Page 22

Asher

“No, definitely not.” Calisto waiting until after we’d had sex to tell me his plans for the next day hadn’t passed me by. And it was telling rather than asking.

He trailed a finger down the center of my chest. When he found a rogue drop of cum, he collected it and brought it to his mouth, savoring it like it was the finest ambrosia in a deliberately provocative action that had me realizing how screwed I was when it came to saying no to him. “Why not?”

It took some effort to struggle free from the thrall his brown eyes held me in and even remember what words were, never mind select the right ones. “Because it’s not safe.”

Calisto gave up on using sexual wiles to get what he wanted and flopped over onto his back. “It’s my workplace.”

“A workplace you were nearly abducted from, or have you forgotten that?”

“You said yourself that Cade wants to talk to me.”

“He does. On the phone.”

“I need out of here, Asher. Even if it’s just for an hour. We all do.”

“I don’t think Cade would appreciate a visit from your entire family.”

Calisto’s lips twitched before he remembered he was supposed to be annoyed. “I don’t think anyone would. Even I don’t. They’re ninety percent of the reason I want out.”

“If you go out, they’ll want out, too.”

“They’re not prisoners. We can’t keep them here indefinitely. That’s why I need to speak to Cade. This entire plan of just hiding away and waiting isn’t going to work. John and Bellamy have already reached that conclusion. They’re going home tomorrow.”

I jerked upright. “Since when?”

“Since they got fed up with hotel life.”

“That would be a very stupid thing to do.”

“Yeah, well. That’s what they’re doing. Unless…” Calisto let the word hang there for a few seconds. “Unless we can come up with something new to tell them. Something that means we can put a time limit on it, so they know it’s not forever.”

“ You’re not going home!” I realized too late how proprietary that sounded. Two nights in bed with Calisto with more than a kiss happening and I sounded like I owned him. “I mean…”

He turned his head my way, amusement shining in his eyes. “I know what you mean. I don’t want to go home.” His gaze trailed down my chest, my house warm enough that neither of us had bothered to get under the sheets. “Being here has some benefits.”

It wasn’t a declaration of love, or an acknowledgment he felt the bond between us, but at least it was something, and I’d cling onto those small moments. “Calisto…”

Calisto grimaced. “Don’t Calisto me. You sound like my mother. You’ve been hanging out with her too much.”

“Mariana is a lovely woman. It would be rude not to—” I stopped mid-sentence at the face Calisto was pulling. “What—?”

“You and my mother getting on so well is weird.”

“You’d rather we were at each other’s throats?”

“No, of course not. It’s just…”

“Just what?”

He shook his head. “Never mind. We’re getting off track.” He propped himself up on one elbow. “Here’s the deal. Either you give me a lift to the PPB tomorrow so you can keep an eye on me. Or I’ll make my own way there. Because I am going there tomorrow.”

“Cade will come here if I ask him,” I said in an effort to find a safer middle ground. “Then you can have your face-to-face meeting.”

Calisto heaved out a sigh. “I’m not explaining myself very well. I need to go there. I need to prove to myself that I can walk back in there. I can’t let O’Reilly and her actions dictate my entire life or I may as well be a…”

“Sensible person,” I offered.

“An amoeba,” he countered with. “She won’t know I’m going to be there. We can go in through the basement, right? Like you did that night when you rescued me. So even if she’s got someone watching the building, she won’t see us.”

“You don’t think she’ll recognize my car?”

Calisto chewed on that for a moment. “We’ll take a cab. Or is that too much of a downgrade from your Porsche? Can you not travel like a mere mortal?”

“I can get a cab,” I said. Even while we were disagreeing, I rejoiced at having this with Calisto. Sensing I was wavering, he rolled on top of me and propped his chin on my chest. “Please! I’ll make it worth your while.”

“You don’t need to pay me in sexual favors.”

He grinned. “Who said anything about sex?”

“You’re on top of me. What else am I meant to assume?”

“That you’re comfortable.”

“More comfortable than a mattress?”

He wriggled slightly, my cock swelling as Calisto rubbed himself against it. “More interesting than a mattress.”

I gave up. He was right about one thing. If he was dead set on doing this, it would be better if I knew where he was. “We get a cab,” I said. “We go straight there and back. We spend no more than an hour in the building. You don’t go anywhere I can’t see you.”

