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But I didn’t need to say it out loud. Calliope knew exactly what I was talking about.
She and Rowan were the only people in Jupiter who knew me in the past, knew me as someone other than the cocky guy who never fucked the same woman twice. They knew me as a husband. As a father.
“Had the suspicion she didn’t,” she replied, still staring with that probing fucking gaze. “A whirlwind romance and whirlwind wedding don’t give you much time to disclose the skeletons, pardon the pun.”
I fucking smiled, despite the situation and the subject matter. Whenithappened, everyone treated me like I was fragile. No man wanted to be treated like they were fragile. Most especially not after losing their wife and daughter. Not that it made anything worse—that was pretty much the worst you could get. But it made it so there was never a moment, never a fucking second where you got a respite from what you lost.
It made me hate everyone, especially those who loved me most.
But Calliope wasn’t like that. She showed up to the wake—the second one they’d held since they buried them without me—with a bottle of vodka when everyone else brought casseroles. And when everyone had those pitying gazes and those fragile words, she’d bowled right through, poured me a shot, and said, “Well, this fucking sucks. We should get drunk.”
That was Calliope.
Rowan was my best friend.
He and I had been almost fucking inseparable our whole fucking lives. To the point that we deployed together, fought a war together, and changed our very insides fighting that war.
But Calliope had always been someone important. Someone who I felt like I could relate to. Someone who didn’t do pity or bullshit.
I had a sister, one I didn’t talk to all that much and who’d always resented what I had with Calliope because we were never that close.
But my sister was warm. She toed the line with the family. She thought she had to ‘know her place.’ I couldn’t relate to that.
Calliope, on the other hand, did not ‘know her place.’ She carved roads in areas no fucker would be brave enough to tread.
“I know you’re likely to get shit-faced drunk and talk about shit that women talk about, but you do not talk aboutthat,” I told her, willing to go to battle with her if need be. But I wasn’t jazzed about it.
Calliope arched her brow. “You know me better than to think I’d spill my own secrets, let alone someone else’s.”
She didn’t say anything else. I waited for her to because women always had something else to say.
“You’re not going to say I should tell her?” I asked when she just kept fucking looking at me.
She cackled. “Fuck no,” she said. “I’m not going to tell anyone how to deal with their past. You don’t want to tell her, don’t fucking tell her.” She glanced to the hall once more. “God knows she’s probably got some secrets of her own that you’re blissfully ignorant about. Enjoy fucking each other’s brains out while your respective skeletons pound at the closet doors. Fuck knows it’ll be a mess when they finally come out.”
“Okay! I changed my outfit,” Fiona declared from down the hall. “I think I look better in this.”
I looked at my wife. She was now wearing jeans with a tank that dipped way low in the front, showing off too much of her luscious tits and her smooth, freckled shoulders.
“Fuck yes, you do!” Calliope declared with a grin. “Now let’s go. We’ve got a town to paint red.”
Fiona grinned at me, snatched her purse off the counter, and followed Calliope.
“Call me when you get into trouble,” I said to Fiona’s ass.
“We won’t get in trouble,” she called back.
I shook my head as the door slammed and I was left with the quiet and my beer.
And fuck if I wasn’t counting down the damn seconds until she came home.
fiona
We did get in trouble.
But that was the end of the night.
The beginning and middle went quite well. I didn’t realize how much I needed a girls’ night out. Didn’t realize how fucking awesome Calliope was. She was a force of nature. There was something about the way she carried herself, the way she walked into a room like she owned it, like she was utterly and completely secure in her own body.
