I was disappointed when he let me down, but he kept his hands on my hips once my feet were safely on the floor. He was about to say something, but I’d never know what it was, because just seconds later the front door banged open. The noise startled me so badly that I jumped up, knocking my forehead into his chin as I wrapped my arms and legs around him. I wasn’t tall enough, so I ended up lower than I’d wanted and ended up pulling and scratching my way up his chest until his hands gripped the back of my thighs and hoisted me the rest of the way.
It must have only taken seconds, but by the time I was safely in his arms, I heard my brother yelling.
“Who the hell is he? What the fuck? Let go of my sister!”
I wanted to go to him. His voice was so strained it was cracking like it hadn’t done in years, and I knew he would be embarrassed, but I was too wrapped up in making myself breathe that I didn’t have the capacity to comfort my brother.
“Cody, that’s Callie’s friend. You just leave them be a minute and she’ll come talk to you,” Gram told him in a no-nonsense voice I’d heard before.
“Screw that! That guy’s like forty years old! What the hell is going on?” he yelled again, his voice once again his usual deep tenor.
They argued some more, but I didn’t catch what they were saying, because all of a sudden we were moving and Asa was speaking quietly in my ear.
“It’s all good, baby, but you need to climb down. Your brother’s about to stab me with one o’ your Gram’s kitchen knives and she’s gonna be pissed,” he told me in an amused voice, his hand rubbing soothingly up and down my back.
I’d finally gotten my breathing under control, so I slid my legs down the outside of his body and stepped away, mumbling, “Sorry,” before I faced my brother.
Cody and I faced each other across the room, both of us uncomfortable with our audience. Any other time, we would have already been hugging and pushing each other around, but we were so far out of our comfort zones that we just stood there staring. He didn’t want to seem like a pussy to the men who filled the house, and I was embarrassed that he’d just seen me wrapped around Asa, so neither of us made a move until I finally found my voice.
“I don’t think he’s forty. Maybe thirty,” I told him with a small grin.
That was all it took.
We met in the middle of the room, wrapping our arms around each other as he swung me around slowly. It was what we always did when we saw each other for the first time during his visits. A few years before, he’d grown taller than me, and to prove that he was bigger he’d swung me around, teasing that he wasn’t the little brother any longer.
Having my brother near always made me feel like the world was right again, but this time I knew it was just an illusion. Nothing would ever be right again, and breathing in my brother’s familiar scent reminded me in a flash that I was the reason we’d lost our parents.
How I’d managed to put it from my mind, I didn’t know, but the minute he set me on my feet, I stumbled to the side as if hit, hearing the voices of the men who killed my parents inside my head.
They were calling me by name.
He reached out for my arm, an alarmed look on his face, but I pushed him away, unable to bear his comfort.
“It’s my fault,” I told him, surprised. “Oh, my God. It’s my fault they’re dead.”
His face drained of color as he watched me, but I didn’t see anything else because I was running for the bathroom with my hand over my mouth as if to hold in the vomit that was pressing at the back of my throat.
Chapter 15
Callie
I wasn’t sure if I should be thankful that I didn’t actually throw up or disappointed that I hadn’t purged the nastiness in my stomach. I rinsed my face over and over with cold water, filling my mouth with the cool liquid—but nothing could take away the bitter taste of bile in the back of my throat.
A knock at the door warned me that someone was coming in before it opened. When Gram pushed her head in and walked inside, I wished for a moment that I would’ve taken the time to lock it. She was pissed.
“Calliope Rose Butler, what in God’s name was that all about?” she hissed at me, crowding me into the space between the countertop and the bathtub. “If I didn’t know you were hurting so bad, I’d slap your mouth for spewing crap like that to your brother!”
I don’t think she expected me to answer her, but I felt the need to defend myself, so I stood up tall and answered her.
“They were calling my name, Gram,” I told her, sucking in my breath with a deep sob, “I could hear them!”
I clenched my eyes shut, the pain of those words seeping through my body as I lost all sense of control. I couldn’t hold it in anymore; my voice was making god-awful noises, like the barking of a seal. I couldn’t hold them back.
Gram reached for me as I started to slide to the floor, wrapping one arm around my waist and the other at the back of my head.
“You are absolutely not to blame here, Callie. Not at all, sweetheart,” she whispered into my hair. “You got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s all it was. Those men weren’t after you, baby.”
The tone of her voice had me raising my head as I tried to understand what she was alluding to. She wasn’t giving away anything with her expression, but once she knew I was keeping it together, she pulled me by my waist out of the bathroom and down the hallway.
Once we reached the kitchen, she sat me down at the table and walked to the fridge where her apron was hanging on the handle. It reminded me of a suit of armor as she tied it on; it was a way to protect herself.
“Poet, Asa, and Cody!” she called to the guys sitting in the little living room. “Get in here. We need to clear some things up.”
As the men made their way to the table, she started pulling things out of the fridge and setting them on the kitchen counter. That’s when I knew that the conversation we were about to have wasn’t going to make anyone comfortable—Gram was cooking.
