Page 34

33

Calista

After

When I woke up in the middle of the night and tried to move, my whole body shuddered in pain. I dug my teeth into my bottom lip to try and stifle the whimper, but Fane woke up the moment the near silent squeak left my mouth.

“You slept through my nightmares at having to run for my life,” I panted, the pain taking my breath away. “But you wake up from that .”

“I was awake then too,” he murmured, gently peeling himself away from me and getting up to leave the room. When he came back, he was holding a glass of water and a bottle of painkillers.

“You didn’t say anything.” I watched him set everything down on my bedside table and help me sit up.

“I thought you’d toast my balls if I asked you if you were okay.” He said the words so seriously I couldn’t stop my laugh, which promptly turned into a cry when my chest spasmed.

“No, no,” I cried, squeezing my eyes tight. “No laughing.”

“You told me you’d tell me if it was too much.” He leveled me with the most disapproving look I’d ever seen on his face.

“It was practically a religious experience.” I winced, taking the pills he held out. “I have no regrets.”

A slow, self-satisfied smile crept onto his face, and he looked so goofy, especially when he started to wag his eyebrows and his hair was still disheveled from sleep.

“If you make me laugh again, I’ll definitely toast your balls.”

He clamped his lips together, mumbling a quiet, “Sorry, laughy pants,” that he didn’t mean in the slightest.

Fane helped me settle back into bed, wrapping himself around me where he’d been before. Sleep found me almost immediately, and by the time I woke up again, I was alone in the bed and there was music filtering in from under the closed bedroom door.

Peeling myself off the mattress hurt about as much as I thought it would, but not as much as the throbbing ache of my whole body last night. I was sore in places I hadn’t been sore in for a very long time. Despite it all, despite knowing it was definitely not what we should have been doing after I’d almost been pancaked by Declan, I couldn’t bring myself to regret a single second of it.

I was still sitting on the edge of the bed, a ghost of a smile lingering on my face as I replayed every detail of yesterday afternoon, of last night, in my head. I’d been content to go slowly. I had to go slowly, because honestly? Even breathing fucking hurt. But when my phone lit up from a message from my dad, I noticed the time and maybe threw up a little.

It was ten a.m.

As in, a whole three and half hours later than Sunshine was meant to be open.

I rushed around the room—which really meant shuffling about three percent faster than I had been just seconds before—grabbing a shirt and stumbling out of the bedroom.

I might have been crying, but whether it was from the overwhelming anxiety of being late for work for the first time since I’d opened Sunshine or from how stiff my entire body felt, I honestly couldn’t say.

Fane was mid-pancake flip when he saw me, and for some reason that equated to him panicking and trying to catch the pancake midair.

“ Fucking balls!” He dropped the pancake as quickly as he caught it, and before it even had a chance to hit the ground, Jerry snatched it up and made a beeline for his couch.

“What did I even just witness?” I mumbled, staring between Fane and Jerry and the now-empty pan he still had clutched in one hand.

“Why are you awake?” That same disapproving look from yesterday was back in full force.

“Because I’m alive,” I grumbled, shuffling the rest of the way toward him before performing the world’s smallest unannounced trust fall and dropping my forehead to his chest. “Everything hurts.”

Fane’s hand that wasn’t holding the hot pan wrapped around me, sliding up and down my back in the most comforting rhythm that I may have dozed off for a second. “I’m sorry, baby.”

I lifted my head slowly, looking up at him, and my heart sank when I saw the devastation in his eyes. “Don’t do that.” I reached up on my tiptoes to kiss the underside of his jaw.

“Do what?” If there was any doubt before, the delivery of that question confirmed it: Fane was absolutely moping.

“You know what.” I quirked an eyebrow at him and slowly slid onto a stool at the kitchen counter. The kitchen was tiny so there was only one chair, but up until a month ago, I hadn’t needed more than one chair. “I regret nothing.”

“Calista, you—”

“Are a grown woman who knew what she was asking for. I wanted every part of what happened last night. Okay?”

