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14

Calista

After

Fane followed me all the way home like a lost puppy I didn’t want to keep.

No matter where I went, no matter how much distance I tried to put between us, I’d turn around, and bam! There he was.

He didn’t even try to hide it, either. Every time I caught him lurking, he’d flash me a smug little grin, gesture between us and say, “I’m shadowing you. This is work,” before whipping out that stupid notebook he kept tucked in his back pocket like a prop.

‘Shadowing’ apparently included loitering in Sunshine, hovering near aisle six at the grocery store, adding snacks to my basket I did not pick out, and watching me pump gas like some overqualified attendant.

And I knew I was going insane because his constant hovering was making me paranoid.

The unease started small. A prickle at the back of my neck. The sensation of being watched—not the casual kind of attention, but the kind that worms its way under your skin, twisting and festering until it feels like your every move is being cataloged.

Half the time, I was convinced it was just Fane. But some moments, even when I knew exactly where he was—leaning against the counter in the café or flipping through some useless magazine in the grocery store, pretending not to notice the way I was glaring at him—it didn’t go away.

It wasn’t constant, either. That was the worst part. The bit that had me convinced I was losing my mind. I’d feel it, sharp and suffocating, and then I’d spin around to find Fane, arms crossed and infuriatingly calm, and for a while, it would vanish. Like spotting him was all it took to remind my brain to get a grip.

But it always came back, and I was convinced this lie I’d dropped us into was going to do way more damage than I initially thought.

I had a sweet reprieve from Fane’s hovering after work on Thursday afternoon. It was glorious. I was going to take a shower, leave him no hot water again as my only means of retribution, and then settle in for a movie with Jerry.

All those plans fell to absolute shit when I got home to find Jerry had not only nudged the basket of clean laundry I’d left on the couch to fold, but I found him happily gnawing on a pair of my underwear.

Jerry was an angel. I’ll never say a word otherwise, but he had a real penchant for eating my panties which, I know, was gross. But it didn’t matter if they were fresh from the wash or brand new from the store, he had zero preference.

“Jerry.” I set my stuff down by the door, observing him as if he was a live explosive. “Jerry, we’ve talked about this.”

We had talked about it a total of five times.

Clearly, none of those conversations had made any impact.

The next twenty minutes consisted of me screaming, “Drop those panties! ” while running around the house. For all his laziness, Jerry had the spirit of a whippet when he needed it. He jumped over the couch and ran under the dining table, upending it gloriously as he tore into my bedroom and collided with the bed so forcefully it shifted to the other side of the room.

Jerry bounded through the living room, my underwear flapping in his mouth like a victorious flag. “Jerry, drop it!” I hissed, tripping over the overturned laundry basket.

That was when Fane arrived home.

I turned toward the front door just as Fane opened it from the outside, stepping in like he owned the place.

His eyes swept over the chaos—me, mid-pounce; Jerry, panting triumphantly; my lace underwear dangling from his teeth—and his mouth twitched. “Am I interrupting something?”

He looked from me to Jerry to the laundry basket sprawled on the floor and then finally to the mangled pile of cotton that Jerry had dropped at his feet. A gift just for him after a long day.

Fane reached down to pick it up, and it might have been one of the less spectacular moments of my life when I caught his eye through the hole in the crotch.

“Are these yours?” Fane’s eyes danced with something akin to victory. I crossed my arms and jutted a hip out, refusing to speak to him even though I had been forced to acknowledge his presence within the very walls I’d vowed not to.

“Rosie Posie, have you been ignoring me all week?” The answer to the question was obviously yes, and when I didn’t answer him, his head tilted to the side in that predatory way of his. And Rosie Posie? He knew I hated that nickname. I was as confused as everyone else on why then, exactly, his words were like phantom hands ghosting down my body, stopping just beyond the juncture of my thighs where my pulse point was wreaking havoc.

“Jerry,” he said, looking down at my dog, who was sitting at his feet like the proudest gift-giver that had ever lived. “Did you know your mom’s been ignoring me?”

Jerry made a huffing grunt in confirmation. I guess I knew where his loyalties lay now.

“Are you allowed to eat panties, Jerry?”

He made another huffing sound identical to the first, and it took everything in me not to yell that, no, he was not allowed to eat panties.

But I was ignoring Fane. That was the goal here.

