering are different things.
Missing is an ache at a distance. Walking back into it is—something else.
Something glorious and gut-wrenching at the same time.
I sit in Evidence for ninety minutes on a Tuesday morning in January and I take seven pages of notes. I come out into the cold hallway, and I stand there for a moment and I think: I should have done this sooner.
And then I think: I did it exactly when I was supposed to.
My phone buzzes.
And there’s the reason himself.
Cal: how’s the material. be honest.
I look at it for a second, smiling at my phone like a person with no self-control.
Me: insufferably interesting. they assigned Daubert v. Merrell Dow in the first week like it’s nothing
A few seconds pass. Then:
Cal: you’re going to be insufferable.
Me: I was already insufferable.
Cal: not an untrue statement. dinner tonight. I have some things to finish but I’ll pick you up at seven.
I stare at the message.
We’ve been in the city for a few months now. We’ve had meals in the penthouse, lunches at the 5th Street café with Gio at a table behind us, Sunday dinners at Carmela’s house where the entire family constitutes its own security perimeter.
Cal has been careful—more careful than I realized at first, more deliberate about where we go and when, because the situation with the Volkovs is still unresolved and that fact lives underneath everything even on the good days.
But he’s asking me to dinner. Out. In public. At a restaurant.
Me: is this allowed?
Cal: I make the rules. so… seven.
He’s waiting when I come around the corner at six fifty-five. No suit jacket, just a green knit sweater and jeans, leaning against the kitchen counter with his phone in his hand. He is frowning, and looks all dark and stormy.
He glances up when I come in and his expression rights itself—in an automatic way, one he hasn’t fully learned to cover—and I love every second.
His eyes crinkle at the corners as a completely involuntary smile spreads from one side of his face to the other. And he lights up from the inside out. The stormy is replaced with sunny happiness.
I’m wearing something Sophia sent over with Gio when I asked her what to wear to dinner in this town.
A dark green wrap dress, black coat, the heels I’ve been avoiding because my feet prefer flats, but tonight I felt like being someone who wore heels.
My hair is down and curled, and I’m sliding a second small, gold hoop into my ear.
When I looked in the mirror before I left the bedroom, I thought I looked like myself.
The best version of myself that I’ve seen in a really long time.
“You look…” Cal shakes his head and walks towards me, sliding one arm around me while placing a kiss to the top of my head.
He says everything without saying it, just like he usually does. A man of few words, except for with me it seems.
Which is why I’m not surprised when he continues, “You’re the most stunning, magnificent thing I’ve ever seen. And I see you every day. And it’s still—” He exhales, his hand flexing on my waist. “God. Every time.”
I smile up at him. His green eyes are bright against the green of his shirt.
“And we match!” I giggle and slide my hand across his shoulder.
“Sophia might have told me what to wear.”
“Ah, she got to you, too!”
Gio drives us. The restaurant is on a narrow street in Federal Hill, tucked into a corner that smells like bread and garlic as soon as we step out of the car.
When we walk in, the host, a short, older man, spots Cal immediately and comes forward.
They shake hands, exchange a few words in Italian, and he leads us to a table around a short wall near the back that seems like it’s probably not on the menu of tables available to the general public.
It’s quiet, private, the right combination of intimate and unobtrusive.
Cal pulls out my chair, tucking me into the table before sitting down himself. I watch him ignore the menu the host tries to hand him.
He doesn’t take it. He looks at me instead.
“What do you want?” he asks.
“I haven’t looked at the—”
“What are you in the mood for?”
I pause. “Something with pasta. And whatever smells so good.”
He looks at the host who is still standing at attention beside the table.
He orders for both of us in Italian, stopping mid-sentence to look at me and ask, “Mushrooms?”
I nod and he finishes. He asks me if I want wine and I say yes, so he orders something I don’t recognize that turns out to be absolutely divine.
I watch the restaurant as I sip my wine. I watch people notice Cal.
Not staring—nothing that obvious—but this odd quality of awareness that a room gets when it contains someone it knows to be significant.
The waiter refills my water glass before it’s even half-empty. Another older man who must be the owner appears briefly to greet Cal.
Cal stands to shake his hand, they exchange pleasantries. The man glances at me with something that could be curiosity, or could be simply registering that Cal brought someone. He leaves without saying a word to me but offers me a kind smile and nod of his head.
“Does it bother you?” Cal asks as he studies my face intently from across the table.
I look back at him. The small votive candle between us throws shadows and flickering light across his sharp features, making him look menacing if you didn’t know better.
But I do. His hair is curly, faded on the sides into the beard I love to run my fingers across in a way that screams he just got a haircut a few days ago.
Adrenaline shoots through me knowing I get to go home with this man… get in bed with this man.
I raise my eyebrows, not understanding his question.
“The way people—I don’t know—calibrate around me.” He turns his wine glass once. “The way they act. I know it’s a lot.”
I think about it honestly. It’s not something we experienced in Boston while we went to school. And obviously not in Abbott. No one knew him there as anything other than Callan Reed.
“It’s strange,” I respond with a nod. “I won’t pretend it isn’t. People respond to you like—” I search for the word. “Like gravity. Like you changed the atmosphere by walking in.”
He looks at me without reacting, drinking every word in.
“But I think I understand it a little better now,” I sip my wine and return his gaze. “It’s just so different to how it was in Boston.”
His eyebrows rise and he scoffs, looking down, but not before I catch the hurt in his eyes.
“No, no,” I say quickly, worry lacing my words as I set my wine down and reach for his fingers, warm and strong, lacing them with mine. “Not like that. It’s not bad different. Just different. The way people walk up to you, and talk to you, you have this air of…”
My voice trails off and I swallow.
Because how do I explain he is the same as he always was just… more. He always had this ultimate confidence that he exuded, but no one ever responded in kind. And here? He’s known. Probably not in a light that is all too great, but, nonetheless, known.
“You’re the Cal I’ve always known, but it’s like everyone else also notices you here. And if this is your world—” I gesture, a small movement that means the restaurant and the waiter and the city and all of it. “I want to live in it.”
Something crosses his face. The open expression, the underneath one.
“You don’t have to want that.” His words are short.
“I know.” I pick up my wine and smile back. “That’s why I do.”
He looks at me for a long moment and I hold it. Let him look. Because I know the doubt that’s going through his mind. He’s expressed the concern for me staying here, being around him and this world.
And I don’t care.
Because he’s what I want.
“She says things like that and expects me to sit through dinner and keep my hands to myself,” he mutters, mostly to himself, quiet.
“She does,” I confirm with a smile.
The pasta is the kind that makes me close my eyes after the first bite.
Cal watches me eat with the expression of someone absolutely giddy to share one of his favorite things.
“Good?”
“If you ever lock me up in the penthouse again and this restaurant stops being an option,” I point my fork in his direction, “I will need a transition plan.”
He laughs. The real one, the one that comes from somewhere behind his careful composure and lands in the air around us, warm and bright.
“I’ll make sure the transition is managed,” he laughs again. “But we can come here whenever you want. It’s safe.”