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“Right, yes.” With effort, I clamped down on my mirth and swiped the moisture from my eyes. “So now you think that your brother, with his extremely sexy minivan, is my next move?”
“As bizarre and disgusting as it sounds, yes I do.” Renee narrowed her green eyes at me. “And I don’t like it.”
With another innocent shrug, I took the plates from her and walked past her into the kitchen. I thought that Renee had possibly missed her calling. I’m sure she was an amazing music teacher, but she should have followed her brother into the law profession. Or maybe she should have been a detective, because damn, she was right. I really had just followed Callum out to thank him, but something had shifted when we were standing outside. He was just so damn attractive and chivalrous. White knights had never been my type, but that was before I’d met the dragons of the world. Still, whatever it was, I was sure it would pass. Nothing to argue with Renee about.
She followed me in, and we did the dishes side by side in silence. When there was nothing left to put in the dishwasher, she leaned against the counter and stared at me until I gave up and looked back at her.
“Leave him alone, Quinn,” she said when I finally met her gaze. “He’s been through enough.”
Mildly insulted, I straightened my shoulders. “I don’t go around hurting people, Renee.”
“Not on purpose.”
The room was silent except for the ticking of the large cat clock over the counter and the sound of the dishwasher starting to froth up. The lightness I’d felt earlier was being weighed down again.
“I’m not a jerk,” I said.
“Not on purpose,” she repeated, then smirked to let me know she was kidding. Then her tone became serious again. “I know you’re not. But you’reyou. You’ll accidentally make him fall in love with you and then have no choice but to break his heart.”She sounded frustrated, like I was making her say something so profoundly obvious it should have been unnecessary. She ran a hand through her dark, wild hair before crossing her arms across her chest.
I saw a wavery reflection of us in the sliding glass door and realized that the two of us were mirror images, left hands curled around our right elbows, right hands gripping our own rib cages. The familiarity eased some of the hurt building up in my chest. How many times had we faced off like this? Arguing over chord changes or who got to drive or who had fucked up that last line? At least a hundred. Sometimes it was the beginning of a drawn-out battle, sometimes it was a blip that smoothed over as easily as it had cropped up. But we always came back together because we were closer than friends. We were sisters.
And whether she knew it or not, I cared about Callum, too. Just not in the brotherly way I used to. I knew that Emma’s death had devastated him. It had taken a blowtorch to his plans, and Callum’s life was built on a blueprint he created at seventeen. He’d drawn it up when he first started dating the beautiful blonde from the best side of town. I knew it hadn’t been easy for him to accept the contingency plan her death had hastily scribbled over his carefully laid ones. He had made the best of it though. One day he’d find another Waterford Village girl, have at least one more perfect blonde child, and take a second shot at happily ever after. The trajectory was as clear as mine had once been.
I would never get in the way.
I just wanted to have a little fun, that was all. I deserved it after the tense, terrible few years I’d just had.
“He wouldn’t fall in love with me,” I said to Renee, like I was negotiating rights to Callum.I’ll take his body for the agreed period of one month, but I’ll leave his heart alone.
“You don’t know that, QC.”
Her use of my nickname softened me. “Come on, I’m notthatlovable.”
She snorted. We were both easing out of our rigid stances. “You’re a pain in the ass, but yes you are.”
I swallowed what felt like a warm glow that slipped down into my chest and drove out some of the ice that had collected between the bones of my ribcage over the years. I wanted to promise her that I’d keep my hands off her brother so we could grab a beer and head out to the treehouse, this matter squashed. I never lied to Renee though, and I wasn’t sure I could keep that promise. “I’ll be careful with him,” I said instead.
She sighed and rolled her eyes upward. “I know you’ll try.”
“I’ll do more than try, Renee. I’ll succeed. I’ll handle him with–”
She cut me off by making a retching sound that reminded me of being twelve again. I’d gone boy crazy before her, and she’d made that exact noise when I kissed Keith Bowen for the first time.
“Oh, stop it,” I smacked her arm.
“Youstop telling me how you’re going to handle my brother.”
We squabbled, we laughed, and then, finally, we grabbed those beers and went outside. I didn’t bring up Callum again, but I thought about him. I thought about him a lot. And then I told myself to knock it off and stop thinking about him.
Later that night, I laid down in a brand-new guest bed with sheets that were still stiff from being shrink wrapped around cardboard squares and stared up at a ceiling that was as familiar as my own. I’d spent a thousand nights underneath this popcorn sky. Of the five thousand stick-on stars Renee and I had put up when we were nine, a few remained, scattered and glowing dimly. The broken window we’d cursed because it meant we had to tip-toe down to the guest room, past Callum’s room, to sneak out had been replaced. The walls were still the pale pink that Renee’s mom had chosen when she found out she was having a girl, but there were rectangular marks where the paint had been ripped up and the builder grade white showed. Even all these years later, I could picture the poster that each piece of tape had held.The Runaways, The Saturdays, The Veronicas.A whole plethora ofThesomethings. We’d imagined our poster hanging up there one day.The Belles.
I tossed onto my side, feeling irritable. I’d have to be blind not to see that Callum was a man now. A real one, with a kid and a mortgage and a job that didn’t require him to spend half his time in nightclubs. If you’d asked me this time last year if any of that sounded appealing, it would have been a resoundingno. Even though things had started going downhill with Jason when my second album bombed, I’d still enjoyed my itinerant, artistic life. I felt bohemian and extremely lucky. I’d turned a blind eye to a lot of the warning signs because I didn’t want to lose what I had. Once upon a time, it had been pretty great.
I realized now that the great times were long in the past. The last four years had been tough. My thoughts began to slip precariously toward the last year with Jason before I herded them back to the much more pleasant topic of Callum. Handsome, strong, brilliant Callum whose chest was as firm as his convictions. I stared unblinkingly into the darkness andallowed his image to coalesce in it. First, a pair of glowing green eyes, then the firm jaw, the nose that had been broken twice playing high school football. At some point, my eyes closed, though I couldn’t tell the difference. The only way I knew I was falling asleep was because the image morphed. The hair lightened to nearly white, and the eyes became glittering blue gems set just slightly too close together over an aquiline nose and pin straight teeth so white they practically glowed in the dark.
I tried to pull Callum’s image back, but in the way of dreams, it was out of my control. I was trapped with the memory of Jason Cain, and my nighttime–like my day–became a nightmare.
When I woke up, gasping, sometime later, I gave up on trying to force my thoughts away from Callum Evans. Instead, I pulled the memory of standing a little too close to him a few hours ago back around me like a protective blanket.