“Oh.” Fane dropped his keys on the side table near the door and walked toward the laundry still on the floor. “Well then, your mom won’t mind if we find you a few more pairs, will she?”

I swear to God, Jerry’s grunt sounded exactly like the word “great,” and he watched on, tail thumping, as Fane crouched down to the laundry pile and started to rifle through it.

My index finger started to tap on my arm, and I decided to try box breathing for the first time in my life. It did sweet fuck all, but I didn’t crack.

“Calista, there’s only one other pair of panties here.” Fane lifted the scrap of purple lace up, standing back to his full height. “And this looks like a week’s worth of washing.”

I wanted to swat the smile right off his stupidly pretty face.

“Still not a fan of panties?” Slowly, he moved the garment over toward where Jerry waited with bated breath like it was his birthday and Christmas all at the same time.

“Well, bud,” he said, finally looking at Jerry. “If your mom has no objections, I’d say this pair is up for grabs too. Unless, of course, you have anything you’d like to say, Cali?”

Oh, I had plenty to say, believe me, but not a peep came out of my mouth when he handed Jerry the pair of underwear. I stormed into the bathroom and did the only thing I could do. I had a very long, very hot shower until the water ran cold and grinned in delight when I heard Fane jump in after I was done and yelp after stepping directly under what had to be a blisteringly cold spray.

When being in the same house as him got to be too much, which it constantly was, I had the option of either smothering him with a pillow or going to see my dad.

So, I drove out to my parents’ place and found him exactly where I knew he’d be, sitting on his chair, looking out at the mountains in the distance.

When my mom got sick, he decided to finally retire, though I use that term lightly. He still got up at the ass crack of dawn and busied himself around the property before he drove into the station. Officially, he’d taken on an administrative volunteer role, but everyone there was relieved he kept coming around. The man was a living encyclopedia of firefighting knowledge, and they all knew it.

Of course, I saw my mom, and sometimes she sat with us too, but our relationships had all changed in the last two years. A big part of me mourned the dynamic our family used to have, of the relationship that Abbey and I used to have.

People cope with sickness differently, and my mom responded a lot like Abbey. She’d closed her circle and tightened it to the point where only one person was allowed inside, pushing everyone else just far enough out of reach.

I’d made my peace with it. I understood that was how she coped, how she got through it. That’s why Abbey’s reaction hadn’t shocked me as much as it might’ve once.

They were cut from the same cloth.

But so were me and my dad.

Our weekly sit-downs outside the family dinners were our thing. Sometimes, we talked; sometimes, we didn’t. The moment I sat down in the porch chair, his hand would find mine, wrapping around it tightly like I was his tether.

He didn’t hold it loosely. He held it like it meant something.

I’d sit down, and he’d kiss my cheek, greet me with one of his classic “Hey, kiddo!” lines, and take this deep breath like it was the first time he’d managed it all day.

The first time I showed up, it had been nothing different—same hello, same hand grip, same deep breath.

The second time in the same week his face lit up like a Christmas tree. “I’m a lucky man, Calista Grey!” he’d said, beaming.

But the third time, there was no hand holding, no kiss hello. My stomach churned at the thought that I’d worried him, that my visits had become more about my own need for clarity than being the thing that grounded him. I was supposed to be his first, easy, deep breath—not the furrow in his brows.

He didn’t say a single thing. He knew me too well for that. He knew I’d talk when I was ready—or at least I would’ve before everything changed. Now? I was a vault.

Every word, every want, every wish hammered at the walls of my mind, but I refused to weigh him down with it.

When I sat down that third time he stood up straight away. My heart hammered the whole two minutes he was gone, and came back with a beer for each of us. I willed the pressure behind my eyes to settle, not to tip over the edge, not to be a reason those laugh lines around his eyes smoothed out again.

He handed me one, took my hand again, and together, we both took a deep breath.

It was different.

Everything was different. But it was enough.

When I got home after those visits, I felt a little more grounded—until I walked through the front door and found Fane still in my house.

All that is to say, I had almost completely ignored Fane. Almost.

I had also dutifully ignored the word of the day that pinged on the lock screen of my phone.

Maybe it was a convenient excuse to avoid trying to figure out what the words meant and how to include them in my day somehow. It felt a little like karma for ignoring that stupid app when it pinged on my bedside table, waking me up and telling me my new word of the day had been delivered.

