11. Freddie #3
He chuckles and looks down at his hands, lacing his fingers together over his stomach.
“Honestly? I’ve just been a workaholic. It’s…
easier. It’s easy to lose myself in seventy-hour work weeks and other people’s disasters so I don’t have to sit alone in my apartment and remember my brother because remembering hurts like a bitch. ”
The air in the room shifts, heavy and thick.
“And then I feel guilty,” he continues, his voice a little rougher around the edges.
“Because I have all these incredible memories of him growing up. Years and years of them. But now it feels like every single good memory is bogged down by the fact that he’s gone.
Like I can’t even look back at us being kids without the sadness creeping in and ruining it. ”
A knot tightens right behind my sternum.
I want to say something—anything—that might take the edge off that suffocating pain.
But I don’t say I’m sorry. I know that look.
I know how it feels to have somebody dump their unsolicited pity onto your head, and I have a feeling that Callum would hate it just as much as I do.
Instead, I swing my legs off the edge of the coffee table and hoist them directly onto his lap, nudging a grunting, half-asleep Jett in the process.
Callum startles, blinking down at my bare feet parked squarely on his thighs. A startled laugh escapes him. “What are you doing? Why do you just assume you can casually invade my personal space?”
“First of all, your ass is on my couch, so technically you are invading my personal space,” I roll my eyes, settling in. “Second of all, it’s like you said, we’re well past modest boundaries. Now stop whining and tell me about them.”
He tilts his head, a faint line forming between his brows. “About who?”
“Everyone. Your family.” I nudge his knee with my big toe. “What about your parents?”
He runs a hand down his face, his palm rubbing against the dark stubble along his jawline. “My parents died in a car crash when I was nine.”
“Oh, damn,” I murmur, the sharp edge dropping out of my voice. “Callum, that really sucks. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. It did,” he says simply, running a hand over his mustache. “It was hell for a while. But we got sent to live with my Gran, Lorna. And Lorna…man, she’s as tough as they come, but she’s one of my favorite people on this planet. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for that woman.”
“I love a terrifying matriarch,” I smile faintly. “What about your siblings?”
“There’s Isla,” he says, a subtle warmth easing into his tone.
“She’s an RN living it up in Nashville right now.
Total social butterfly. Has been since we were knee-high, always making fifty new friends every time we went to the grocery store.
She’s just got one of those big, bright hearts, you know?
Always wanted to help people, so her becoming a nurse was basically written in the stars. ”
“Are you guys close?”
He tilts his head side to side, giving a half-shrug. “Yeah, we are. Even though we’re night and day. She talks enough for both of us.”
“And your brother?” I ask softly.
“Rory was…larger than life,” Callum says, his mustache twitching as his mouth tilts into a fond smile.
“A total prankster. Always had to make sure everyone in the room was taken care of and laughing, even if he was falling apart himself. He was wild. Couldn’t sit still if his life depended on it.
Always exploring, always adventuring, always trying to drag me along into some crazy scheme. ”
He lets out a laugh that lights up his eyes. “God, one time Rory bought this realistic rubber garter snake from a joke shop. My Gran is deathly afraid of snakes. So we snuck into her room and tucked it right under her pillow.”
I grin. “Oh no.”
“Oh yeah. She found it while making the bed, let out a scream that probably shook the neighbor’s windows, and then chased the two of us around the house for twenty minutes beating us over the head with a broom.”
I burst out laughing, “Okay, that’s my kind of woman. She takes no shit.”
“None,” Callum chuckles, shaking his head. “Not a single grain of bullshit whatsoever.”
“Wait, so I thought your family was from Scotland? How did you guys end up in the States?”
“They are,” he says, adjusting his weight on the cushion.
“Me, Rory, and Isla were the first generation born Stateside. My parents grew up in a tiny coastal town outside Aberdeen. My dad was an engineer and got offered a massive contract stateside right after him and my mom got married. My Gran, my dad’s mom, decided to come with them.
She’d been widowed for a while and didn’t have any other family besides my dad.
They intended to stay for five years, max, save up some money, and move back home.
But then they had me, then Isla, and then Rory…
and, well. Life happened. They stayed. But Gran never let us forget where we came from—she still bakes shortbread from scratch and yells at the TV in a thick Scottish brogue when rugby is on. ”
I grin at the mental image of a tiny Scottish woman throwing hands with a television screen over rugby, but then my brain catches up with a weirdly warm sensation on my calves.
