4. Damien
FOUR
damien
THEN
If there was such a thing as hell, it was listening to Sam talk shit about Callum.
I couldn’t call him on it because I was supposed to be Sam’s best friend, but I honestly thought he needed to lay off.
Were siblings really supposed to act like that?
Callum was always nice to Sam, but Sam didn’t always appreciate it.
It never used to bother me. Sam was my friend, not Callum.
Sure, I saw him often because I practically lived at their house, but I was always with Sam.
And then he got a summer job working for a landscaping company.
He’d tried to get me to work for them too, but apparently hay fever and cutting lawns all day don’t mix.
After an afternoon of misery, I decided that it simply wasn’t worth it.
Had Sam not been there to see my puffy eyes and witness my condition for himself, he might not have understood, but he begrudgingly accepted that we would have to spend time together outside of his job.
Hanging around his house when he wasn’t there wasn’t that bad.
Callum was there, after all. I’d always noticed Callum.
He was quieter than Sam. More reserved. More willing to go with the flow.
More apt to compromise than Sam was. Sam liked being in charge.
He relished being the center of the universe.
Sam was the more popular one at school too.
Callum might have been the older one by a year, but Sam was the social butterfly.
He had friends in every clique, which was why it still made me feel like something special that he picked me to be his best friend.
Only now, looking at Callum and trying not to look at Callum, for the first time I wondered if that was a good thing.
I’d never wanted to look at a guy before.
Not really. I mean, some guys were good-looking, but not in the way Callum was.
He had this dark hair that looked soft and smooth.
It was a bit long right now, curling around his ears and brushing the back of his neck.
He’d probably cut it again before school started like he did every year.
If Sam wasn’t my best friend, I might not have felt guilty when I first started to notice the way my body reacted to Callum.
It had been this gradual thing, starting so small I didn’t notice it at first. The subtle flip-flop of my heart when he entered a room.
The way I had to fight against my own eyes to not stare at him constantly when he was near.
The most telling of all the ways my body reacted to him was how I’d reach for my dick and try to think about someone else.
Carly from English class, with the pretty smile and the soft mouth.
But then Callum’s face would appear. He had dimples when he smiled, and it was fucking impossible to get him out of my head once I’d let him inside.
Poof. Carly was gone and Callum was front and center.
Him and his dark hair and his dimples and his endless brown eyes.
I didn’t so much care that I was bisexual.
Because I still liked Carly and her soft mouth and the way she looked in sundresses.
But Callum had become this obsession, this thing I couldn’t have.
It was like being a kid in a bakery looking at a tray full of cookies through the glass.
I could look but not touch. And hell, I wasn’t even supposed to look.
Sam would kill me.
That should have kept me from coming over when he wasn’t there.
But it didn’t. I hated being at my house.
It didn’t feel like my home anymore. I was practically invisible when my parents were around, and they never noticed when I wasn’t.
It was at the point now where I no longer bothered them for school things.
I merely scrawled my mother’s signature on any consent forms that needed to be signed.
I was pretty sure the school knew, but because my grades didn’t suck and I stayed out of trouble, they looked the other way.
The new pool at Sam’s house was a dream come true. And a fucking nightmare. Callum in swim trunks all summer long? Yes, please. The cold water had helped hide how much I enjoyed that on more than one occasion.
Occasions when Sam wasn’t there to demand all my attention. When I could do things like hang out in the shallow end and pray that no one noticed I couldn’t do more than float or doggy paddle.
Callum liked to sit at the deep end and stick his feet in the water.
I think he sat there on purpose, knowing I’d stick to the shallows.
It felt like he was avoiding me by doing that and, for whatever reason, that made me bristle.
I’d done shit to avoid him on occasion. Like if he was dressed too nice or smelled too good, I’d find ways to not be near him.
But that was survival. Sam would rip my dick off if he knew it got hard for his brother.
On a whim one day, while Sam was at work and Callum and I were occupying the same space but not really hanging out, I made the executive decision to use the edge of the pool to pull myself out of the shallows and into the deep end.
Callum was sitting on the edge, as usual, his feet swishing around in the water.
Clinging to the edge, I moved next to him. I crossed my arms and hung off the edge, near enough to make easy conversation. Not too close where we might accidentally touch.
“Why don’t you bring your friends over?” I asked him.
I knew he had friends. Callum had run with the same small group of people the whole time I’d known him.
Sam might easily flit from group to group and find friends everywhere, but Callum was more insular.
More guarded. More loyal. He had his core group of friends, and they seemed solid.
But maybe he had room for one more friend.
He looked down at me, then looked away and shrugged. “I like the quiet. Besides, I see them plenty.”
