I have no idea how I'm supposed to hold the line. She's already under my skin, all the way through.
Chapter 6: Callie
I take the long path down to the creek with the textbook under my arm and last night still on my skin.
The creek runs cold and clear over flat stones at the back of the property. I sit on my log and open the textbook on my knees. Developmental psychology. I read the same paragraph three times before I close it.
I am not going to be able to study today.
I went into the kitchen this morning on purpose. Every move I made in there was deliberate. I left the house with my pulse in my ears, and I am not sorry.
I owed him a confession, and I gave him one without saying a word. I want him. I let the neckline of my sweatshirt slip at the collarbone as I walked past his chair, and I didn't fix it.
He didn't pull his look away. He wants me too.
That is not a small thing to have done. I know it isn't. I'm twenty-two, I have never been with a man, and the first one I have decided I want is the one my brother sent me to.
I sit on the log with the cold of the stones coming up through my boots and I think about it honestly. I owe myself that.
Here is what I come back with.
I am not going to pretend I don't want him. I have spent enough years pretending I didn't need things. My grandmother got sick when I was fourteen and I learned to fold myself small around what was left of the people in my life. I folded myself small for Danny when he came home on leave and didn't want to talk about anything. I folded myself small for the professor who took me on as his advisee, played the grateful promising girl, and never asked for more than the scraps of attention he gave me. I have been small, patient, good for a very long time.
I am tired of being small.
The other thing I come back with is harder.
He is going to fight me. A man with his code does not put his hands on his best friend's little sister without fighting himself over it first. I am sure of that without him having to tell me. I have watched something shut in his face every time my brother's name has come into the room.
I don't know how to take that wall down, or if it is mine to do.
What I know is that I am not going to spend the rest of my time here keeping my hands to myself and my eyes on a book.
I pick up the textbook and walk back to the house at four. I'm done with being good.
***
I get in the shower a little before six.
I tell myself I'm waiting that long because I have a chapter to finish, laundry to fold, and a phone call to make to my advisor before the offices close for the day. All of that is true. None of it is the whole reason.
The whole reason is that I want to come out of the bathroom while he is already in the house.
I turn the water on hot. I stand under it with my forehead against the tile and let it run over my shoulders. The white musk of my soap goes up in the steam. I think about his hand on the back of my neck. I think about his mouth where my hair ends.
I don't touch myself. That isn't what tonight is for.
I take my time. I wash my hair, then the rest of me, slow, with attention, with the heat of him in my mind the whole time. When the truck pulls up the gravel drive outside I hear it through the wall of the bathroom and through the rush of the water. I turn the water off a minute later, not right away. I dry myself off in the steam.
I put on the robe I packed and didn't think I'd need: short, tied at the waist. I open the bathroom door, and the steam spills out into the hall ahead of me.
He is in the kitchen with a paper bag in one hand, just walked in. The door makes him turn.
He sees me.
His eyes drop down the length of the robe before he can stop them, going to the wet hair on my shoulder, the tie at my waist, the bare leg below the hem, and back up. His hand stays closed around the bag while his throat works once and the muscle in his jaw sets. He pulls his look back to my face and holds it there with effort.
"I didn't hear you pull up," I say.
