9. Callum
CALLUM
The apartment is on the fourteenth floor of a building I bought three years ago as a tax-efficient hold. I've spent maybe six nights in it total. It has a doorman, a gym on the second floor, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the financial district, and a kitchen I've never cooked in.
Clara steps inside and stops in the entrance hall, the robe still tied around her, her bare feet on the marble floor, and she turns in a slow half-circle taking it in.
"This is yours," she says. Not a question.
"Ours." I drop the bag by the door and move past her to turn on the living room lights, keeping them low. "For as long as we need it."
She follows me into the main space and stops at the windows. The city is laid out below us in a grid of orange and white, traffic thin at this hour, the skyline clean against the dark. She presses one hand flat to the glass.
I give her the quiet. I move to the kitchen, find the kettle where I left it, fill it. I know the fridge is stocked—I had a service come in twice a month regardless of whether I was using the place. Coffee, fruit, eggs, the basics. I pull out two mugs.
"You had this entire time," she says finally, still facing the window. "A whole apartment just—sitting here."
"I own several properties." I lean against the counter and watch her. "I planned for the possibility that we'd need to leave."
She turns around. Her eyes are dry now—she cried in the car for about four minutes, silently, her face turned toward the passenger window while I drove. I didn't push her on it. When she was done, she was done.
"You planned for it," she repeats. "You packed a bag and had an apartment ready because you knew our parents was going to find us."
"I knew someone would eventually."
A long beat. The kettle begins to hiss.
"You are the most infuriating person I have ever met," she says, but there's no real heat in it.
"I know."
Something close to a smile crosses her face—brief, involuntary—and she crosses the room and stops in front of me. This close, I can see the tiredness in her eyes and underneath that, the steadier thing. She isn't broken by this. I knew she wouldn't be. She's too sharp for that.
I hand her a mug. She wraps both hands around it.
"Our parents," she starts.
"Will need time. Give them that." I hold her gaze. "Nothing tonight requires a decision. You're warm, you're safe, no one is walking through that door. That's all tonight is."
She searches my face for a moment, then gives a single nod and drinks her tea.
I show her the bedroom—large bed, clean lines, blackout curtains she immediately pulls aside so the city lights come in. She stands at that window too, mug in hand, taking stock of her new world from fourteen floors up.
She came with nothing. The robe on her back and whatever she was wearing when our parents opened that door. Everything else is back in that house.
I make a mental note to handle that in the morning.
She sets the mug down on the windowsill and turns to look at me across the room, and the low light from the city catches the line of her jaw and the loose fall of her dark hair, and I feel the pull of her the way I always feel it—constant, absolute, completely outside my control.
"Come here," I say.
She crosses the room and walks into my arms and I close them around her. She tips her head back to look up at me.
"We're really doing this," she says.
"We've been doing this." I brush her hair back from her face. "We're just not hiding it anymore."
"My stepbrother," she murmurs, testing the word now that there's no one to overhear it. Something in her expression shifts—charged, uncertain, curious all at once.
"Your stepbrother," I confirm, and I watch her breath hitch. "You say it like it scares you."
"It does scare me."
"Good." I untie the robe at her waist. "Fear means it's real."
She lets it fall from her shoulders.
No locked doors. No muffled sounds, no hand pressed to her own mouth. No listening for footsteps in the hallway below.
She pushes me back onto the bed and I let her, which I can see surprises her—she pauses when I land against the pillows and doesn't immediately move to take over, just watch her. She's still processing what this latitude means.
"You're just going to let me—" she starts.
"I'm not going anywhere, Clara."
She straddles me slowly, knees bracketing my hips, and she's bare above the waist already, and even in this low light I can see the slight fullness of her breasts—the telltale weight that's been building since this afternoon.
She's been wearing the same bra for hours and her body doesn't care about timing.
I put my hands on her hips and keep them there. I don't guide her. I wait.
She rolls her hips once, experimentally, and the sharp breath she pulls in is mine to keep.
"Oh," she breathes.
"Yeah," I say.
She sets a rhythm slowly, hands planted on my chest, figuring out what she's doing, and she is absolutely taking me apart. Her head drops forward, dark hair sliding over one shoulder, and she rolls and grinds with a focused, instinctive precision that is completely at odds with her inexperience.
