14. Freddie
Freddie
My personal version of hell has always been remarkably specific.
It’s a perpetually damp Tuesday where I’m trapped walking behind three slow tourists on a narrow sidewalk for eternity.
It’s listening to a guy in a movie theater loudly crunching his way through a plastic cup full of nothing but ice.
It’s being forced to make small talk with my mother’s garden club while wearing an itchy wool sweater.
Now, lying flat on my back on what feels like a squeaky spring mattress, my forearm pressed hard over my eyes, I realize I was completely wrong.
Hell is Reaper oil in your tear ducts.
I’ve spent the last twenty minutes in the bathroom trying everything short of exorcism.
I flushed them under the ice-cold sink until my hair was dripping into my shirt.
I tried dabbling toilet paper in tap water.
I even tried blowing air into my own eyelids like a lunatic.
Nothing worked. The capsaicin is just baked into my flesh now, an eternal pain that makes my teeth ache and my ears ring.
So this is it. This is how I go out. Not in a blaze of magical glory, not saving the town from a rogue curse, but taken down by a five-dollar bag of gas-station beef jerky. I always pictured my end being a little more noble, or at least a little more badass.
The door to the room creaks open, followed by the muffled scuffle of Callum’s shoes against the hardwood. He steps inside the attached bathroom, and I hear the clatter of glass against the tile sink, followed by the running tap.
A second later, his footsteps cross back into the bedroom, stopping right beside the edge of the mattress.
“Can you stand up?” he asks. His voice is still raspy from nearly hurling his guts out over a pine tree almost thirty minutes ago.
“I don’t know,” I mumble into my sleeve. I sound pathetic. I am pathetic. “I don’t want to move. I don’t want to do anything that requires existing. I’m just going to lie right here and let the Reaper claim me.”
“Fred, come on.”
Before I can muster up a witty rebuttal and also acknowledge how that’s the first time he’s ever my nickname, a pair of broad arms slide under my knees and shoulders.
I gasp, my hands scrambling for leverage as he scoops me off the bed like a bag of laundry.
My forehead lands flat against the front of his jacket, and god, the man is built like he’s carved out of stone.
It’s almost offensive how immovable he feels under all those layers.
My brain goes completely off the rails for a second, trying to figure out if he spends his off hours chopping wood or carrying tractors.
I let my head sink into the crook of his shoulder, exhaling a shaky breath. It hits me then that I can’t remember the last time I let someone just…hold me.
Touch has always been transactional for me, or at the very least, a game with strict safety boundaries.
I’ve always been “the fun girl”. The witty, easygoing girl who stayed for a drink, shared a few laughs, and slid out of the sheets before the sun even thought about coming up.
Staying meant breakfast. Staying meant morning light hitting your unwashed face, awkward lingering by the front door, and someone asking you questions you didn’t want to answer.
It meant letting someone see the messy parts of you that weren’t charming or funny.
Being held required surrender, and surrender was dangerous when you spent your whole life trying to keep a tight lid on everything inside you.
“You’re shaking,” Callum grumbles softly against my hair, his chest expanding under my cheek as he steps toward the threshold of the small bathroom. His grip on me doesn’t slip an inch. “Hold still, reckless.”
He sets me down on the lid of the closed porcelain toilet, his hands lingering on my waist for half a second before he drops into a crouch right between my knees.
I crack my left eyelid open a fraction of a millimeter, wincing as fresh fire flares through my tear duct. Through the blurry haze, I see him reach into the sink basin and pull out a dripping hand towel. It’s dripping from a glass bowl filled with…white liquid?
I wrinkle my nose, leaning back an inch. “Is that milk?”
He smirks as he wrings out the cloth. “It is.”
“And what, exactly, do you think you’re going to do with that?”
“I think you’re going to sit still and find out.”
Every stubborn bone in my body wants to put up a fight, to tell him I can fix my own damn eyes, but the reality is I’m sitting on a toilet seat blind, crying pepper tears, and I don’t actually want him to leave.
“What about Jett?” I ask instead, my voice sounding smaller than I’d like. “And Twyla?”
“Handled,” Callum says, his thumb gently catching a rogue tear off my cheekbone before it hits my jaw.
“The owners here are cool guys. They’ve been married a few years, super chill.
They found an old dog bed in the office for Jett.
He’s already passed out in front of the lobby radiator.
” He pauses, his gaze softening just a fraction.