As Asa walked into the kitchen, he stopped behind my chair and rested his hand on my shoulder for a second before sliding it across my collarbone and up my neck. When he reached my chin, he tilted my head back so I was looking at him upside down.
“You okay, Sugar?” he asked me quietly. Once I nodded my head, he leaned down and kissed the spot between my eyes slowly. “Okay, I’m gonna sit over by your Gram so your brother can sit here. You need me, you just rub that spot between your eyes, and I’ll get you the fuck outta here. Okay, baby girl?”
When I nodded again, he swept his hand back down my throat and moved to the other side of the table. He was so gorgeous; I couldn’t help but watch his movements, but when Cody sat down next to me I had to stop myself from cringing in guilt at the train of my thoughts.
“Hey, sister. You okay?” he mumbled, his eyes sliding between Asa and me.
“Yeah—” I cleared my throat and tried again. “Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry,” I told him, my eyes locked on his face. It seemed like every time I didn’t see him for a few months, his cheeks became more chiseled or he had just a little more scruff on his face. He was growing into a man, and I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with that.
He opened his mouth to speak when Gram interrupted him, her voice rising above the noise of pots and pans clanging as she searched for the one she needed. “Poet and Asa, Callie is under the impression that those men were there for her. Apparently they were calling her by name. You boys want to explain that to her?”
If I hadn’t turned to look at Asa when Gram started talking, I wouldn’t have noticed the color leach out of his face before he stood abruptly from the table. “Callie—”
“Grease, sit your ass down,” Poet called with no inflection in his voice, and it was scary, because Asa immediately sat.
“Girl, none of this was your doing. If anything, you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Why did people keep saying that to me? “We had business with Jose—the man who had you at the house. Wh
en Grease went to take care of that business, Jose decided to be a dick. You with me so far, darlin’?”
I nodded slowly as I waited to hear the rest of the story. I needed to know.
“When Grease took you outta that house after—well, let’s just say they put more importance on you than they should have.” I flinched at his words, and that little movement had Asa on his feet again.
“What the fuck, Poet?” he roared. “Watch what the fuck you say!”
Cody reached down and grabbed my hand as we watched the men across the table stare each other down. The tension was so thick that even the guys in the living room had turned toward us and were watching with wide eyes. A few of them were shaking their heads.
“Grease, I’m telling it like it is. No disrespect to your woman—” he stopped and turned his head to the living room as a couple of the guys made noises of astonishment. “Like I said, I wasn’t being disrespectful. Now, sit the fuck down and show me some goddamn respect before I fuckin’ drop you.”
He was calm. He never raised his voice or gave any inflection to the words he was using.
It made his little speech infinitely more terrifying.
“Like I said, Calliope, they thought you were important to Grease, so they were using you to get to him,” he finished with a nod.
I tried to act calm even though my insides were quivering. There was more to the story that I didn’t understand, but I’d honestly heard enough. I was trying to sort through the memories of that night and the new information I was just given, but Asa’s voice pulled me out of my reverie.
“Fuck, Callie. I’m so sorry, Sugar—I thought you knew. If I thought that you were blaming yourself I woulda set you straight right away. It was my bad, darlin’, I fucked up when I took you outta that house.” He sounded weary as he confessed to me, and he wasn’t even looking at my face, but at the table in front of me.
I squeezed Cody’s hand once in apology before pulling away and standing up. Gram had stopped all movement at the stove and was watching me out of the corner of her eye as I walked toward Asa. When I stood behind his chair, I ran my fingernails through the hair at the side of his skull and tilted his head back like he’d done to me just minutes before.
“So you fucked up by saving me from being raped?” I asked him gently, playing absently with a piece of hair that had fallen out of the messy ponytail at the back of his head.
He reached his long arms behind him, wrapping his hands around the backs of my knees and squeezing them gently before he replied. “No, baby. I’d do that again. I’d do that a thousand times. But I should’ve known; I should’ve seen that shit a mile away and known to stay with you until it blew over.”
“I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. I was grounded. I shouldn’t have even been out at all,” I told him flatly, trying to ease the guilt I saw in his eyes.
“You’re sixteen, Callie. I know my life hasn’t been the most normal, but even I know that sixteen-year-old girls go to parties without their parents’ permission. You did nothing wrong, Sugar.” He squeezed the backs of my legs in emphasis.
The look in his eyes was sincere, and I knew that he believed what he was saying, but I couldn’t let it go.
“I shouldn’t have been there, Asa,” I whispered while curling my body down and around his—forgetting for a moment that there were others in the room with us. My eyes filled with tears, and one slowly ran off my cheek and onto his lips. “If I would have just stayed home—”
He cut me off by letting go of my legs and standing from his chair. As soon as he was facing me, his hand came to my cheek, but before he actually touched me he must have remembered the people watching us because he grabbed my hand and turned to Gram.
“We need a minute, Rose.” His comment was both a question and a warning.
“Go on into my room,” she told us with a small nod of her head.
As we made our way out of the kitchen, I heard Cody tell Gram, “This is bullshit,” and Gram replied that he wasn’t too old for her to wash his mouth out with soap. Normally, I would’ve laughed at the exchange, but my chest was tight with an emotion I couldn’t name as I followed Asa into the bedroom and watched him close the door.
