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 sideand 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 pancakestwotimes 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.
