Callie was grateful when Noah pulled the car over at the highway rest stop in Connecticut. The traffic on Rt 95 was intense and they hadn’t even hit the worst of it yet, but a distance that should have only taken a little over an hour had instead ballooned to two, and her body was aching in protest.
“I’m going to grab a coffee. Do you want anything?” Noah asked.
“No, thanks. I’m just going to take a minute to stretch before we get back on the road.”
He nodded and disappeared into the rest stop. She watched him go, her gaze lingering on the way the breeze ruffled his dark hair, how his jeans clung to his thighs.
“Enough of that,” she chastised herself. She made a promise to herself not to spend the entire week lusting after her best friend’s older brother, then dropped into a deep squat in the empty parking space next to Noah’s car. The stretch burned along her thighs as the tired muscles of her hips relaxed. She winced when the dull ache in her lower back turned sharp.
Exhaling a frustrated breath, she steadied herself with a hand on the car as she came back up to standing. Then she braced her hands on the side of the car and bent forward at the waist, just a little at first, letting the stretch sing along her hamstrings and through her calves. With a baby step backwards, she deepened the stretch again and again until she was bent in half, her hands clasping her ankles and her hips pressing up to the sky like her yoga teacher had taught her. It felt so goddamn good she never wanted to move. But already she could feel the blood rushing to her head and knew she’d have a killer headache if she didn’t stand back up soon.
“I got you a—” Noah said behind her, breaking off with a curse.
She shot up to standing at the sound of his voice, turning to look at him over her shoulder. He quickly averted his gaze, but not so fast that Callie couldn’t see how dark his eyes had become.Noah was checking out my ass?That couldn’t be right. There was no way. Noah had made it clear over the last few years that he was not even the slightest bit interested in her anymore, no matter how many times her hopeless romantic heart had wished he would be.
She spun around to face him, but she moved too fast and the vertigo caught up with her, shaking her balance and sending her careening towards the pavement.
Noah reached out an arm to catch her, the jerky motion sending the drinks in the tray he carried sideways. He caught the first cup, but the second fell out of its holder, spilling iced coffee all over his shirt. Noah cursed, shaking his free hand as drips of the milky liquid flowed down his arms in rivulets that drew Callie’s attention to the corded muscles of his biceps and forearms.
“I’m so sorry,” Callie said, her eyes wandering over the damp fabric clinging to his chest.
“You didn’t do anything,” Noah grumbled. “Here, take this.”
He thrust the sodden cardboard tray at her and, in one swift movement, pulled his soaked t-shirt over his head. Callie’s eyes raked over the expanse of tan skin, the lean muscles of his chest and abs, the line of dark hair disappearing into the waistband of the jeans hung low on his hips. It had been a few years since Callie had seen Noah without a shirt on, and in that time he’d sculpted his body into a work of art.
He balled up the t-shirt and tossed it into the back seat of the car, using napkins from his glove box to wipe the last of the coffee from his skin. “I got you one of those disgusting teas you like,” he said. Callie raised her eyes to his. His expression was hard, making it clear he’d caught her checking him out, and he was unamused.
“Thank you.” She took a sip of the kombucha.
Noah opened his suitcase and pulled on a fresh t-shirt. Though the fabric hid all that defined muscle from view, it couldn’t stop her from wondering what it would be like to be the kind of girl Noah spent the night with. Callie knew better than to indulge in the fantasy, of course. One look at the photos Noah was tagged in on social media made it quite clear: Noah Van Aller never spent more than one night with the same woman. Callie’s one night had been confined to a single kiss at her twenty-first birthday party. But what a kiss. A kiss to end all kisses. A kiss she had compared every other kiss to for the last six years.
By the time they pulled back out onto the highway, Callie had almost succeeded in putting her inappropriate thoughts about Noah out of her mind. Almost.
To be fair, inappropriate thoughts about Noah had been Callie’s constant companion since the summer she turned twelve. Back then, it was Noah, home for a few weeks between semesters at college, who drove Callie and Liv to the mall, Noah who accompanied them to the Shakespeare Festival, Noah who spent his mornings giving her piano lessons. Unlike Mrs. Shabot down the street, Noah didn’t chastise Callie when she improvised. Instead, he encouraged her to explore the melodies playing through her mind and helped her channel that music through her fingers as they danced across the keys of the baby grand in the Van Aller family living room. Callie flexed her fingers against the dull ache in her wrists, the constant soreness that left her knuckles swollen and stiff and had put an end to her piano playing.
“You good?” Noah asked, his eyes flicking to her hands.
“Fantastic,” she said, her voice too bright even to her own ears. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her hoodie.
“Explain something to me. Why is your mom so hell bent on marrying you off? Is there some secret inheritance or something that you only get access to if you have a husband?”
Callie barked out a laugh. “I wish.”
“Then what is it?”
“She’s afraid I’ll have no one to take care of me.”
She braced herself for his follow-up questions. They’d never talked about her illness before, which was odd because Noah was a cards-on-the-table kind of guy and Callie was perfectly happy to answer questions, though she was tired of having to dispel the myth that having fibromyalgia meant she was incapable of taking care of herself. Her mother was insistent that her ‘independent streak’ was recklessness in disguise. Callie resented the implication that she was careless or cavalier about her health—almost as much as she resented the idea that having a chronic illness meant she needed a husband to take care of her.
Besides, her ex-boyfriend Ian had made it clear that a life with her was a burden. One that, according to him, had cost him a major promotion. He’d been forced to take a position with a different financial firm out of town, so really, he’d said, it was her fault that they’d been in a long-distance relationship in the first place. Could she really blame him if he’d grown tired of dealing with her flare ups when they had so little time together? She refused to be in a relationship with someone who would resent her for the ways she held him back, or who only cared for her out of a misguided sense of obligation. Maybe she’d read too many romance novels, but she’d have breathless love or nothing at all.
“That’s bullshit,” Noah said.
Callie smiled in spite of herself. “I agree.”
“And she thinks that because Livi is getting married, you should be, too?”
“Well, I am older than Liv.”