I’d have asked when he ever saw them, but then I realized that most of the time I was with Sam, and when I was with Sam, we were nowhere near Callum.
I didn’t know what to say to that. So I said nothing at all and just lingered by the pool’s edge trying my best not to feel awkward.
“When is Sam off work?” he asked.
“Dinner time. So not for a couple of hours.”
“Too bad the job didn’t work out for you,” Callum said.
“Yeah, I’m really torn up about not pushing a mower all summer.
” I laughed softly. “I didn’t really want the job anyway.
It sounds dumb, but…” I stopped abruptly, suddenly realizing that I was about to tell Callum things I hadn’t told anyone.
Not even Sam. Was I trying to impress him?
Was I wanting him to pity me? Or did I just think he’d understand where I was coming from? I wanted him to know me.
“But what?” Callum asked, his feet still moving in circles in the water.
“But my parents might be shit, and they might be absent, and they kind of ruined my childhood in a lot of ways that are going to need therapy later, but at least they don’t expect things of me.
They give me money so I can do what I want and stay out of their way.
I know this won’t last forever, because nothing does with them.
So I want to enjoy it while I can and don’t want to spend my summer working. I’ll leave that to Sam.”
The word vomit made me feel stupid and vulnerable, two things I wasn’t used to feeling and without thinking, I pushed away from the wall of the pool, only to realize when I’d launched myself into the middle, that I was in the deep end and I could barely swim.
Panic gripped me and I sank like a stone. I tried to calm, but my brain had already gone offline. The three responses to fear were fight, flight, or freeze, but they didn’t tell you about a secret fourth option—flail.
My heartbeat hammered in my chest, and it was all I could hear until a strong arm yanked me above the surface and a voice broke through my blind panic.
“Don’t fight me, D. Don’t fight me. Relax. Just relax.”
I tried to listen to Callum. Tried to get my body to stop acting like… well, like someone who didn’t want to drown. And through some miracle, Callum managed to haul me back to the edge of the pool. He stayed there with me, his arm around my shoulder.
“D, are you okay?”
Callum had never called me D before. That was something only Sam called me. But I didn’t hate it coming from Callum.
I tried to answer but ended up coughing instead, which prompted Callum to rub my back. Which made my stupid cock, who had no idea that he almost died, stir in my swim trunks.
I nodded through a coughing fit, and Callum stayed by my side the whole time as I clung to the pool’s edge trying to compose myself.
As more oxygen entered my lungs and I realized what a fucking ass I must have looked like, humiliation crawled up my spine and flooded me with the urge to run and hide.
“One time, when Sam and I were like ten, we were at the pool downtown. Well, Sam went off the diving board and did this really neat looking dive, and I wanted to try it.”
Callum kept rubbing my back, and it was exquisite torture. I basked in his attention even though I shouldn’t.
“Sam is a showoff,” I said, not feeling bad for shit-talking Sam because it wasn’t anything I hadn’t said to his face a million times.
Callum laughed. “So I get up there, and I get ready to try. The diving board is one of those springboard ones, and I give it a bit of a bounce. Then a harder one. And then I go for a really big one, wanting to launch myself really high, right? Then I slip and I crack my head on the board in front of everyone. I didn’t break skin, by some miracle, but I did give myself a massive goosebump.
The lifeguard had to fish me out of the pool. ”
“I bet you never went back.”
“Actually, I begged for swimming lessons.”
I shook my head. That tracked. Callum never met a challenge he wouldn’t take.
“I could teach you, if you wanted.”
I turned to face him and tried to see if he was serious or not. “I know how to swim,” I lied, defensively. It was a stupid, obvious falsehood, but Callum never acknowledged it. He simply offered again.
“I could teach you, and no one has to know. Not even Sam.” He winced when he said it. “Not that you can’t tell him, just that I won’t if you don’t want me to.”
“I mean, I’m here all the time anyway. If I happen to be here and you happen to be here, and you happen to give me some pointers, I don’t see why that would be a bad thing.”
Callum laughed. “Even Sam couldn’t get pissy at that logic.”
“I’m sorry he’s not nicer to you,” I said, feeling guilty for all the times I said nothing when Sam iced him out.
“It’s fine. Sam’s not that bad.”
He sort of was, but admitting that out loud felt like a step too far. It crossed the line from recognizing your best friend had faults into genuine betrayal. And as much as I liked Callum, I didn’t want to betray Sam.
“At least let me show you some basic stuff so you can tread water and swim short distances. Okay?” Callum looked at me, concern and determination pooled in his gaze.
“Okay,” I said, agreeing to his plan. “You can teach me to swim.”
“Good.”
“But not today. I think now I need to get out of this pool.”
He got out first and if my stomach swooped when he reached down and helped me climb out, no one had to know.