The muscle in his jaw twitched once, twice, before he gave me a curt nod and, much opposed to the brooding demeanor he had going on, proceeded to pour another pancake while wearing my floral apron.

I didn’t know exactly how to explain it, but despite the soreness of my body and—the soreness between my legs—I felt steady for the first time in a long time. I looked at Fane, and my head felt clear. My chest was free of the lingering heaviness that had become so much a part of me I didn’t fully recognize myself without it.

All I knew was that being here, with Fane, it felt right. It felt good .

“If you keep looking at me like that, I’m going to have to remove myself from the room.” Fane set down a heaping pile of pancakes in front of me, topped with the most mouthwatering caramelized banana you’d ever seen in your life. Right on cue, my stomach let out the loudest, grizzliest growl that ever existed.

“You made my pancakes.” I stared at them in awe. “I think I missed these more than you.”

“Really nice.” Fane kissed the side of my head, and I could feel his grin. It sent a pang through my chest at the realization that we’d lost two years together.

One gentle finger pressed up under my chin, and I looked up into his eyes and felt my bottom lip quiver a fraction before I caught it between my teeth.

“Tell me so I can fix it,” he murmured.

I closed my eyes at his words—words he’d said to me so many times before, pressed them into my soul, etched onto my bones. It terrified me how much hearing them now soothed my racing heart.

Instead of telling him all that, I blurted the second thing making my stomach churn.

“I’m late for work,” I croaked, right before I shoveled an arguably too-large bite of pancake into my mouth, my eyes on him the whole time.

“That was sexy.” He grinned, catching a runaway drop of syrup that was creeping down my chin with his thumb before licking it off.

I’m not proud of the way I froze mid-chew, my mouth hanging wide open. There would have been no doubt in anyone’s mind what was going through my mind right then. I crossed my legs and focused all my attention on the plate of food in front of me.

“What—”

“You know what,” I mumbled, hoping maybe he wouldn’t understand a word I was saying and would just walk away.

“I’m not sure I do.” I saw him cross his arms across his broad chest from my periphery.

I released the mother of all sighs. “If I look at you, I’m going to jump your bones, and I’m afraid that might kill me. So maybe you should just go have your shower and then you can drive me to work.”

I didn’t need to look at him to know he was grinning that stupid, beaming grin of his that wasn’t actually stupid at all. It was totally not what I needed to see in order to maintain my morning of celibacy.

“I’ll take you in to grab a coffee because I want one too, but you’re not working today.”

“That makes no sense.” I was still refusing to look at him. “How are we getting coffee then?”

“Ash stopped by early this morning to grab the keys.”

“Ash is running the café?” I yelled into an empty kitchen, unable to turn my head toward Fane’s retreating body fast enough before the bathroom door clicked shut. I did manage to move my head in time to see Jerry silently stalking back into the kitchen for another pancake that I may or may not have dropped onto the floor from my overflowing plate.

As soon as Fane pulled into a spot out the back of the café, he turned the car off, hopped out, and walked around to open my door, but he didn’t move back.

To be honest, I was surprised he’d held out as long as he had in asking me about the name of the café. If our roles were reversed, it might have been the first thing I did.

“Why Sunshine? ” His question was tentative, and his eyes kept darting between our clasped hands and my face.

It was a relief to have nothing but the want to be truthful with him. This was how it was meant to be between us.

“Your laugh reminds me of sunshine.” He already knew that, I must’ve told him a thousand times. “It always made me warm, happy. Peaceful.” I closed my eyes, a little hum pulling from my chest at just the mere thought of it. “Before you, it was my parents and Abbey. It always came from someone else. I needed to create something like that of my own. I didn’t want to rely on anyone for that sort of peace. I’d hoped this would do it.”

“Did it?”

I nodded, slipping my fingers between his where they rested on my legs. “In a way.”

“Good.” He nodded, a small, sad smile ghosting over his mouth.

When Ash led me into the back room of the café, there were stacks of home-cooked dishes, flowers, and cards from so many people—people whose coffee orders I knew by heart. I hadn’t ever expected them to show up for me the way they had, steadfast in this belief I’d hammered into my mind that if I wanted warmth and happiness and peace, then I needed to make it for myself.