“Twyla’s curled up next to him. That freaky orb thing took a lot out of her, I think, but she’s fine. Just resting.”
A heavy lump lodges in my throat and I force myself not to let fresh tears swell up. Twyla burned through so much of her tiny pixie magic just to keep us from smacking into a pine tree at forty miles an hour. Because of me. Because I couldn’t wait twenty minutes to eat a stick of damn jerky.
“What’s rattling around in that demented little head of yours?” Callum asks softly.
“Hey!” I protest, though there’s no bite left in it.
“Close your eyes, Winifred. Completely.”
I do, letting out a ragged breath. The moment my eyelids seal shut, the cold, milk-soaked towel presses gently against my skin. It’s an instant, blissful relief, soothing the worst of the burn.
“It’s a beautiful demented head, for the record,” he adds, his voice barely above a whisper.
I swallow hard, my pulse doing a strange two-step in my chest. I don’t even know what to make of that—or the fact that his hands are being so ridiculously, impossibly careful with me.
Looking at Callum, with his broad shoulders, rough knuckles, and scowling jaw, you’d expect him to handle things like a caveman.
But right now, he’s kneeling on the cold bathroom tile, nursing my self-inflicted beef jerky wounds like I’m made of glass.
A hot flare of embarrassment prickles down my neck.
“Seriously,” he murmurs, his fingers lightly resting against the side of my face to keep the cloth in place. “What are you thinking about?”
“Where did you get milk?” I ask, deflecting as hard as humanly possible.
He huffs out a laugh. “I managed to convince one of the ladies working the kitchen downstairs to hand some over.”
I suppress a wry smile under the towel. Knowing Callum, I doubt he had to do much convincing at all.
“And you got milk because…?” I ask, my voice still a little raspy.
“Because pepper oil is fat-soluble,” he explains, his thumb brushing warm against my temple as he holds the cloth steady. “Water just spreads capsaicin around and makes it worse. Milk has fat and protein that breaks the bond and washes it away.”
“Huh.” I shift slightly on the hard porcelain seat. Who knew? Apparently Callum. “And why, exactly, didn’t you mention this while I was waterboarding myself in the sink earlier?”
I hear the snicker before he speaks. “Because watching you was pretty funny.”
Without lifting the milk-soaked rag from my face, I blindly raise my right hand and hold up my middle finger.
I’m fully aware of how ridiculous I look—sitting on a toilet lid with a wet cloth draped over my eyelids, throwing a middle finger at a guy kneeling between my knees—but it’s the principle of the thing.
The throbbing fire in my eyes is actually starting to ebb, settling into a dull, manageable ache instead of a localized nuclear explosion.
“How do you even know that?” I ask.
“Well, first of all, even though we’re in Amberhollow, Google is free,” he says, his hand remaining gentle against my skin. “And second, because Rory used to do some really stupid shit when we were kids, so…”
“So it was up to you to fix it and pull his ass out of the fire?”
“Pretty much.” Callum lets out a soft sigh, his breath warm against my cheek. “You and Rory probably would’ve been good friends.”
I smirk, the cloth crinkling over my nose. “Why? Because we’re both wildly reckless and never listen to a word you say?”
“Exactly that.”
I hear him shift on the tile, and then his fingers lightly pull the damp cloth away from my face.
“Slowly open,” he warns in a quiet voice.
I let my eyes flutter open, wincing a little at the soft overhead bathroom light. They’re still raw and watery, but I can actually see again.
And the very first thing I see is Callum.
I’ve never been this close to his face before.
I can see the slight, crooked bump on the ridge of his nose where it looks like it was broken years ago and never set quite straight.
I can see the tiny, pale scar cutting through the edge of his left eyebrow, and the dark stubble dusting his jaw.
Then my gaze drops to his eyes, and my brain just stumbles over itself.
From a distance, you’d just call them blue and move on.
But right here, with three inches between our faces, they’re an entire spectrum.
The outermost ring of his iris is a stormy indigo, bleeding inward into a bright aquamarine around his pupil.
Floating through the middle are swirls of robin’s-egg blue and even tiny specks of tawny olive near the center.
They’re the kind of eyes you could easily get lost in—ones that feel entirely too dangerous to look at for more than three seconds at a time if you want to keep your head on straight.
“See?” he murmurs, his voice dropping an octave as his eyes track the movement of mine. “Told you it would work.”