"Look at that," I say quietly. "My stepsister learning to ride."
"You feel so good—ahh—" She doesn't finish her sentence as I thrust upward and she moans. Her hips stutter and pick back up, deeper, and her eyes find mine through the dark.
The fullness breaks before either of us expects it—she makes a small shocked sound and her milk lets down, running in twin rivulets down the curve of her breasts and onto my chest. She freezes for half a second, embarrassed, even now.
"Don't stop," I tell her. I slide one hand up her ribcage and cup one breast from beneath, and she whimpers as the pressure releases further.
"I can't—Callum?—"
"Keep moving, Clara." I bring her breast to my mouth.
The sound she makes when I seal my lips around her nipple and draw is not quiet. It's honest and loud and completely unguarded—freed by the fact that there are no walls here thin enough to hear through—and it sends a deep, fierce satisfaction through me to hear it.
"Oh God—" she gasps. "Oh—stepbrother, I?—"
The word in her mouth like that, while she's riding me, nearly does me in.
She starts to shake apart. Her hips lose their rhythm and find it again, faster, both hands fisting the sheets above my shoulders as she chases it, and I keep drinking from her and she clenches around me hard enough that I have to grip her hip to hold her still as I come.
"—Callum—Callum—yes—" Her head tips back.
"That's my girl," I manage, rough. "Right there. Come on."
She does.
Her whole body shudders through it, long and thorough, and she collapses forward onto my chest afterward, milk-slick and warm and breathing hard against my neck.
Neither of us moves for a long time.
The next week happens at a pace I didn't anticipate—not slow, not frantic. A settling. Like two people figuring out the edges of a new space.
Clara spends two mornings on her laptop transferring her classes to an online format, efficient and brisk about it, and when she closes the computer each time she undoes the small knot between her shoulders that appeared during the call with the registrar.
I watch her from across the kitchen without drawing attention to myself.
I go back to work, which for me means a monitor setup on the dining room table, calls to Singapore and London before Clara wakes up, portfolio decisions made before most people have had coffee.
Clara discovers me there one morning at five and stands in the hallway in my t-shirt staring at me like I've grown a second head.
"You've been up for how long?"
"Two hours." I hold up the spare mug I had ready. "I heard you move."
She takes the coffee. She sits on the kitchen counter and watches me work for a while, asking sharp questions about what she's observing—private equity structure, why that company, what the margin on this versus that—and her instincts are good. Better than good.
We cook dinner together every night that week, which is not something I would have predicted about myself. She has opinions about garlic. I learn that she defaults to over-seasoning when distracted. We argue about it twice and settle into a workable division of responsibility by Thursday.
The milking sessions become their own rhythm within the rhythm.
Twice a day now, sometimes three times—her body is persistent and her appetite for relief has turned, by degrees, into something neither of us is pretending is purely clinical.
She sits across my lap on the couch in the evenings with one hand in my hair, and I take my time, and afterward she is loose and warm and entirely satisfied in a way that has very little to do with pressure and everything to do with us.
One afternoon she says quietly, looking at the ceiling while I work at her left breast, "My stepbrother has very strong opinions about this."
"He does," I agree, and she laughs—a real one, full and unguarded—and I feel it in my chest.
Two weeks into this—two weeks since we walked into my apartment as stepbrother and stepsister and started building something that has nothing to do with our parents' marriage—and I'm taking her out properly on our first date together.
The restaurant is on the twenty-second floor of a hotel downtown, the kind of place with no sign outside and a reservation list three months deep.
I called in a favor to get the table because I wanted her here specifically—somewhere that feels like an occasion, somewhere that matches what I'm about to ask her.
Clara is in a black dress I don't recognize—she must have bought it during the week—and her hair is up, a few pieces loose at her jaw.
She looks at me when she comes out of the bedroom like she's expecting a reaction, and I give her one.
I let my gaze move over her slowly, deliberately, taking in the line of the dress against her body, the bare stretch of her collarbone, the way the fabric clings and moves when she shifts her weight.
"You look like trouble," I tell her.