“What are you doing, Callum?” I asked quietly. When he didn’t answer, I turned to him, my forehead pressed to his. “Are you okay, buddy?” I whispered. He nodded.
“Better than that.”
I smiled. “Okay. That’s good,” I said brightly. I was about to say something else to lighten the mood but he spoke over me.
“You know how much I love you, right?”
Any attempt to play things off was shot by instant emotion. Callum’s expression was pained but sweet and genuine, too, and it brought me straight to tears. Luckily, they didn’t fall. They just sat pretty in my eyes. “I think so, Callum.” He was cupping my cheek now, gazing into me. He nodded with satisfaction at my answer, his stare dipping down to my lips. His murmur was the softest I’d ever heard it.
“You have my back the way I’ll always have yours. No matter what, Lake. You’re the most important thing in the world to me and I’ve always known it. I just want you to know it now, too.”
I couldn’t help my giant smile. “I know it.”
“Good,” he exhaled. And then he kissed me tenderly for, oddly enough, the first time ever.
* * *
It was important to Caroline that at least one of us go to college so I enrolled at FIT and started classes that September. She helped me move into my dorm, strung Christmas lights on my walls the way she’d seen on Pinterest and invited my roommate, Dara, with us to lunch at a three-star restaurant. Dara said no, assumed I was one of those girls who hated her mother and later said, “That was so pretentious,” effectively landing her on my shit list.
“Wait. So that wasn’t your mom?” she asked me one Sunday night when it was pouring and none of my new friends were willing to go out, forcing me to hang out with just Dara. I braved the rain and bought two bottles of Cabernet with my fake to make the night more tolerable.
“No, but she’s raised me. With my grandma.”
“How did she meet your grandma?”
“My grandma kind of raised her. She was her housekeeper growing up. And I guess she stayed her housekeeper till she died.”
“Wow, that’s depressing.”
I gave her a look. I didn’t think it was. What was up with this chick? She was like negativity in walking human form. “Do you want some more wine?” I asked hopefully.
She adjusted her hipster glasses. “No, thanks. So like… that Callum kid is your brother-ish but you guys are like… vaguely romantic?”
I sat in bed and peeled the label off my bottle of Cab, wondering why I’d ever told her that. I had just been trying to open up with her and like her but it didn’t quite work. “Yeah. We’re hard to describe.”
“Have you slept with him before?”
“No, I’m a virgin.”
She smirked, adjusted her glasses and made a face like wow. “And you’ve never officially dated and called yourself boyfriend and girlfriend? Or friends with benefits?”
“No.”
“Then you’re not anything.”
“We are.”
“I…” She made that wow face again. “I beg to differ.”
“He loves me,” I blurted stupidly.
“Like a good friend,” she decided, as if I’d given her all the information she needed to make conclusions about my life.
“It’s not… I’m pretty sure there are a lot of people who have weird, complicated relationships with people that are still deep and meaningful but can’t be put into any sort of… like…” Fuck. I was losing my words to the wine.
“Like…?” Dara challenged me with that all-knowing, smug-ass look on her face that made me suddenly aware of how annoying I probably was when I was sixteen.
“Never mind.”
“Can I see a picture of him?”
I jumped at the chance to show her. I’d proudly shown my group of friends from class and they’d gasped, pointed at my face and then burst into a chorus of crazy squealing – about how hot he was and how I totally loved him. It was enough that my instructor came to see what the ruckus was about. She leaned in, looked at the picture and then said “hoo-baby.”
I grinned when Dara looked at a photo I’d taken of Callum at the beach the month before. He was healed up enough to surf – not as well as he used to, but still. I’d gotten a shot of him coming out of the ocean, water dripping from his hair and his triceps bulging as he carried his board back to where I sat on my towel. I was pretty fucking delighted that even jaded old Dara was not immune to his looks. “That’s him?” she asked skeptically, as if I’d just pulled some picture off a Google search for smoking hot blonde surfer dude.
“That is him.”
“He looks older than eighteen.”
“He’s just muscular. And he’s actually nineteen now.”
Dara nodded and kept staring. “Yeah. He seems like he’d be mature for his age,” she said. I smirked. She loved to describe herself as mature for her age. “Does he have a girlfriend?”
“He was on a date yesterday but he doesn’t have a girlfriend.”
“You’re in love with him and you don’t mind that he was on a date?”
I paused. No? Was that weird? I’d been on a date last night too but it was just for shits and giggles. And maybe a little titillation. It started Friday night when there were no cabs and I asked a guy if I could share his across town. He was hot, probably in his mid-thirties and just as drunk as I was. Our conversation was flirty from the jump. He revealed, to my delight, that he was a fashion designer. “A straight one,” he said right away. “It’s important for you to know that.”
“Is it? Why?”
“Because I’m going to ask you out before I get out of the car.”
“You should just do it now. I’m going to say yes.”
“Cool. You wanna go out?”
And that was that. Our date was fun. He took me to a Japanese restaurant that didn’t serve sushi, when all I knew about Japanese cuisine was sushi, and then we randomly hit a karaoke bar. We made out in an alley and he dry humped me against the wall and then I texted my friend to call me with an “emergency” and he sent me home with cab money.
Callum’s date was similar. Similar-ish. His girl was someone he’d met randomly at the marketing firm he was interning at on Fifth Ave. She was tall and gorgeous, a little older and had been in the building for a casting call. I’d met up with them toward the end of their first date ever and while she seemed surprised, she wound up flirting with me when she realized Callum liked it. She murmured close to my lips and touched my knee and played with my hair till we all kind of wound up together in his bed that night. Hailey, my go-to friend for fake emergency calls, said threesomes weren’t abnormal and that she’d had one at camp when she was even younger, so I decided it wasn’t weird.
Especially since no sex wound up happening. There was everything but penetration before we all fell asleep. The closest we got to that was when Callum followed me into his kitchen in the middle of the night when I went for water. He was wordless as he pulled me from the fridge, kissed me hard and slid his fingers inside me. He stroked me to an orgasm that he muffled with his hand before we went back to bed, where he spooned me to sleep. The next morning, the girl got cab money to go home and planted a sultry kiss on my lips before leaving. I wasn’t totally surprised. She was nice but I knew she liked Callum and was just trying to show him that she was game in case I came as part of a package deal.
So maybe it was weird.
But even if it was, that was just what Callum and I were. Weird. Indefinable.
“Yikes.” Dara gave me a big cringe and went back to her book. “I hope you’re not like, holding out for him.”
“Holding out for him?”
“Like, thinking you’re going to end up with him. Just from what you’re telling me, it seems like anything romantic that happened between you two was out of the convenience that you were living with him and now he’s moving on without you.”