Chapter 22
Clay
I woke up, and she was there.
Her leg hooked over mine, her arm across my stomach, her face pressed into the curve of my neck.
Her fingers were curled against my ribs like she'd fallen asleep mid-grip and her body hadn't gotten the memo to let go.
She smelled like sleep and shampoo and underneath all of it something sweet I'd never been able to name and had spent the last week aching for.
I didn't move.
My body was already responding to her. The press of her breasts through the thin cotton of my shirt she'd pulled on sometime in the night, the weight of her thigh draped across mine, the heat of her skin everywhere it touched mine.
A week without her and my body was starving — every point of contact greedy, desperate, lit up like a livewire.
I pressed my lips against her hair. She shifted closer.
Not awake — just instinct, her body finding mine the way it always did in sleep.
Her thigh slid higher across mine, and my breath caught.
Her fingers flexed against my ribs, loosened, then curled tight again, and the small unconscious grip of her hand against my bare skin made my chest ache.
I wanted to wake her up with my mouth. I wanted to roll her onto her back and press my face into her neck and feel her arch against me the way she had last night.
I wanted to hear that sound again — the breathless, broken one she'd made when I pushed inside her.
My whole body was taut with it, thrumming, every nerve ending tuned to the woman wrapped around me.
But I didn't move. Because this — her weight against me, her breath on my neck, the morning light coming through the curtains, and the house quiet and her body pressed into mine like it was the only place she wanted to be — this was enough.
After a week of cold sheets and an empty bed and the ache of missing her so deep it sat in my bones, just having her here was everything.
She stirred. Opened her eyes. Looked up at me, and her face did something that hit me square in the chest — no walls, no performance, no measured composure. Just Callie. Rumpled and raw and real. Her eyes soft and still half-asleep and looking at me like I was the first thing she wanted to see.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi."
"I'm sorry."
"I know. Stop apologizing. We've got a fight to win."
She smiled. Small. The corners of her mouth lifting by a fraction, the way a sunrise starts — not all at once but in degrees.
I cupped her face and kissed her. Tangled hair and warm skin, and I couldn't help it, couldn't wait another second without my mouth on hers.
She made a soft sound against my lips and her hand came up to the back of my neck and pulled me closer and the kiss deepened into something slow and thorough and hungry.
Her tongue found mine and my hand slid down her side and gripped the curve of her hip.
She hooked her leg tighter over mine and rocked against me, and I groaned into her mouth.
I was hard. Achingly, desperately hard, straining against her thigh, and when she shifted her hips and pressed into me, I sucked in a breath through my teeth.
She felt it. Of course, she felt it. She pulled back just enough to look at me, then glanced down between us, and a slow, wicked smile spread across her face.
"Well, good morning to you too," she murmured. Not to me. To the situation south of my waistband.
"I missed you."
"Clearly." She rolled her hips against me, slow and deliberate, and I swore under my breath and grabbed her waist, and she laughed — low, throaty, the laugh of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing — and I was about three seconds from flipping her onto her back when —
Then the door burst open.
Maisie stood in the hallway in her pajamas with her hair going in six directions and her horse tucked under one arm and her eyes the size of dinner plates.
"Cly!"
She was airborne before I could sit up. Launched herself onto the bed and landed on my chest, knocking the air out of me and Callie sideways.
"You're here!" She was bouncing on my ribcage, one knee dangerously close to something important.
"You're here, you're here, you're here!" She grabbed my face with both hands and squished my cheeks together.
"I have to tell you stuff.” And then proceeded to tell me every detail of her life in the seven days I had been absent from it.
Momma was right. She was my heart outside of my body. She might not have been mine by blood, but she was mine in every way that mattered.
"Baby," Callie said from somewhere under a pillow. "Breathe."
"I am breathing. And also Mommy let me have pancakes two times this week which is not normal so I think something was going on but I don't know what." She leaned down to my ear and whispered at full volume: "And can you make eggs because Mommy's eggs are not the same."
"I heard that," Callie said.
"I'm just saying."
I was laughing. Properly laughing — the kind that starts deep and takes over and makes your eyes water. She was still on my chest, still bouncing, still delivering her report like she'd been saving it up for a week.
