Page 10 of Starrily (Perks of Being #2)

Chapter 10

S imon wasn’t sure whether his plan had gone exactly as expected or horrendously off the tracks.

When it came to softening up Calliope, there was only so much he could do at work; he could crack jokes and attempt to lighten the mood, but Calliope was always focused on her tasks. The solution seemed simple: get her away from work. He could invite her for a coffee, but why do that when he could do something more fun?

The body art project had gone great. He was sure she had fun, and neither of them had stormed off because of a quarrel. Job accomplished.

There was the small matter of him landing on top of her and contemplating a kiss for a split second, but it was only a knee-jerk reaction. Or some other reaction.

Point was, he was fine. He wasn’t trying to kiss Calliope. Everything was fine.

Except for him being in her apartment now. When she’d invited him, he was ready to say no. He didn’t want to intrude, but a little devil Everett on his shoulder whispered, “Soften her up,” so he said yes.

With a few slams into her apartment door, Calliope got it open and invited him in.

“Is your door okay?”

“No worries. It does that all the time.” She shut it with some force. “At least if someone tried to break in, I’d know.”

“People might think you ’re trying to break in.” He looked around. The main space combined a kitchen, a small dining table, and an approximation of a living room—a patchwork sofa, a TV, and shelves filled with books and small decorative pieces. A couple of pet toys were strewn around the floor, clothes hung off the sofa, and a pair of mismatched socks was left in front of another door.

“Uhh …” Callie turned in a circle. “Why don’t you go to the bathroom first? That door. You can dry off, and I’ll find you something to wear.”

The bathroom was slightly less of an organized chaos. Simon took off his jacket and shirt and dried his hair with a towel, nearly overturning a couple of bottles and cream tubes on the overcrowded sink shelf. One toothbrush, and all women’s products. No boyfriend, he guessed.

And why do you care about that, again?

After several more minutes of waiting, he peeked out. Calliope wasn’t around, and he walked to the sofa, his eyes stopping on the closed laptop on the coffee table.

Everett would want him to check it out to see how Calliope was progressing with her software and how much work she’d done from home.

Well, Everett could go stick his espionage plot into a black hole.

“This was the biggest shirt I could find.” Calliope came out of the other door—must be her bedroom—clutching a gray t-shirt with a NASA logo. She stopped, stared at his bare chest for a moment, and blinked.

He did his best to fight off an amused grin. “Thanks.” He pulled the shirt out of her unmoving hands and dressed. “Usually, this is the other way around, isn’t it?”

“Hmm?”

“Women wearing men’s shirts.”

“Oh. Right.” She blushed. “I … bathroom. Yeah.” And she disappeared inside.

Now that his comfort had been raised above the level of a wet dog, Simon inspected her apartment. There was a picture of Calliope with another woman of the same age, in graduation clothes—probably a friend of hers—but interestingly, no pictures of family members, or even a younger Calliope. As if she sprung into existence after graduation.

Not that dissimilar to myself.

A framed print hung on the wall above the bookshelf: a minimalistic graphic of a sci-fi spaceship with a star-like logo underneath and an inscription: May you never walk in fear, only in wonder .

Starship Andromeda. The name wasn’t written anywhere, but it came to him, clear as day. He used to … no, Raleigh used to watch the reruns of the TV show every Thursday night, with Newton softly purring next to him on the sofa.

He had to stop thinking about this. What use were old memories?

How strange he’d find a poster of the show here. He wasn’t surprised Calliope would watch something sci-fi, but Starship Andromeda was such a corny, optimistic show, and Calliope was …

Perhaps Calliope wasn’t who he’d judged her to be.

He turned his attention to the bookshelf. A fair number of scientific titles; again, no surprise. But also some fiction and —comic books? He pulled out one issue and looked at the bathroom door, left ajar. “You knew who Phoenix was all along, didn’t you?”

“What do you mean?” Calliope’s voice came from the bathroom.

“You read X-Men comics.”

Her head peeked out. “Well, yeah. But it’s hardly an original name. You could’ve been thinking of anything.” She disappeared back into the bathroom.

He figured she was a nerd—her job gave it away—but he hadn’t imagined she was a nerdy nerd. He didn’t know why, but it made him smile. There were so many things he didn’t know about her, and discovering them felt like unwrapping a piece of candy. It might be bad for him, but he wanted more.

