Then there is the letter. Danny's letter is in the top drawer of the dresser in my room, exactly where I put it the first night. Kane knows it exists. He knows it's meant for him. He hasn't asked for it once, and I haven't given it. Not yet. The letter is the one piece of this house that's mine to play, and I am not playing it until he tells me what he called me here for.
Another thing I keep to myself is how I've started thinking about his body.
I'm twenty-two and I've never been with a man. The girls in my class were figuring out their first crushes while I was watching my grandmother get sick. By the time she was gone I didn't have the energy to look up. But I know my own body. I know the heat that comes between my hips when I want something, and it's been coming for him since the second night under his roof.
It comes when his sleeves are pushed up to his elbows and I can see the line of veins in his forearm. It rises if he stands close enough to set a plate beside mine. It floods through me when Iwalk past him in the hall after a shower and his eyes drag down the length of my robe before they snap away.
I don't act on any of it. He's in a fight he isn't telling me about, and I am not going to be one more thing he has to fight. But I'm not going to pretend the feeling isn't real, either.
***
On the night of day four he gets back later than six. He brings home a wax-paper bag from the Rusty Anchor and sets it on the kitchen table without saying what's in it, and when I open it there's a slice of apple pie wrapped in foil with a note in handwriting I don't know.Eat it, sweet pea. Lou.
I look up at him.
He shrugs. "She put it in my hand on the way out. Told me it was for you and to make sure you ate it."
I smile. "She's a treasure."
"She is."
I unwrap the foil. The pie is still warm. "Want to share it?"
He gets two forks out of the drawer, puts them on the table, and sits across from me. He pushes the bag closer to my side and waits. The pie is good. He eats two bites of his half and pushes the rest to me, the same gesture from the night we sat in Mama Lou's booth. I take a forkful. The apple is sweet on my tongue, and I think, on the inside where he can't hear me:I'd rather be tasting him.
I take the last bite slowly. I see his eyes drop to my mouth and stay there until I lick the apple off my lower lip with intention, and then they snap to the window. The heat between my hips arrives on cue.
I carry the plate to the sink. He stays at the table but I can feel him watching me from it. I turn the water on cold and stand there with my fingers under it until my pulse is back under my own control. I turn off the tap and dry my hands on the kitchen towel. When I turn back he's standing.
"Going to call it a night."
"Oh. Okay. Good night, Kane."
"Good night, Callie."
He goes down the hall. I hear his door close and then nothing. I stand at the sink another minute. Then I walk to my own room with my pulse still hammering between my hips and humming through the rest of me, close the door behind me, lie down on top of the bed with the light off, and slide my hand inside my underwear.
I think of his hands, the strength I've watched in them all week, what they could do to me if he stopped holding them so still. His mouth on me, anywhere he wants to put it. The weight of him on top of me, pressing me into this mattress. The walls in this house aren't thick, so I try to be quick and quiet about it.
I don't manage the quiet part all the way. When I come, a sound gets out before I can catch it.
Tomorrow morning he'll put a second mug on the counter beside his. I'll take it, drink my coffee, and pretend tonight didn't happen.
Chapter 5: Kane
I have been awake in the dark for an hour with one arm flung over my eyes when the sound comes through the wall, and even before I work out what it is I know I have no business hearing it. It's a run of small moans she didn't catch in time, the last one breaking at the back of her throat and carrying through the boards of an old mountain house and the rooms between us. I sit up before I can think about whether I should.
I know which room it came from. I know what sound that was. I know it because half of me has been waiting for it without admitting it since the first day she slept under my roof.
The other half is hard against the front of my shorts.
Fuck.
I lie back down. Eyes on the ceiling. The fan I never turn on in spring is now set at max speed. I count beams but I lose count at three.
Her mouth. The lower lip she licked clean of apple at my kitchen table earlier tonight, the line of her teeth behind it, the corner where her lip meets the start of her smile. I want it open under mine. I want to see how she looks with my cock betweenthose lips and her tongue working the underside of it, slow, with the same patience she brings to everything else she does in this house.
Christ.