Seeing the way that I was proved so incredibly wrong loosened something in me.

The feel of Fane there—how solid he was beneath my touch—it made the entire concept of the café seem ridiculous. Yes, I was proud of it, insanely so, of what I’d managed to achieve all on my own. But it was never more clear to me now how short it had fallen in the space I had tried to fill with it.

This. This was peace.

All my life, I’d chased the vibrancy of laughter, yearning to be smothered in it. I always thought that’s what I was after, never giving much thought to the quiet that came after—the kind of peace that lingered softly, like the calm after a storm.

It wasn’t the laughter I’d been chasing. It was this. That steadiness I’d seen growing up, in my parents, in the spaces between their smiles.

In the end, I hadn’t needed to search for it. Peace had found me—all on its own.

* * *

“The last tour is today.” I reached out to drag a finger down the slope of Fane’s nose, and it made me remember the sad little heap my glasses had ended up in after they flew off my face and out the open window when my car went spinning. I thought I’d be sadder about the loss of them—about that last, fragile part of the person I used to be.

But instead, it felt freeing, in a way.

“I told you—” he started to grumble, turning onto his side and tugging me into him gently.

“It’s an important one, plus it’s on my list.” My words were mumbled from the way my face was tucked against his chest, and I felt his body start to shake with sleepy little hiccups of laughter.

“Well, if it’s on the list…” he mumbled into my hair.

“Can you make us pancakes again?” I asked after a second of him not moving. I was pretty sure he was about to fall asleep again.

With a deep sigh, he rolled to the end of the bed, mumbling something about how being soft and approachable was ruining his sleep. He padded into the kitchen in nothing but his briefs, a hand shoved down them for some ungodly reason in a move I was pretty sure was repeated by all of the men on planet Earth.

“Please wash your hands before you cook!” I called out, starting to roll myself off the bed too.

“You’ve literally had your mouth wrapped around my co—” Fane’s words got cut off with a very un-Fane-like squeak thanks to both my pointer fingers digging into his ribs.

He spun to face me, a frying pan held in one hand and the other hand flipping me off, like presenting an attacker with your middle finger mid-fight would be the best use of a free hand.

I held up my two pointer fingers, wiggling them in anticipation of another attack.

“I already washed them!” He grinned, but he didn’t lower the frying pan or his middle finger.

I lowered my own ‘weapons’ and stepped forward with a sweet smile. I reached up on my tiptoes and pressed a kiss to his lips.

“You know,” he started in between kisses, “Sometimes you can be a little scary.”

“Guess you’ll have to teach me a lesson or two,” I whispered, matching his grin.

He groaned and dropped his head to my shoulder. “Eleven days.”

Fane had refused to touch me until the two-week mark of me getting better had hit.

“Fane—”

“Nope.” He pulled back, dropping a kiss to the corner of my mouth and a light smack on my ass. “Hop in the shower, and your pancakes will be ready when you’re out.”

“You don’t want to join me?”

“I hardly fit in your shower alone, so as much as I’d love to see you wet and naked, I don’t think we’d leave that scenario without further injury.”

I gave him my best pout, and when he leaned down to whisper in my ear about the list of things he was keeping track of that he would be doing to me when the eleven days had passed, I made sure that he heard every moan and cry that left my lips as I sunk two fingers into my pussy, replaying his words in my head. Wishing it was his fingers, not mine.

As promised, there were pancakes waiting for me when I walked out of the bathroom. I only knew that because of the smell that had threaded through every room of the house. I didn’t actually have a chance to see them because the moment the bathroom door opened, Fane was on me.

His kiss was desperate and possessive. His hand grabbed the towel and pulled it from me. I gasped at the way his hands roamed over my still wet body. His palms skated down, taking two handfuls of my ass before squeezing roughly.

My hands found his biceps, steadying myself, and that’s when I realized he didn’t have a stitch of clothing on either.

He wasted no time before a hand delved between my legs. Fane captured my cry with his mouth as he sunk one long digit into my still sensitive core before pulling it out, and with a final, claiming kiss, he stepped away from me.