"I missed you," she said. Quieter now. Her hand found my face and patted my cheek — not gently, more like she was checking I was real. "Don't go away again, okay?"
"I'm not going anywhere, baby."
"You promise?"
"I promise."
"Pinky promise?"
I held up my pinky. She wrapped hers around it — small, fierce. She squeezed. I squeezed back. She held it up and inspected it, turning my hand over in hers like she was checking the seal.
"Okay. You can stay." She nodded once, satisfied. "But you have to make cloud eggs. With lots and lots of cheese."
She climbed off me and went to the kitchen, still talking, now apparently addressing the horse about the peninsula situation.
Callie rolled onto her back and looked at the ceiling, and she was crying and laughing at the same time — the specific, beautiful mess of a woman watching her daughter be completely, unreservedly herself.
"She's been saving that speech for a week," Callie said.
"I'm honored to finally receive the briefing."
She turned her head and looked at me, and her face was wide open. Walls down. Foundations gone.
I made the eggs. Cloud eggs. Extra cheese — which, by Maisie's standards, meant you shouldn't be able to see the egg anymore.
She sat on the counter and supervised and told me everything three more times, and I listened to every word like it was new because it was.
All of it. This kitchen. This morning. This life I'd almost lost and gotten back.
Momma arrived at nine. She came through the front door without knocking — because that's what Momma did, she treated doors as suggestions — and Maisie was off the counter and across the room before Momma had her purse down.
“Miss Lou! Clay's back, and he made cloud eggs and did you know about peninsulas?"
Momma looked at me over Maisie's head. Her eyes moved across my face — quick, reading, the same way she'd read all of us since we were small. Whatever she saw made her nod. Once. The nod that meant good.
"I'm taking this one into town," she said. "Ice cream. The bookshop. Possibly the farm supply store if she behaves."
"I always behave," Maisie said.
"That is categorically untrue," Callie said.
Momma scooped Maisie up, collected the horse and the pink boots, and was out the door in under three minutes with the efficiency of a woman who'd raised six children and understood that momentum was everything.
The cottage went quiet. Callie looked at me across the kitchen.
"Savannah's coming at ten," she said.
"Then we've got an hour."
She crossed the kitchen and kissed me — slow, deliberate, her hands on my jaw, the taste of tea and the smell of her shampoo and the specific, grounding certainty of a woman who'd chosen to stay.
"Thank you," she said against my mouth. "For being here when she woke up."
"There's nowhere else I'd be."
Savannah arrived with a legal pad and three folders.
Levi beside her — quiet, sharp, the kind of lawyer who let other people talk while he listened for the thing nobody said.
He mentioned his wife, Savannah’s sister, Tess, had been in a similar situation to Callie, so I appreciated his insight when he gave it.
We sat around Callie's kitchen table, and Callie was on my left with her hair up, glasses on, a pen moving across her own legal pad with the speed and precision of a woman who'd been doing this work for years and was very, very good at it.
Savannah walked us through the strategy. The three pillars of Preston's filing. How each one collapsed under the evidence Levi had assembled. The counter-strike — the Aspen violation that put Preston's existing visitation at risk.
Callie listened in lawyer mode. Her pen stopped moving when Levi presented the Aspen violation — she wrote something in the margin of her pad, underlined it twice, then asked a question about the burden of proof for custody modification in Texas that made Savannah's eyebrows lift.
"Section 156.101," Callie said. "Material and substantial change in circumstances. Preston has to prove the change — my relocation to Copper Creek — materially harms Maisie. Everything we have shows the opposite."
Savannah closed her folder. "Either way, it ends Monday."
Under the table, Callie's hand found mine. Her fingers laced through mine and held — the grip of a woman who'd found her footing and was planting her feet.
Savannah stopped at the door on her way out. "Cal."
Callie looked up.
"You're ready."
Callie nodded. One nod. The same nod Wyatt gave — the kind that meant more than a speech.
Savannah left. Levi followed. The kitchen was quiet.
"Section 156.101," I said.
"What about it?"
"You just cited Texas family code from memory."
She picked up her tea. "I've been reading the filing for two weeks. Some things stick."
"Some things stick because you're brilliant."