Chapter 7
SYLVIE
THE TAKEOUT CONTAINERS are empty and scattered on the coffee table in front of us, scraped down to the last smear of sauce. It turns out watching a man eat for two is its own kind of foreplay and I’ve been half hypnotized by it for an hour.
I’m tucked into his side on the couch, my legs pulled up under me, his arm heavy and warm across my shoulders.
There’s a talking snowman on the enormous television and I could not tell you a single thing that has happened in this children’s movie because I have been too busy cataloguing the way his chest moves when he laughs.
“See,” Callen says, gesturing at the screen with the neck of a beer he’s barely touched.
“This is what I’m talking about. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t hold up.
The first one was tight. This one’s just…
” He waves a hand. “Bloated. Too many songs. Not total garbage, but close. This is the problem with sequels.”
I lift my head off his shoulder to look at him. Past his strong jawline, his eyes are dark, reflecting the glow of the screen.
“You’re critiquing the sequel? As in, you have opinions, plural, about the relative merits of the two Frozen films?”
He goes very still, like a man who’s just heard the trap click shut around his ankle. “I’ve heard talks of a third and I’m very concerned.”
“Oh. You were watching the first one earlier, while we were on the phone, weren’t you?”
He tips his gaze down, meeting mine. “How’d you know that?”
Be more fucking careful, Sylvie, Jesus. “I heard it playing in the background.”
“Oh. I didn’t realize it was so loud.”
Phew.
“It was. So, let me make sure I have this straight: a grown-ass man. A former SEAL. Sitting alone in a very nice apartment on a weeknight, drinking a Dos Equis in his underwear, watching a DreamWorks princess movie by himself—”
“Disney,” he says.
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s Disney. Not DreamWorks. If you’re going to mock me, get the studio right.” His mouth is fighting a smile and losing badly. “DreamWorks is the ogre. And the fish. Completely different structurally.”
“Oh my God.” I press a hand to my chest. “You said structurally about a children’s movie.”
And he laughs, that low unguarded rumble I’ve decided is the best sound he makes, but then it fades into something quieter, and he looks back at the screen, at the two animated sisters, and the smile goes somewhere sad.
“It’s nothing creepy. But yes, I’ve been watching it a lot lately.
Taylor’s girls,” he says. “Lola and Daisy. I watched the first Frozen with them about four hundred times. I’d go over to spend time with my buddy but his little girls wouldn’t give us guy time to save our lives.
” He settles deeper into the couch. “Lola used to sit behind me on the couch and braid my hair while it played. I went through a phase where it was almost down to my shoulders. She was terrible at it. I’d walk around all night with these little lumpy braids because I couldn’t bring myself to take them out while she was watching.
” His Adam’s apple bounces as he swallows hard.
“Daisy was only a little older and she was locked in on the songs. She knew the lyrics. Every time I’d sing along and get it wrong it’d be: ‘Uncle Jeff. It’s let it go, not let it snow. ’”
“Uncle Jeff? Taylor was your brother?”
He looks ahead again, toward the screen, but not really watching. He goes somewhere far away in his mind. “Yeah. In all the ways that matter.”
“How often do you see them now? Your nieces?”
He’s quiet for a second too long.
“Never,” he says. “Daisy just graduated from high school. I saw it on Facebook. I haven’t really…since their dad died. I only went once.”
“Just once? In…” I try to do the math but I don’t have the numbers for the formula.
Lola and Daisy were little girls. If she just graduated from high school that’s what—seventeen, eighteen in America?
I never went to a traditional school in Ireland anyway.
I most definitely never had a traditional life. “Ten or so years?” I guess.
“I couldn’t face them.” He says it plainly, no self-pity, which is worse than if he’d wallowed.
“Every time I look at those girls, I see him. I see the reason he’s not there to see them.
I’m not a monster. I sent money. I sent birthday cards…
But I stayed away because what happened in…
Anyway, it’s pathetic.” I can tell the way he trails off he feels he’s already offered too much.
“Kesara,” I say. So gently, like I’m trying not to startle a deer in the woods.
He nods. He doesn’t elaborate. He doesn’t have to.
The professional in me is supposed to lean in, taking advantage of this precious moment of vulnerability and pull—because a man cracked open by grief is a man who spills the rest, the names, the box, the pieces I was sent here to collect.
This is the whole reason I’m on his couch.
