Chapter 184 Aurélie #2
His throat bobbed. Then, without missing a beat, he huffed a crooked grin.
“Christ, you’re such a romantic, baby.” He made a mock-swoon sound and clutched his chest.“How am I supposed to be a brooding sex symbol when my French revolutionary girlfriend keeps saying shit like that? I have a brand to uphold.”
I laughed, warm and wrecked and whole all at once. He grinned, his dimple popping and stealing my breath.
Then the quiet came again. It wasn’t heavy this time, just full. Full of love and tenderness and us.
“I’ll handle this meeting,” he said. “You go to Paris, get the movers sorted. We’ll go from there.”
I nodded, still smiling at him.
“Then,” he growled, “I’ll come find you. Since you refuse to give me the address.”
“I wasn’t refusing, but you know what?”
He rolled his eyes. “What?”
“Now I will.”
“You’re fucking crazy if you think I won’t be able to find you.”
I rolled my lips together. “Wherever I am?” My eyes burned for no reason at all.
He squeezed my hand. “Always.”
And with that one word, I knew we would survive any storm that blew our way.
Ifinally peeled myself out of bed sometime around ten that morning, moving as though I’d been assembled in the dark with missing instructions. Everything ached, and my uterus cramped like it had a grudge.
The bleeding hadn’t stopped, not since last night. Heavy from the moment it started, and so relentless I was starting to lose count of the number of tampons I’d already bled through.
It was definitely something I could ignore if I just didn’t look too closely. If I just didn’t check for clots again, then I’d never know for certain and I could brush this off as a bad period.
Callum sat on the edge of the bed, watching me mechanically fold clothes into my bags.
I hadn’t even showered yet. I’d thrown on the first thing I could find—one of his shirts and a pair of his boxer briefs over my panties.
It was an extra layer of armor. Another barrier keeping this devil of a period at bay, and maybe keeping the rest of me from spilling open too.
“You sure you’ll be okay alone?” he asked softly.
“I won’t be alone.”
He lifted a brow, a question without asking.
God, when had I learned to read him so well? Just a few months ago, I couldn’t tell if the man even had moods. Now I could read the subtleties in his silences like a second language. One I’d only learned by surviving him.
“étienne and Emilie are coming to help,” I admitted, avoiding his gaze as I zipped one of the bags.
His tone shifted slightly. “Oh. Are you… okay with that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.” I puffed my cheeks out and put my hands on my hips.
“I think that’s why Emilie’s coming too.
It was étienne’s idea, but Emilie texted in our sibling chat offering to help.
I think she wanted to make sure it didn’t turn into a disaster. She’s good at being a neutral party.”
I was rambling, and I had no idea why. Maybe I was more nervous than I thought to see my brother.
The last time I’d seen him in person was in Monaco, after I won my first Grand Prix.
We’d fought—shouted at each other, actually.
I confessed to him and our parents that I'd accepted a role at Luminis while he was still in the hospital after a crash that almost killed him. It had been brutal.
“Have you spoken to him again?”
“Not really.” I reached for my charger and tried not to over-explain. “A few texts, but nothing deep. I think this is his olive branch.”
“And Emilie?” he asked, and the way he said her name—his accent wrapping around every syllable—was so distractingly perfect it made me want to bite something. “You never talk about her.”
I sighed, trying to focus by changing into leggings and a crop top.
“Emilie and I were never as close as she is with étienne. I was the twin that had to be kept busy since I was on the same schedule as him. She never got caught in the crossfire of that, but she and I were never the golden children our parents wanted us to be.”
He hummed softly, thoughtful but not prying. That was the thing about him—he didn’t demand to know my pain. He just stood beside it.
Callum didn’t push. Instead, he stood up, and helped me carry my things to the car. We didn’t say much. We didn’t need to. He kissed me like we weren’t parting at all—slow, reverent, mouth warm and grounding—and tucked my hair behind my ear when we broke apart.
“Text me when you get there,” he murmured, fingers trailing down my arm.
“I will.”
He leaned down and pressed an open-mouthed kiss to the pulse point at the base of my neck, his stubble scraping lightly across my skin.
“Or call me,” he whispered against my throat.
“FaceTime me so I can see your beautiful face. More than a day or two without you and I might start going through withdrawals.”
I smirked faintly, even as my chest squeezed tight. “Better find me fast then, mon Casanova catastrophe,” I purred, though I felt anything but seductive.
He chuckled against my skin, low and rough. “That’s a promise, not a warning.”
Then he kissed me again, longer this time. Tongues, teeth, hands everywhere, like we were memorizing each other in case we forgot how this felt. He cupped my face, my nails dug into his shoulders, our breath shared between our mouths until I thought we’d never come up for air.
And then I left.
The drive from Silverstone to Paris should’ve felt like something out of a movie. Cross-country roads, winding motorways, the sun creeping in and out of clouds, ferry terminals and fields of green. But I didn’t feel like the main character. I didn’t feel like anything, really.
I took the ferry across the Channel Tunnel, queued behind strangers with their own lives, their own destinations, and stared blankly out at the road through the windshield as the countryside blurred by. England faded into France without ceremony.
It was a six-hour drive, give or take. More if I stopped. I used the restroom once on the ferry, under flickering fluorescent lights that buzzed like they were angry to still be alive. The floor was wet, the stall smelled like antiseptic and bleach, and I refused to look down at the mess in my pad.
Somewhere past Calais, I missed an exit I’d taken a hundred times before. Just drove past it like it wasn’t even there, then sat on the shoulder for ten minutes, trying to remember how long I’d been on the road.
When I pulled back onto the road, the soft hum of the road filled the silence.
I let my playlist run quietly in the background without really listening.
I didn’t call anyone or touch my phone at all.
Just kept my hands steady on the wheel and tried not to think about blood, or emails, the number of social media tags that flashed across the screen, or what would happen next.
I didn’t want to think about Morel. I didn’t want to think about Callum’s maybe-future. I didn’t want to think about what it meant that étienne was meeting me at my new house tomorrow.
So I didn’t.
I just drove.