“Not even to the bathroom?”

“No.”

“Great,” Calisto said wearily. “It’ll be me, you, and Baxter squeezed together into a cubicle. Why have one person watch you take a piss when you can have two? I can’t wait.”

Calisto had undergone quite the range of emotions during our journey to the PPB building. First had come excitement at leaving the house, his obvious elation making me chew on what he’d said about his family.

While there was still alcohol left in the house, Margarita would probably stay, which meant her husband Thiago would remain by her side. Calisto’s parents seemed overjoyed to get to spend time with him, and I had an inkling Mariana would do anything I asked of her. His grandparents seemed happy to avail themselves of my entertainment system. His siblings, though, were already growing restless, and I gave it a couple more days at most before they’d grow tired of the half life they were living and want to return to normal.

Next, had come nerves, Calisto’s hands betraying a slight tremor before he dropped them to his lap and imprisoned them between his knees. I longed to put a reassuring hand on his thigh, but I debated too long over whether he’d welcome it, and the moment passed. We might be fucking like bunnies at night, but there was a world of difference between intimacy inside the bedroom to out of it.

Nerves had developed into something more visceral by the time the cab dropped us outside the entrance to the basement, Calisto staring at the building like he expected to find O’Reilly lurking behind the door.

“We don’t have to do this,” I pointed out. “We can turn around and go home.”

“Your home,” Calisto said flatly. The slight turn of his head said Baxter had accompanied us here, and that the other man had made some comment. Despite me knowing of Baxter’s existence, Calisto wasn’t yet willing to talk freely in front of me. Either he thought it rude to hold a conversation where I could only hear one side, or perhaps the two of them had too many secrets.

“It could be your home too, if you wanted.” I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth. It was too much, too soon, and the slightly wistful note in my voice didn’t help. During the silence that followed, I busied myself with unlocking the gate.

“I have to do this,” Calisto finally said. “This is my workplace. One I fully intend to return to once this shit show is over with. How can I do that if I’m scared to set foot inside?”

So we were pretending I hadn’t invited him to move in with me. Fair enough. I suppose that was better than him turning me down flat and telling me it would never happen. “Makes sense,” I said. I unlocked the gate and Calisto followed me down the stone steps to the door at the bottom. “What does Baxter have to say about it?”

“He thinks I should man up.”

“Harsh, when you were nearly abducted.”

“Thank you!” Calisto shot a pointed look to his right. “I’ve asked him before if he lacked empathy when he was alive, or if it’s a being dead thing.”

“What did he say?”

A long pause, and then, “I’m not telling him that. Tell him yourself… I don’t care how. Get someone to use a Ouija board or something. Work out how to haunt someone other than me.”

I flicked the switch in the basement, the space lighting up. “What did he want you to say?”

“You don’t want to know. He’s sex obsessed.”

I blinked. “Really?”

“Unfortunately so.”

Arguing with Baxter had provided enough distraction for the tension to leach out of Calisto’s body. It had the opposite effect on me, reminding me of something we’d never addressed. “He’s not there, is he, when we…?” I didn’t know what kind of arrangement the two of them shared in Calisto’s personal life. I wasn’t a prude, but I drew the line at putting on a sex show for a long dead psychic.

“Jesus! No.” The utter horror in Calisto’s voice reassured me it was the truth. “He’s on strict instructions to make himself scarce whenever I’m intimate with anyone.” His glare into space said Baxter’s response hadn’t been one Calisto liked.

“This is weird,” Calisto said as we entered the stairwell that would take us up to the top floor. “I kind of had other things on my mind the last time we were here, like who the hell you were, and whether O’Reilly would be waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs when we got there.” He glanced upward, quite a few flights of stairs still to climb. “And now I’m wondering if she’ll be waiting for us at the top.”

“I think I would have noticed if she’d taken up residence in my office.”

“True.” We continued our ascension, Calisto turning his head to study my face when we were halfway up. “Have you had any visions in the last few days? Because you haven’t mentioned anything.”

“I have visions all the time. I had three in the cab on the way here.”

Calisto stopped dead and tugged me to face him, his expression curious. “When? What about?”

“There was a woman at the traffic lights,” I said. “At some point, she’s going to return home early from work because she’s not feeling well and discover her husband in bed with her younger sister.”

