7. Callum
CALLUM
I'm early.
Not by accident. I leave the house with twenty minutes to spare because I don't trust the way that kid looked at Clara at the bus stop two weeks ago—the specific entitled curl of his mouth when she didn't respond the way he wanted.
Men like that don't let things go. They recalibrate and come back with a sharper edge.
I pull around to the side entrance of the humanities building where Clara texts me to meet her, killing the engine and stepping out. The afternoon is grey and still, the kind of late autumn cold that settles into concrete. I spot her from thirty feet away.
She's not alone.
He has her backed against the brick wall beside the door—not quite touching her, but close enough that his arm is braced beside her head, penning her in.
I recognize him immediately. Same guy. Taller than I remembered, and angrier.
Clara's chin is up, jaw set, which I know by now means she's working hard to hold her ground while her pulse is probably spiking.
I move.
I catch the words before I reach them—his voice low and ugly, designed to degrade: "—think it's funny? Blowing me off in front of everyone? You know what I know about you? I've seen it, even when you're so good at hiding your little lactation problem."
Clara's face goes white.
He leans closer. "You think about being nice to me, or I start talking."
His hand closes around her wrist.
Three seconds later, I have him by the back of his jacket.
I don't yank—I don't need to—I simply pull, and he comes away from the wall like a coat off a hook, stumbling backward and spinning to face me. His eyes go wide, then fast with manufactured bravado, the kind that collapses under the first real pressure.
"Clara." I don't look away from him. "Are you hurt?"
"No." Her voice is steady, which is the only thing that keeps my response measured.
The kid opens his mouth. I hit him once—deliberate and precise, an open-palm strike to his sternum that drives him straight down onto one knee on the concrete. He makes a sound like he's been winded, which he has, and his hands come up.
I crouch down to his level.
"Look at her," I say.
He doesn't move.
I cup the back of his skull with one hand and orient his face toward Clara. Not rough enough to damage anything. Just enough so he understands this isn't a conversation he has options in.
"Now apologize."
Two students near the building entrance have stopped walking.
Neither of them intervene. The kid on the ground looks at Clara, and his face does something complicated—humiliation folding into the residue of anger, and then the anger draining out because the situation has made it very clear that anger is no longer a resource available to him.
"I'm sorry," he says. His voice cracks on it.
"For what, specifically." I keep mine flat, even. "Tell her."
"For—for what I said. About your—I won't tell anyone. I'm sorry."
Clara stands very still, arms crossed over her chest, watching him with an expression I haven't seen on her before. Not fear. Not satisfaction, exactly. Something contained and cold.
I stand up. He starts to rise. I put a hand on his shoulder, and he stays down.
"If you come within a hundred feet of her again," I say, "I will find you.
Not today, not tomorrow, but I will find you, and no one will hear about it beforehand.
" I lean down, dropping my voice further.
"And if one word about her condition reaches a single person—a text, a rumor, a whispered comment to anyone—I will dismantle every part of your life I can reach, and I can reach further than you want to test." I hold the eye contact until I'm certain the words have gone somewhere permanent in him. "We are done here."
I step back.
He gets up and walks away quickly, not running but close, and I watch until he rounds the corner before I turn to Clara.
Her arms are still crossed. She's staring at me with her brown eyes wide open, and there's a flush along her throat that has nothing to do with embarrassment.
"Your wrist," I say.
She extends it. There's a faint red mark where his fingers were. I press my thumb gently over it and feel her pulse hammering. I release her and tilt my head toward the car.
"Come on."
She falls into step beside me without a word.
We get in. I start the engine and pull away from campus, and for two full minutes neither of us speaks. Clara sits with her knees together, her bag in her lap, and I can feel her looking at me from the passenger seat—steady, unblinking, the way she looks when she's working something out.
Then she puts her hand on my thigh.
Not timid. Not accidental. She places it there with intention and leaves it.
"I need to take care of you first," I say. "Before we get home."
She knows what I mean. She uncrosses her arms and I feel the slight shift in her breathing—relief and something else threaded through it. The crossed arms weren't just defensive posture. She's been holding herself carefully this whole time.