He sat down on the sofa and spread his legs. A soft tapping sound came from the open door to the bedroom, and then even a softer hop as a ball of beige and brown fur jumped on the sofa next to him.

“No, no, Theia!” Calliope ran out of the bathroom, changed into a simple t-shirt and sweatpants. “Be careful. She doesn’t like people, and she’s a scratcher.”

“Just like her owner, then,” Simon replied, throwing a smile over his shoulder. Calliope raised an eyebrow in a ‘not impressed by your joke’ answer and took her clothes to the bedroom.

Simon watched the cat as the cat watched him. She meowed and slowly approached, then rubbed against his arm. He raised his hand and ran it along Theia’s long, silky smooth fur. “Scratcher, huh?” he said gently.

Calliope returned to the main room and stopped at the sofa. “You little traitor,” she said to Theia, then looked at Simon. “She doesn’t even like Ava, and I’ve known her longer than I’ve had Theia.”

“I used to have a cat. Maybe she feels that,” he said before he could stop himself.

Calliope still stood at the edge of the sofa. “I didn’t take you for a … person.”

“Wow, thanks.”

“I meant …” she waved her hand in frustration. “I wanted to say cat person, then I thought if I should say pet person instead, but remembered you liked that dog that ran up to you at the observatory and in the end … it came out wrong.”

“No, no. I think it came out just right,” he teased.

“Would you like some coffee or tea or soda while you wait for Stan?”

“Right.” He’d completely forgotten he was supposed to get a ride back home. Damn rain. This whole “let my chauffeur get me on his day off” was really enforcing the spoiled rich man idea Calliope had of him.

Which didn’t use to bother him that much.

“Tea, please.”

“Good choice.” Calliope filled up the kettle while he called Stan.

“He’s not picking up,” he said, five minutes and several tries later. “If you have a spare umbrella, I’ll take that and walk back to the bus station and figure it out from there.”

“That makes no sense.” She turned off the whistling kettle. “Besides, you’re crazy if you think I’m gonna let you wander outside so everyone can see you in my old stretched t-shirt.”

“You mean …”

“There’s a whole sofa available, and apparently, Theia doesn’t intend to murder you, so you’re safe to spend the night here.”

“Are you serious?”

“Sofa’s big enough for one.”

Dr. Calliope “Get That Man Out of My Face” Guidry was telling him he could spend the night at her apartment?

Granted, when he put it like that, the situation sounded different—but this was still a big step forward. A major softening, Everett might say.

And he hated that he didn’t want to do it because Everett had ordered him so, and it felt wrong, but he also did want to do it because the apartment was warm and cozy and dry, and he didn’t want to go back out in the rain …

And he wanted to spend some time with Calliope.

“All right,” he said.

She put a round tin box on the counter. “Come pick your flavor.”

Simon dug through the box. The mess of different tea bags reminded him of the disorganization in the apartment, and it felt oddly fitting but also exciting, like he was digging for treasure, trying to find that one last bag of the best flavor.

“Mmm, spicy.” He pulled out a ginger-lemon mix.

“Another good choice.” Calliope tilted her head in approval. “One of my favorites.”

“I thought you’d like them all, what with you being the only one who uses the box. Assuming you’re the only one.”

“Theia doesn’t drink tea, no,” she said with a smile, pouring the boiling water into mugs.

“And no boyfriend?” He figuratively hit himself on the head. You had to go there, didn’t you?

Calliope paused, holding a mug. “It tends not to work out.”

“Too much of a workaholic?”

She shook her head, handed him the other mug, and moved toward the sofa. “Not that.”

He followed her and sat down. He couldn’t tell if he’d annoyed her with his out-of-line question; her gaze was pensive as she gently swished her tea, but she didn’t look angry.

“Sorry,” he tried.

“For me being single?”

“No!” He jerked forward, spilling a drop of tea onto his pants. “I mean—I’m sure you could be in a relationship—”

Calliope snorted. “Either way, I don’t think I’ll be taking advice from you , Mr. Playboy.”

“Well, I could also be in a relationship,” he said, not sure why his tone was suddenly so defensive—or why her calling him a playboy bothered him.

She side-eyed him. “Mm-hmm.”

“Which one was your most successful, then?”

She squinted as she thought. “We dated for a few months. For an anniversary of … those three months, I suppose, he gave me a ring.”

“Seriously?”

“Not an engagement ring. Just a ring. A golden one. I said, ‘You know two neutron stars had to collide to make this,’ and I suppose he took it as criticism, and we broke up. He took the ring, too.”