Waiting for me to fail at expanding my vocabulary.

As I slowly came to on Saturday morning, I internally groaned at the way my cheek was pressed firmly to Fane’s chest.

I liked to believe that the reason I was constantly in this situation since Fane decided it would be fine to invade my bed was that he was the one pulling me to him while we were both asleep. That was a big fat lie, and I was surprised he hadn’t used it as ammunition in our verbal sparring wars.

We both knew it was me.

Fane was still firmly on his side of the bed. The wall of pillows had somehow been scattered around haphazardly, and my side of the bed was gloriously empty. The sheets were cold, cementing what I already knew: I had been here for a long while.

His breathing was steady, his chest rising and falling beneath my cheek. His heartbeat thumping steadily beneath my ear.

I slowly let my head move back to take him in. Lips parted, and long, thick lashes fanned out on his cheeks. The scowling glare he had on consistently since arriving in town was smoothed out.

He looked peaceful, like my Fane. The one I had learned with painstaking detail over two years.

I swallowed, knowing I should move. This was so far over the line of inappropriate that it was unrecoverable if he opened his eyes and found me ogling him. Instead, I let myself take a second to look at him. To let my heart pang painfully at the fact that I’d never been this close to him before without him being mine.

Without being his.

I’d made a point of not looking at the tattoos he’d added to his body in the last two years. Fane had already had two full sleeves when I met him. A tapestry of things that he liked for no reason, things he liked for serious reasons, things that had resonated with him in some way or another.

He had tattoos all over his chest, legs, and arms. They had always fascinated me because so many of them were opposites to one another. There was a grim reaper on his back. It was this huge, shadowed depiction of it, and then he also had the phases of the moon going up his side and over his ribs. A skull with a snake coming out of its mouth and wrapping down his arm, and then a bunch of butterflies on his torso. A wolf, also on his back, howling in sorrow, and then a rubber ducky on his thigh.

I loved it because it explained him perfectly. He wasn’t just one version of himself. He was so many different parts pulled together, and I loved every aspect of him without any hesitation.

The new tattoos on his neck were things I had no idea the meanings behind, but I wanted to. It was almost hard to sit still; how much I wished I knew. It was a mismatch of things. A rose, a timepiece, a mandala design that went up the column of his throat.

It made him look even more imposing than he did before. Like maybe he’d done it just so people would leave him more alone than they already did.

The hand he had resting on his stomach used to be unmarked on the top. Now it held what looked like a constellation. I had no idea which one it could have been.

That thought brought me back to reality.

Of course, I didn’t know. Why would I? I had no right to know. It wasn’t my business, and letting myself get soft wasn’t going to help me when he left. The only thing I could do was make sure the only thing that was caught in the crossfire was me, not Darling.

I managed to extract myself from the firm hold he had around my waist, determined not to wake him. Desperate to have a second where I didn’t need to be on guard. Where I could let my walls down and admit that this was getting harder, not easier.

I was not an angry person. Being constantly angry at Fane was already taking a toll on me, but it was the only way I knew how to keep my guard up—to keep myself from unraveling completely.

I just needed to endure it.

Grabbing my phone on my way out of the bedroom, I tiptoed to avoid the floorboards I knew would creak. My gaze flickered briefly to the dark lump of his belongings piled in the corner, an unwelcome reminder of how much my house had changed in just one week. Even the air felt different, saturated with the woodsy, warm scent that clung to the man in my bed like a freaking pheromone.

He smelled like a mix of hot showers and wilderness: fresh pine and clean soap. It was the kind of scent that made you lean in without realizing it—intoxicating.

I would not think about it. Starting now.

Before grabbing Jerry’s lead to take him on his walk around the block, I checked my word of the day.

Beleaguered .

“Oh, perfect,” I muttered. Apparently, the universe had jokes.

Jerry was sprawled belly-up on the couch, his legs sticking straight into the air. One eye cracked open as I approached, and his tail thumped a lazy rhythm against the cushions.

“Good morning, sweet boy.” I dropped to my knees beside him, burying my face into his side. His fur smelled faintly of Fane too, which was a betrayal I chose to ignore. “Time for a walk with your beleaguered mom.” I kissed his nose and scratched under his chin, letting his soft grunts of contentment soothe the part of me that was still silently screaming.