I pull onto a quiet residential street three blocks from campus and park under an overgrown oak that drops enough shadow over the car to give us cover. I cut the engine.
"Turn toward me," I say.
She does, and I reach over and work the buttons on her coat with efficient hands, pushing it open, then lift her shirt. She's wearing the soft nursing bra she's switched to because the underwire was unbearable by midday. I unhook it and the cups fall forward.
The fullness is already visible—the slight shine of stretched skin, the dark leak spreading across the fabric where she'd been soaking through.
My jaw tightens. That kid saw this. He used it as a threat, took something that is private and specific to us and weaponized it, and the rage that had been cold and functional during the confrontation finds a different quality now—quieter, more permanent.
I cup her left breast in both hands, thumbs pressing gently inward from the base, and the first pale drop beads at her nipple and runs.
"Callum—" Her breath hitches.
I lower my head and take her in.
The milk comes steady and warm, and she makes a low, broken sound and slides her fingers into my hair.
I drink without rushing—deep, rhythmic pulls that drain the pressure and pull matching sounds from her throat—her body releasing tension it had been holding since before I arrived.
I work methodically, one breast and then the other, hands shaping and pressing while my mouth draws her out, and she tips her head back against the headrest and stops pretending any of this is complicated.
By the time I lift my head, both of us are breathing slower. She looks down at me with heavy, dark eyes.
"Better?" I ask.
"Yes." The word is barely audible.
I straighten her bra and pull her shirt back down, button her coat back up, and put the car in drive.
She keeps her hand on my thigh the entire ride home.
The front door clicks shut behind us and I haven't even reached for the light when she turns and grabs my jacket with both fists.
I let her pull me down to her mouth. She kisses me hard, without the hesitation that used to live at the edges of everything she did with me—that fraction of a second where she weighed the wrongness of it, catalogued the reasons, nearly pulled back.
Tonight that pause doesn't exist. Her mouth is open and certain and she tastes like the coffee she drank on the walk to the car.
I walk her backward down the hallway toward the stairs, hands at her waist, and she's already pulling at my jacket.
"Our parents are at dinner," she says against my jaw. "They won't be back until nine."
"I know."
In my room, I peel her coat off and she does the same to mine, and I sit at the edge of the bed and look up at her while she reaches back and unzips her dress. The fabric drops to the floor.
"You liked watching me break him." The words come out rough, lower than I intended. She goes still. "Didn't you?"
Her chin lifts slightly, which is her version of a confession.
"You're mine to protect," I say. "Mine to take care of." I reach forward and unhook her bra with one hand, and she lets me push it away. "Mine to fuck."
"Yes." She breathes it like a decision made long before tonight.
I pull her down onto the bed and roll her beneath me, and her thighs part easily around my hips, her hands already working at my shirt buttons with a focus she didn't have a month ago.
She gets three undone and then I take over, sitting back and stripping the shirt off, and her hands go to my chest and travel down with a curiosity she no longer tries to disguise.
"Turn around," I say.
She looks at me.
"Come here." I shift her—gentle, deliberate—until she understands the geometry I want: her knees on either side of my head, her mouth at my hip. She goes still for one second, processing it, and then something in her expression loosens into want.
She lowers her head and takes me in her mouth.
The groan that comes out of me is involuntary and genuine, and I feel her smile around me before she gets serious about it—her tongue working the underside of my shaft while she sucks, her hand at the base, and she is considerably less tentative than the first time.
I grip her hips and drag her down to my face and seal my mouth over her, and she gasps and nearly loses her rhythm.
I lick her in long, slow strokes, her hips rolling forward instinctively, and she moans around my cock—a real sound, open and helpless—and pulls off just long enough to say "oh god" before taking me back in.
She's wet and slick and her thighs are trembling by the time I start working her clit in tight circles with my tongue, her pitch climbing, hips grinding, hands tightening at the base of me while she works.