Every instinct I’ve been trained to have says he’s on the hook, and I should open my mouth and gently, gently reel.
Instead, I twist in his embrace so I can put my hands on his face.
Both of them, palms to his stubbled cheeks, turning him away from the screen and toward me.
Under my thumbs there are two deep lines carved between his brows, permanent now, worn in by a decade of this exact expression.
I trace them like I could smooth them out.
I hold him in place, asking him to see deeper into what I want to be, and not what I am.
“Hey, listen to me. Life is mostly just the brief moments between regret, guilt, and pain. Some days all you can do is survive the next terrible hour.” My thumb moves over the worry line.
“But if you’re lucky. Sometimes. In the in-between”—I tip my head toward the TV, where the credits have started to roll, white letters climbing over black—“you find something worth saving. Something that reminds you there was good amongst the bad. You’re not a pathetic man for holding onto that. You’re a hopeful one.”
He looks at me again. It seems he decides something. The anguish in his face banks down into a different heat entirely, and I realize I’ve stopped breathing. I let go of his face because it suddenly feels like an inferno.
“There’s more depth to you than you’ve let on, isn’t there?”
“God, I hope so.”
He wets his lips. “I’ve told you you’re too young for me, right?”
“Too many times.”
“And how beautiful you are?”
“Only once.”
“And how much I want you right now?”
“That’s new,” I whisper.
His arm slinks over my hip. He traces his fingertips down my thigh and hooks his hands underneath my knee before guiding my leg over his lap.
I settle onto him, straddling, crotch to crotch.
After bringing my mouth to only a breath away from his, I stop.
I hold. Because I need him to be the one who closes the space.
I need him to choose it with a clear head, this man of rules and lines.
I wait, our lips nearly touching, and I let him feel me not-taking it.
He makes a sound low in his chest. And then his fingers twist into my hair and he brings his lips to mine.
They feel so much fuller than they look.
Warm and cool all at once. Tender but not wet.
It’s a classic swoon-worthy kiss. One that makes my heart pound and toes clench.
Even when he clocks his tongue over mine, it feels gentlemanly.
He’s so gentle in fact, I hardly notice when we slip from soft kisses to hungry ones.
What the hell am I doing? I can’t have him like this and have him the way I was hired to. It doesn’t make sense. Nothing about this does. Then again, I’m not trying to make sense of anything at the moment.
I press into him naturally, surrendering to the ache.
I shift my hips, pressing more of me into him.
His fist closes in my hair. His other hand drops to my ass and grips, hauling me flush against him, and I feel exactly how much he wants this, hard and insistent through two thin layers of fabric, and the kiss escalates further from hungry to filthy between one breath and the next.
I grind down against him. He groans into my mouth. I lose the thread of every reason this is a bad idea.
We stay like that too long, dry grinding, and desperate, rutting against each other on his couch like teenagers, his hand guiding my hips, mine anchored around the back of his neck.
He’s almost panting into my mouth. I’m wet enough that it’d be embarrassing for some women.
But not me. With my skirt hiked up around my hips, I hope he can feel the dampness that’s settled into my panties.
There’s no stopping now, and because I can never leave well enough alone, because provoking him has become my favorite hobby, I wedge one hand between our bodies and toy with the waistband of his boxers.
Teasing along the elastic, I murmur against his jaw, “I bet you’re a lights-off, missionary, under-the-covers, kind of guy.
Aren’t you?” I nip his throat. “Want to take this to the bedroom?”
I feel him go still.
It’s a different kind of stillness. This one has bite, like he’s offended.
He pulls back just far enough to look at me, and every soft and kind thing is wiped clear from his face. What’s underneath it makes my stomach drop in a way that has nothing to do with fear.
“Is that a challenge?” His tone is almost pleasant, but not quite.
Before I can answer he lifts me off his lap—just lifts me with one arm while he rises to his feet. He plops me down on the couch like I weigh nothing. “Now your teasing has you in trouble, Sylvie.”
“Really? With no warning.”
“Why bother? You’re not the kind of woman who heeds warnings.”
Eyes still locked on me, he sweeps the takeout containers off the coffee table in one motion. They clatter three feet to the ground, a little sauce and rice debris splashing over the ground, dirtying his floor. He doesn’t flinch, which contradicts everything I assumed about him.
Neat. Calculated. Orderly. That’s the Callen I’ve been studying.