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3

Fane

After

It honestly felt like I’d been tripping balls for the last seventy-two hours.

I hadn’t slept at all for the first twenty-four, and everything after that was now too grimy to recall.

Cali looked at me like she’d seen a ghost, and then she started to blink rapidly. So fast it was kind of alarming.

I wanted to move toward her, but I doubted that would help. No, I knew it wouldn’t.

When her eyes popped open, she reached up like she was about to rub them before stopping herself and clamping them shut again.

I cleared my throat and felt like I might be drowning. “Are you—”

“Mother of God,” she gasped. “You’re real.” Her eyes flew open, one hand immediately landing at the base of her throat.

“Hi.” Good fucking Lord. I had never been very good with words, but I had at least been able to stay away from being some sort of monosyllabic dickhead. Until now.

“Hi.” Her brow furrowed as her head tilted to the side. The move was so familiar to me that I knew exactly what was going through her head. Even when I had no real right to anymore.

“Fane.” She said my name like it had sat on a shelf at the back of her mind, and she was blowing the dust off it. For one small, minute moment, I had no idea how this was going to go, and then she narrowed her eyes at me, and I knew I’d been wrong.

I was fully aware of exactly how this was going to go.

“What the hell are you doing here, Fane?” She was pissed.

“The sign out front said coffee.” I gestured back toward the street to where the group of contracted tradesmen loitered.

“We’re closed.” She crossed her arms and took a single step back further into the kitchen.

There was a huge sign in the window of Cali’s café that said, “We are open until 5!” I saw it when I walked in. I knew she knew it was there too, because I’d wager she was the one to put it there.

I took my time looking from her face to the clock on the wall on my right that showed four thirty p.m. before looking back at her face. And God help me, I tried, but I couldn’t stop the way my mouth curved at the side because I knew she was full of shit.

Turns out, that was not the right reaction to have in the presence of a woman harnessing what I am sure rivaled the wrath of the devil.

“We’re still closed,” she bit out between clenched teeth, crossing her arms and jutting out her hip.

She was so familiar to me. And every single move she made, every second I could drink her in, my ability to breathe got easier and easier. It wouldn’t last, this moment of peace I’d found. I knew that. But I’d be damned if I wasted even a second of it.

I opened my mouth to say something else, overcome with this sudden need to ruffle her feathers. I wanted to push her buttons. I wanted to see that flush I knew hid just under the collar of her shirt spread up her neck.

I hadn’t seen Calista Grey in almost two years, and every single scenario that I had imagined, every moment that I’d played out in my head and memorized what I’d say, no longer meant a single thing in the light of seeing her in the flesh.

“Why are you here , Fane?” Her voice wavered, and I wanted to tell her exactly why I was there. I wanted to tell her where I’d been, too.

The thought of the last two years made me clench my fists. Made me want to crack my neck over and over and fucking over.

However, showing up out of the blue and saying, “ Hey, remember my dad? The one I hate, the one I swore I’d never be like? Well, surprise! I ended up working for him, and now he’s got his sights set on Darling. Your Darling. And I didn’t know what else to do, how else to stop it .” That didn’t feel like the best approach.

Instead, I just said, “Work.”

“ Work? You’re here for work? In Darling? You’re here to work, here in Darling?” With every word that came out of her mouth, her eyes got bigger, and the bigger they got, the harder I clamped my mouth shut.

“Are you…are you laughing ?”

“No, ma’am.” I shook my head, knowing I should look away from her, but completely and totally unable to.

Everything. I memorized everything about this woman, and still it had not done her justice.

Closing my eyes had been a mistake the last time I’d seen her. When I opened them again, she’d been gone.

I watched now as her body went from rigid to mildly defensive. The way her crossed arms loosened, and her pointer finger reached up briefly to the bridge of her nose before she dropped both arms to her sides.

I felt it more than I saw it happen. The way she let her eyes wander over me. I could categorically list the things that she would pick up.

My hair was shorter. The last time she saw me, it was longer, so long I used to keep it up half the time. Now, it fell against my nape in a tousle of dark brown waves, long enough to tuck behind my ears but too short for anything else.

I could have imagined it, but it looked like her hand twitched like maybe she remembered what it was like to run her fingers through it. Just like I hadn’t been able to stop doing, why I had ended up cutting it to begin with.

I knew she was taking note of the tattoos that hadn’t been there before. The ones that covered my neck. My hands.

I didn’t let myself take her in more than I already had. Even those few moments already felt like a mistake.

The woman in front of me might have loved me once, but she certainly didn’t love me now.

It felt like a handful of minutes between then and when the door behind me opened. The bell above it was sweet and light, cutting the tension that had formed like a knife through butter. A glance at the clock told me I was wrong, and it was now five p.m. on the dot. We’d spent almost thirty minutes just…staring at each other.