Simon was about to ask to clarify the statement but realized he already knew the answer from his course. “Because some of the rarest metals, like gold and platinum, are only created in neutron star collisions.”

She stared at him as if he was a random stranger who popped up on her couch. “Yes.”

He broke the tension by clearing his throat. “Note to self: don’t give Phoenix golden or platinum rings,” he said, in as joking a tone as he could muster.

Theia nuzzled up against him. “You might like it, though, wouldn’t you?” he said to the cat.

“I swear she’s doing this to mess with me,” Calliope muttered.

“How old is she?”

“Four years, soon. I was in the middle of my PhD thesis and losing my mind. Ava said I needed stress relief and took me to an animal shelter. We were only supposed to take a few animals out for a walk, but she was there, a tiny little fur ball, all alone …” Calliope shrugged. “It makes it even funnier that after all this time, she still doesn’t like Ava. She wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for her.”

“You must be glad to have her. And your friend.”

“Absolutely.” A bit of a smile played on her lips.

“And your family?”

The smile instantly disappeared. “What?”

“You don’t see your family often? I don’t know if you live far away from them, but as far as emotional support—”

“No,” she cut him off. “I—they—yeah. They live far away.” She’d tensed, and he felt an uncomfortable energy in the air, hinting he should let the topic go. So he did.

Unfortunately, he was never good at silence. But he was good at salvaging conversations. He tapped his feet on the floor. “Wanna watch a movie?”

She pursed her lips, thinking. “Sure.”

“Hmm, but who’s picking?”

Theia jumped off the couch onto the console table holding the TV, looked at them, and meowed.

Calliope looked at him, a slight smile showing. “This, Mr. Montague, is where you learn who truly rules this apartment.”

Three cups of tea, two hours, and an argument over Han Solo shooting first later, the evening drew to a close. Calliope wandered over to the door to her bedroom, leaving Simon with some final, needless instructions—the bathroom is over there if he needed it during the night, and there’s drink in the fridge and chips in the overhead cabinet, in case he was a midnight snacker. Simon thanked her and watched her disappear into the darkness, Theia softly treading after her.

And then the door closed, and he was alone in the living room. He turned off the light, leaned on the pillow she’d given him, and stared into the ceiling.

The pillow smelled of something flowery, but not too sweet. Calliope . Was that her scent? There hadn’t been many opportunities where he would’ve been close enough to pick it up; the most recent being their little tussle during the body art project. Of course, at that point, she smelled more of paint than anything else.

But the way she looked … the way that tight jumpsuit displayed every curve of her body … and for Calliope being barely over five feet, there was a surprising amount of curvature.

Simon grunted, turned over onto his stomach, and buried his head in the pillow, unintentionally getting even more of her scent.

“Stop it,” he commanded and, with everything he had, willed himself to sleep.

Simon wasn’t sure what had woken him up, but it was still the middle of the night. The rain had stopped, and pale light shone onto the sofa. He rose into a sitting position and shook his head. He was convinced he’d heard something, but he’d still been caught in his dream and wasn’t sure what was real and what not.

And then—a scream. Or a yelp, more like, coming from Calliope’s bedroom. He deliberated for a second; after all, he couldn’t—

Another scream.

Nope, he was barging in.

Calliope was twisting and turning in her bed, her blanket tossed away, bedsheets crumpled. “No, hold on,” she said. “Hold on! Mila, no!”

Not sure what to do, Simon sat on the edge of her bed and gently shook her. “Calliope. Wake up.”

She moaned, tossing her head left and right.

“Calliope,” he tried again, shaking her more firmly.

She came awake with a cough and a gasp, as if she’d been struggling for air. “Mila.” She looked around, unfocused, until her eyes stopped on him.

“Are you okay?” Stupid words to say when she clearly wasn’t—but he didn’t know how else to react. She was trembling, and a few beads of sweat dripped down her face. She was scared. Not of him—but whatever dreams had been chasing her.

“Hey. You’re awake now. It’s gonna be all right.” And then he was hugging her, and she grasped his shirt and melted into his embrace. She felt so small and vulnerable, and her heart, close to his, beat as fast as a bird’s.

“It’s going to be okay,” Simon kept repeating as he gently rocked her. “You’re safe now.” He had no idea who or what she should be protected from, but as he held her in his arms, he did realize one thing.

He wanted to be the one doing it.