It was like I’d been sucked into a hurricane and spat out the other end. I was having a hard time remembering my own freaking name, let alone understand what the fuck just happened.

He’d managed to turn us around, leaving me just outside of the bathroom while he stepped back into the still steam-filled room. I watched as he lifted the finger he’d just buried inside me up to his mouth, closing his lips over it, his eyes dragging down my naked form.

My chest was heaving, legs shaking like all the strength from my body had been siphoned out in the space of a heartbeat. I watched him with greedy eyes of my own, solid and beautiful. His cock jutted out, hard and thick. I watched it jerk the moment he tasted me off his finger, and the moment I stepped forward, a wicked smile took shape, and he tutted, gripping the door beside him.

“Eleven days.”

I was still standing there, naked and stupefied, when the shower turned on and I heard his first groan filter from under the door.

The smile on his face was only half satisfied when he found me eating the pancakes after he’d stepped out of the bathroom, and that was the only thing that made me feel even remotely better. That and the middle finger I had already extended his way before I’d even heard the door handle rattle.

An hour later, we were on the highway heading just outside of Darling.

“This is the way back to Artington.” Fane raised an eyebrow at me before snapping his eyes back to the road.

I hummed in acknowledgment but didn’t say anything else until we got to the part of the highway I was waiting for. “Do you see that shoulder up there?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Pull in there and put the windows down.”

The truck rolled to a stop and after shifting it into park Fane pulled the key from the ignition. He turned to look at me, his eyes filled with the kind of patient curiosity that made my heart ache. Like I had every answer he’d ever need. Like I was his true north.

I focused my attention first on his hand still resting on the steering wheel that had the compass, my whole body erupting into goose bumps while I recalled the words he’d said about the meanings of his tattoos.

Now, the compass wasn’t pointing at me. It was pointing right at the very place we’d come here to see.

“Do you see that?” I pointed to the ranch house that was settled on the most beautiful property I’d ever seen.

“The house?”

“That’s Primrose Ranch. It actually belonged to Sammy’s grandfather. He died a few years ago. No one lives there now, but she still goes once a week to clean it up.”

He didn’t say anything, just waited for me to keep going.

“Dylan is Sammy’s cousin. I don’t know if you know that.”

I saw him shake his head from the corner of my eye.

I nodded, still tracing the house with my eyes. “Growing up, I was always wherever Delilah was, and she was always wherever Dylan was. He was always here with his older brother, Jessie. Sammy too, with her older brother.”

Fane looked from my face to the house like he was trying to picture a little version of me sitting on the steps of the big wrap-around porch.

“I loved it here,” I said softly. “As a kid, I thought I’d never love another house more than the one I grew up in. But over the last couple of years, I’d come here, park in this exact spot, just to stare at it. I think I’ve realized I love it more. I didn’t realize why until last night, though.”

“Why?” Fane was still looking away from me, his eyes glued to the house too.

“Tell me what you see?”

He didn’t hesitate this time. “I see space. A house. Mountains.”

“What do you feel?”

“Your hand in mine. The sun on my face.”

I hummed as I closed my own eyes and asked him my last question.

I closed my eyes, letting his words sink in. “What do you hear?”

After a second, he finally whispered his reply. “Nothing.”

“How does it all make you feel?” I asked him before slowly opening my eyes to find his already on me, catching the sun the way they always did. Brilliant. Incandescent.

“Peaceful.”

I smiled, a small exhale of relief slipping past my lips.

I’d always thought this was what reminded me of Darling the most—the perfect representation of the town I loved. But it was never more clear to me now that I’d always thought of Darling as loud, laughter-filled, and vibrant.

This place, though. This quiet, purple-hued corner of the world? It reminded me of Fane.

“Peace is hard to come by,” I said. “Why would you ever want to disturb the pockets of it that exist?”

He leaned over the seat, his lips finding mine in a kiss that was slow and intentional. Then he placed another on my jaw, lingering just long enough for me to feel the weight of his understanding.

I knew he’d heard everything I’d said. Loud and clear.