“Kid? I saw your car was still here, and I…”

I let my eyes fall closed, giving myself a moment to feel the shit that I had so thoroughly stepped in before stepping to the side and turning to the man behind me.

Calista’s dad.

“Hey, Dad.” Cali’s voice was a strangled croak.

I can honestly say that this was the first time I’d ever seen Calista Grey nervous.

It was night and day the way she went from doing her best to become a part of the wall behind her to taking the five strides to get her from where she was to where I stood.

Right fucking next to me.

“Fane?” Dallas Grey took his hat off and reached for my hand the same way he had the first time we met.

“Sir, nice to see you.” I shook his hand back, but he didn’t stop there. Instead, he pulled me into the sort of embrace that made you feel a part of something. Important. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt like that and tried to keep the look of what the ever-loving fuck was happening? off my face.

That was a lie I told myself often. I could sure as fuck remember. I could remember it down to the day. Down to the second .

“I did not expect to see you here! Cali didn’t say a single thing to us.” He stepped back with a grin on his face and a light in his eyes. A light that had been there the last time I had seen him. One that meant I was a part of his family.

One that should absolutely not be there right now.

“Oh?” I was impressed that my voice came out sounding normal instead of the high-pitched squeak I had been expecting. Not that I’d ever squeaked in my fucking life, but if I were a betting man, I’d have bet it would’ve happened for the first time right now.

“No, well, you know.” Cali slid a finger up the bridge of her nose again before flicking her eyes up to mine and away just as fast.

“It was a surprise for me too,” she said, giving her dad what I used to call her I want to cry smile.

“I’m surprised you could get time off work long enough to make the trip,” Dallas said, crossing his arms and leaning against the door he just came in.

I nodded, looking down at the woman next to me as if I could read what the fuck was on her mind just by wishing it. “Well,” I started, clearing my throat and reaching up to rub the back of my neck. “The, uh, the—“

“Mines,” she filled in for me, and I just stared at her while I collected myself because what the fuck?

I cleared my throat and looked back to her father. “The mines …”

“Are closed,” Cali supplied, rather unhelpfully, and I felt my eyes almost fall out of my face. I clenched my jaw at the same time her grip on my arm tightened, nails digging in.

“The mines you worked at in Australia closed?” Dallas frowned at us, pushing off the door and looking for all the world like the concerned sort of father I always wished I had.

“To me,” I added quickly. “Closed to me. As in, I no longer work there.”

“That’s right.” Cali’s head nodded so furiously it looked like it was about to come off, an unhinged sort of grin plastered on her face. “They fired him.”

“Or.” I knew she could feel my glare. “I quit.”

“You know,” Dallas shook his head, taking off his hat to run his hands through his dark peppered hair before replacing it. “You two are really made of sterner stuff. What’s it been, Cal, a year and a half?”

“Almost two,” she mumbled, and I still couldn’t stop looking at her.

“Almost two years.” He whistled low and long before clamping a hand on my shoulder and shocking me back into the conversation. Dallas wasn’t a small man, but I had a few inches on him in height and width.

It had always felt weird, looking down at her dad.

“Yep.” I nodded, reverting to the monosyllabic dickhead from before.

“Real happy for you guys.” Dallas pulled Calista into a tight hug with a kiss on the top of her head. “Glad you can finally start your lives together.”

“Thanks, Dad.” Her voice was muffled against his shoulder.

“So, I’ll tell your mom to set another plate for the table, but I’ll let you surprise her. Sound like a plan? Six thirty sharp.”

“What a plan!” Cali half raised her hands in the air like, somehow, it would help with making her sound less like she was in pain. Dallas just stared at us with a big grin on his face, like he was waiting for something. That’s when she looped her arm through mine and leaned her head on my arm like her touching me wasn’t a big deal. Like I hadn’t thought of her every day, of every month for the last six hundred and fucking thirty-nine days.

“Great plan.” I nodded at him as he delivered a double thumbs up and headed for the door, the little bell sounding too light and peaceful for the way my heart was thrashing in my chest.

Cali didn’t move for the next handful of seconds, and I might have imagined it again, the way her fingers flexed on my bicep before she pulled away and turned to face me.

“So,” she said, not meeting my gaze, “You’re going to laugh at this.” She sounded like she’d rather yell the words at me, but the situation demanded she at least attempt to be civil.

“Okay.” My voice came out rough. Filled with everything I was feeling. Panic, curiosity, wonder, confusion, concern. A mild amount of hysteria. A fucked-up little bit of hope.

“When I moved home…” Her eyes flicked up to mine and then away, but it was enough for me to see the jagged edges of pain that still remained. “No one had expected me to show up alone.”

I was glad she wasn’t looking at me because she didn’t see the way I flinched at her words. Every single one of them was like a knife she’d flung right at my chest. Not even needing to look to hit the bull’s-eye.