"Callum—" She breaks off to moan again. "I can't—I'm going to?—"
I pin her hips down and keep going until she's shaking, until her thighs clamp around my ears and she cries out and her whole body goes rigid above me. Her cunt pulses against my tongue, wet and clenching, and she makes a sound that is completely undone—raw and high and real.
I lift her off me and flip her onto her back in one motion. She looks up at me with her hair across her face and her chest heaving, and I notice the moment it happens—the flush spreading down her throat to her breasts, the slight fullness returning, the first glint of milk at her nipples.
I look at it. I look at her.
"Didn't I already take care of these?" I drop my head and drag my tongue across one nipple, tasting the first trace of sweetness. She gasps. "I just drained you an hour ago."
"I know—" Her voice is embarrassed and wanting at the same time.
"You like it that much." I press my mouth to her and draw, and she arches, hands flying to my hair. "Your stepbrother's mouth on your breasts gets you this worked up."
"Callum—Ahh?—"
I switch breasts and the milk comes freely now, warm and slow, and I drink and feel her thighs bracket my hips and grind upward. The noise she makes isn't language anymore—it's a long, desperate sound that goes straight down my spine.
I lift my head. Milk tracks across my jaw and she stares at it.
"Tell me you want me," I say.
"I want you." Zero hesitation.
I reach between her thighs and push two fingers into her—already slick and tight, her hips bucking up at the intrusion—and I curl them forward and feel her go taut.
"Good girl." I press my thumb to her clit. "Ride my hand."
She does. She actually does—hips rolling, thighs spreading wider, head dropped back, mouth open, completely unselfconscious in a way that is brand new and devastating.
She rides my fingers with her eyes closed and her lip caught between her teeth until the sounds she's making are continuous and climbing.
"Please," she says. "Please, Callum?—"
I pull my fingers out, line up, and push into her in one long, slow stroke.
The sound she makes?—
"Unngh—" She breaks off, breath punched out of her.
I hold still while she adjusts, both palms flat against her hips, watching her face. Her eyes squeeze shut and then flutter open.
"Move," she says.
I move.
I pull back and drive forward and she cries out and grabs my arms and holds on.
I build a hard, grinding rhythm, the headboard knocking once against the wall before I brace an arm back to still it, and she's loud in a way she hasn't been before—no more bitten-back sounds, no more effort to muffle it.
"You feel that?" I drop my chest to hers and take her nipple in my mouth mid-stroke, drinking from her while I drive into her, and the combination pulls a sound from her throat that is absolutely not controlled. "Your stepbrother fucking you. Say it."
"My—" She gasps as I thrust deep. "My stepbrother?—"
"Again."
"My stepbrother is—Callum—" She breaks on a moan. "Don't stop?—"
I don't stop. I fuck her through two more stuttering climbs, feeling her cunt grip and flutter, and I drink from her breasts in between—her milk smearing warm across my jaw and throat, mixing with the sweat on her skin, and she's completely given over to it, her whole body arching into both sensations at once.
"Come on my cock," I say against her breast. "Right now."
"Ahh—ahh—yes—" Her thighs clamp and she tips over, clenching hard around me, a flood of slick heat that pulls the orgasm out of me before I've decided to let it go.
I drive in deep and stay there, my jaw tight, the groan coming from somewhere low and involuntary, and her nails drag down my back and she cries out one more time, bright and sharp.
I stay inside her while we both come down, her chest heaving under mine, fingers loosening in my hair.
Her breasts are soft now. Drained and warm and rising and falling with each slow breath.
I roll to the side and pull her with me, tucking her against my chest. She curls in without resistance, her cheek at my collarbone, her hand flat over my ribs.
The room is quiet. Street light comes through the curtains in a slow yellow bar and lies across the ceiling.
"Clara."
She lifts her head slightly.
"You're my whole world now," I say. "No one touches you."
She looks at me for a moment—those dark eyes calm and searching and something close to certain—and then she sets her cheek back down against my chest and pulls the sheet up with one hand.
I wrap my arm around her and keep her there, and outside the house the street is quiet and the evening has gone fully dark, and I don't move.