Callum’s thumb is tracing slow, unthinking circles against my ankle, his large palm resting heavy against my shin. He’s still looking at me, completely absentminded about the fact that his hand is rubbing my leg like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Then his gaze drops and his hand follows, shifting as his thumb drags higher up my skin, tracing the dark ink of the python where it coils up my thigh. Every rough slide over the scales leaves a trail of goosebumps in its wake.
“Look, I apologize in advance if my legs feel like Jett’s fur,” I say, clearing my throat and wiggling my toes. “I honestly can’t remember the last time I shaved.”
“Yeah, I can tell. It feels like I’m being stabbed.”
“Excuse the fuck out of me?” I grab a throw pillow off the armrest and smack him in the chest with it.
He laughs, throwing an arm up to block the cushion. “What? You said it, not me!”
“Well, you weren’t supposed to actually agree with me, asshole!” I snort, yanking the pillow to my chest like a shield. “What happened to chivalry? What happened to politely lying?”
“Chivalry died when men stopped getting challenged to duels over mild insults,” he says, a lazy, unbothered grin spreading across his face. He doesn’t move his hand off my leg. “Besides, I may be off the clock, but the detective in me physically cannot withhold the truth.”
“You suck,” I mutter, even though my face is suddenly five degrees hotter than it was ten seconds ago.
His smile softens, the playful light in his eyes dimming just a little. He adjusts his grip on my ankle, his fingers rough against my skin. “In all seriousness, Winifred…you shouldn’t be afraid of your magic.”
I scoff. “Easy for you to say. You’re not the one walking around with a loaded cosmic gun in your chest.”
“I know it’s easy for me to say,” he says. “But life is full of a million things worth feeling. Good ones, scary ones, all of it. How brutal would it be if we just spent our whole lives sitting in the dark trying to avoid getting hurt?”
I look down at my hands, picking at the edge of my thumbnail. “It’s not just that I’m scared of what the magic can do, Callum. I’m scared of what people do when they realize how much of it I actually have.”
“Why would that scare anyone?”
“Because it’s a tale as old as time,” I say, looking back up at him.
“People have been terrified of witches since the beginning, even when we were just making herbal teas to cure their baby’s colic or literally just minding our own damn business.
” I gesture with one hand, getting into my groove.
“Fun fact: back before the Salem trials even popped off, most accused ‘witches’ were just unmarried women who inherited property, or midwives who knew too much about anatomy. A witch, historically speaking, is really just a woman who refuses to live within the bounds a man set for her. The second a woman stopped being afraid of them, some guy immediately stepped in and told the whole town she was dangerous.”
I give him a dry, sideways look. “Isn’t it wild how history taught us to be afraid of the witches, but never of the men burning them alive? Pretty fucked up if you ask me.”
Callum just watches me while I talk, his thumb making steady passes over my shin, not interrupting or trying to fix it.
“Look,” he says, giving my calf a gentle squeeze.
“If anyone has a problem with you—whether it’s the magic, or the fact that you talk too much, or whatever else—that’s on them.
They don’t get a front-row seat in your life anyway. Fuck ‘em.”
I arch an eyebrow at him, a half-smile tugging at my mouth. “Does that mean you like me? Even though I’m tragically, undeniably a little bit fucked up?”
A rumbling chuckle shakes his chest. “Well…maybe we can just be tragically fucked up together and figure it out as we go.” He tilts his head, tossing me a playful look.
I was starting to really like that look.
“Though the jury is still out on whether I actually like you or not. I’m not sure I can trust a person who willingly buys dill-pickle-flavored Oreos. ”
“Hey! Those were a limited-edition masterpiece!” I laugh, kicking him in the hip with my bare foot.
He catches my ankle mid-swing, his fingers wrapping firmly around it.
He doesn’t let go either, his thumb dragging a slow line right across the arch of my foot, and the breath gets stuck in the back of my throat.
My brain immediately screams at me to pull away, but every single nerve ending in my body is practically begging him to keep doing that.
Don’t do it, Freddie, I tell myself, swallowing hard. Do not get attached to this hot ass, broody Scottish man. We’re not doing it. Even if his mustache is magnificent. Get your shit together!!!