“When they asked where you were…” My eyes darted from her face to her throat, and I watched the way she swallowed once. Twice. Then she shook her head and dragged her eyes from the floor to meet mine. It was like seeing a completely different person.

There was not an ounce of the pain I saw before. So much so that I was half convinced I’d made it up. Wanted it to be there so much, maybe I imagined it.

All I saw was…nothing. She looked at me with nothing.

“I wasn’t going to break my mom’s heart more than it already was, so I lied. I told them you were tying up some loose ends in the city. I thought they’d forget about it, considering my love life was nowhere near the most important thing going on right then. But… after a few months, my dad asked about you. Instead of breaking his heart, I told him you were in Australia.”

“Working in the mines,” I clarified, my heart still thrashing, my lungs burning. All while I was coming to the realization that if I was going to get through the next few months, I would have to seriously change my approach.

Cali didn’t just feel nothing . I could see it, feel it. Right to the very center of me.

She hated me. She had every right to, I wasn’t debating that. I just hadn’t expected it to rip the air from me the way it had. Like the last little bit of hope I had just disappeared.

“I figured it would be a good reason to tell them eventually that it didn’t work out, but…” She pushed her finger up the center of her nose again, and I finally figured out why she kept doing that. Cali wasn’t wearing her glasses. “I could never bring myself to do it. So, here we are.”

I nodded. Only because I wasn’t entirely sure what else to do.

“Will you go along with it?”

My eyes were still on her throat. At her tone, they snapped up to meet her hazel gaze. She was glaring at me, but like she was trying hard not to. Like I had inconvenienced her by showing up and making her out herself in the lie she’d wrapped us both in.

“I don’t know anything about Australian mines.” I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off her the moment she stood beside me. So, I did the only thing I could do. I matched her glare with my own.

Matched her nothing with my own.

It wasn’t fair, but I reached for that kernel of rage that simmered deep in my soul that sparked to life when I woke up and found her gone. The one time in my life that I’d let myself fall into a deep sleep, an exhausted sleep, and my biggest fear had come to light. That I wouldn’t wake up in time to stop something bad from happening. From losing someone I loved.

She had no idea what I’d done. What I’d sacrificed.

And it was all for her. There was no time to explain. She hadn’t given me even a second from the moment she asked me to move home with her, and all that came out of my mouth was, “No.”

And now, she didn’t know the fucking half of what it had taken to get here. To be here for her. Like seeing her was easy for me. Like losing her wasn’t the most fucked-up thing that had ever happened to me.

If Calista wanted to fight with me, I was more than happy to step into the ring with her.

“Yes, well, I’m sure you can Google it.” She crossed her arms and kept her narrowed stare firmly in place.

“What’s in it for me?”

“What?” Her face went blank.

“If I go along with it…” I enunciated every word like I was talking to a child. It was condescending and mean, and the way her nostrils flared in anger made something zap down my spine. “What’s in it for me?”

Her foot started to tap on the ground. Brows drawing close while she pursed her mouth to the side. Calista wasn’t just thinking. She was panicking .

“What do you want?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“That’s not fair,” she blurted. Her brows drew in further.

“Yeah, well, that’s life.” I let my stare turn into a glare. The sick sort of satisfaction I got when her eyes narrowed further was borderline sociopathic.

We were locked in a silent, unmoving battle. She, I was sure, was trying to think about all the ways she might get away with killing me. While I was still trying my fucking hardest not to step closer to her, to wrap my hand around her throat just to see what she would do.

I was caught between wanting to squeeze until she gasped in that way I knew she did and fucking begging her to put her hand back on my arm where I could still feel the burn of her touch on my skin.

Cali surprised me when she nodded her head, mouth still pursed and brows still drawn, but that was a nod of agreement nonetheless, and I felt like I’d just won the fucking lottery somehow.

“I’ll—I have a new number now,” she said, looking anywhere but at me.

“I know,” I said. Saying more in those two words than I really meant to. The only way I’d know that was true is if I had tried to call her. Tried to text her. I had done both of those things. Many times.

Her face registered that, and then, like she’d made herself delete that bit of information, her face went blank again, and her voice went flat. “What’s yours? I’ll message you the address.”

“It’s the same.”

“You never changed it?” She dropped her arms to her sides, and her body swayed like she wanted to step toward me too.

I just shook my head.

“Why?”

I didn’t give her a reply to that one. I couldn’t. I just let my eyes fall over her, taking her in. Real and healthy and right in front of me. Gut-wrenchingly fucking perfect. With a last nod goodbye, I turned to leave her café.

“I didn’t give you the address.”

Her voice sounded closer to me, like she did take that step.

“I remember the way,” I mumbled, not bothering to turn around.

I was so fucked, but I knew this was nothing compared to what would happen when she realized why now, after all this time, I’d finally found my way back to Darling.