He sat on the bed and pulled me with him until I was standing in between his spread knees, looking down at him. He was so tall that his face wasn’t far from mine, and I watched him closely as he swallowed, and then swallowed again.
“Had to get outta there—they were watching us like fuckin’ bugs under a microscope,” he told me, rubbing his hands up and down the outside of my legs. I hadn’t had that impression at all, but now I was alone with him and I wasn’t going to argue.
“Okay,” I mumbled back, waiting to see why he’d brought me in there.
“I don’t want you thinking it’s your fault, Callie. Okay? I don’t wanna hear that shit come outta your mouth ever again.” His voice had taken on a stern quality, his fingers digging into the skin of my hips. “It was my fuck up. I should’ve stayed where I could protect you. I should’ve seen that shit coming. This is on me, not you,” he told me harshly, giving me a small jerk.
He was sitting there taking the blame on his shoulders, but I knew it was both of our faults, or maybe no one’s fault at all. I’d gone to what I thought would be a party like I’d been to a hundred times before, and ended up in way over my head. Grease had been there to do whatever sort of business he did, and ended up saving a girl with braces on her teeth from being raped by a guy twice her age. Neither of us had planned how things went down. Neither of us could’ve anticipated the events.
I felt so much for him right then, my chest was burning with it. I wasn’t sure what it was—not love, it couldn’t be love—but something so close and consuming that it made my heart race.
“You saved me,” I whispered as I put my hands on his head and pulled the rubber band out of his hair. When I started to run my fingers through the strands, he groaned low in his throat.
“Callie, you gonna start crying again, Sugar?” he asked, scooting himself back on the bed and pulling at my knees so I was straddling his lap.
“No,” I answered him, wondering at the question as I wrapped his hair around my fingers and softly outlined one of his ears.
“Good, ‘cause I’m gonna kiss the fuck outta you now.”
Chapter 16
Grease
I knew that all the shit that had happened to Callie was on me. It was my call to pull her out of that house, and my call to leave her helpless when I’d finished my business. They were both bad decisions, but there was only one that I would’ve changed.
There was no way I could have left her passed out and alone on the floor of that house. The longer I knew her, and the more time I spent with her glued to my side, the more I knew that the decision to keep her safe had been the right one.
It was the decision to walk away that hadn’t been right.
At some point, Callie was going to realize that her fucked up life was entirely my fault. She was going to blame me and hate me and wish she’d never met me.
But at that moment, in her Gram’s bedroom, she wasn’t doing any of those things. Instead, she was standing in front of me, pulling the rubber band out of my hair far more gently than I ever had, and running her fingers through my hair.
I wasn’t a fucking saint.
I asked her if she was planning on crying again, mostly because I wasn’t sure where her head was at, and when she told me no, that was it.
I pulled her onto my lap, on her grandmother’s fucking bed, and I kissed the shit out of her.
I was so distracted by the taste of her that I didn’t notice her whimper at first. It wasn’t until the taste of blood filled my mouth that I ripped my head back to see what the fuck was going on. She had blood pooling in the corner of her lip, and for a second, I was afraid I’d fucking bitten her or something.
She wiped at the blood, swallowing thickly as her face turned beet red.
“I
’m sorry! My mouth’s just—well, my braces…” she stuttered, looking at me apologetically.
“Holy fuck! Did I just do that to you?” Shit, I kissed her and drew blood. My thoughts were completely self-centered until she started trying to pull herself off my lap.
“No. Um, yesterday my mouth was really dry—and I wasn’t being careful.” She tried to lift her leg over me to crawl off the bed, but I grabbed both of her thighs and pulled her tight against me, effectively ending her squirming as her breath caught. “My braces cut a bunch of little sores on the inside of my cheeks. Totally not your fault.”
“Ah, sweetheart, why didn’t you say anything?” I asked her quietly, finally understanding what was going on. I’d never been with a chick with braces, and I couldn’t remember any of the kids at the club having them growing up, either. But it wasn’t hard to see how having metal fucking brackets in your mouth could fuck your shit up.
“Let me see, Sugar.” I hoped that the damage wasn’t bad enough that she’d need stitches or something. Fuck. That was all we needed.
She pulled her lips out on the sides and turned them a little inside out so I could see the little red sores in her poor mouth. The things must have burned like hellfire, but she hadn’t said a word about them until I’d fucking attacked her.
“You got something you can use to fix it?”
“I’ve got wax in my purse I think. I forgot it here at Gram’s the other night.” She gave me a small smile. “It won’t help the cuts, but it’ll keep the little fuckers from making them worse.”
The bravado in her eyes from dropping an f-bomb mixed with the little goddamn dimple in her cheek had me smiling back at her. I couldn’t even help myself. It was so fucking…cute. I knew at any minute she was going to remember—she was going to get lost again in grief and guilt, and those few minutes where it was just her and I would be over.
Instead of talking to her, rubbing her back, or getting up so she could go find some of that fucking wax she needed for her braces, I lifted my hand and wrapped it around the back of her neck so I could bring her mouth to mine again.