“That’s…”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “And if you’re going to ask me whether I was tempted to tell her to stay at work that day, or to tell her that her husband is cheating on her, then the answer is no. Is she better off not knowing? Possibly. But I highly doubt it.” I gave Calisto a moment to digest what I’d told him. “Do you remember that scaffolding we passed?” I waited for Calisto’s nod. “The workman taking his tea break at the bottom of it is going to find out that the man he always believed is his father isn’t in the next couple of months.”

“How?” Calisto asked.

“A random curiosity about those genetic kits you can buy and send off. Would he be better off not knowing? Probably. But if I told him not to buy one, it would only make him want to know what could be so bad, so…”

“Is it always bad stuff?”

“Not always. Our cab driver is going to win a holiday to Mauritius.”

“Yeah!” Calisto smiled. “That’s nice for him. He looked tired. He probably deserves a break.”

“And while he’s there—”

“Please don’t tell me he’s going to get eaten by a shark or something.”

“While he’s there, he’s going to fall in love with a local nurse. He’s going to give up driving cabs and run a surf rental place for tourists instead.” I left a deliberate pause. “Or… none of that will happen. Something else might come along and change the outcome, might change the outcome for all of them.”

Calisto’s nod was thoughtful. “Do you ever intervene?” He rolled his eyes at my pointed look. “Apart from with me, I mean?”

“I shouldn’t. I should leave well enough alone. If I tried to take on the world’s problems, I’d buckle under the strain in no time at all.”

“But?”

“It’s difficult sometimes,” I admitted. At Calisto’s raised eyebrow, I explained further. “If it involves loss of life, it’s hard to brush it under the carpet and pretend it’s nothing to do with me.”

Calisto cocked his head to one side. “Loss of life?”

“There was a woman a few months back… She’d been the victim of domestic abuse for close to a year. Like most cases of domestic abuse, it had grown steadily worse. If she’d gone home that day, he would have killed her.”

“What did you do?”

“Told her not to go home. Told her there were people out there that could help her, that she wasn’t alone. She didn’t take it well. She did what a lot of women in her position do when confronted with the truth. Her pride had her flat out denying it.”

Calisto looked pained. “What did you do?”

“Kept at her. Refused to let her walk away until she listened to me. In the end, she let me drive her to a women’s refuge. She was lucky that she didn’t have kids. It made walking away easier than it might otherwise have been.”

Calisto’s release of breath said he was relieved by the outcome. “You did the right thing.”

“Did I?”

He frowned. “Of course. What was the alternative? Let her go home and be murdered?”

“But what else did it change?” Calisto’s expression said he didn’t understand the point I was making. “Did she go back to him? A recent poll revealed fifty percent of all women suffering domestic abuse do, that they take anywhere between five to seven times on average before they successfully break away. So statistics would lead me to conclude she went back.”

“You don’t know that,” Calisto said with a shake of his head. “And even if she did, perhaps there was something that night that would have led to him killing her that was never replicated again. Maybe he’d lost his job or something that day, and he would have taken it out on her. You can’t assume a negative outcome.”

“Or,” I said, not in the headspace to listen to Calisto’s perfectly rational arguments, “she didn’t go back.”

He laughed. “That would be good, though, right?”

“They got divorced,” I said. “And he married again and killed that wife instead. So all I did was swap one woman for another. A woman who would have lived because he would have been in prison for the first murder. Maybe that woman would have had a son or a daughter who went on to do great things. Perhaps a few generations in the future, their family line would have been responsible for a prime minister who refused to go to war and sacrifice millions of lives.”

Calisto blinked. “The butterfly effect.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, pleased he remembered that conversation from the first night when emotions had been so heightened, it would have been all too easy not to take it in. “It’s an enormous risk whenever I intervene.”

As Calisto stared at me with enough empathy in his eyes to touch my soul, it occurred to me that halfway up a hidden stairwell wouldn’t be my first choice of place to have such a serious conversation.

“Come here,” he said.

I cleared my throat. “Cade is waiting. He—”

He pulled me into an embrace so tight it felt like my ribs might crack. “Fuck Cade!”

“You sound like John,” I mumbled into his shoulder, my willpower too weak to refuse Calisto’s affection.

“Well, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. He’s tougher than I am. I need to toughen up.”

“You’re perfect as you are.”

Calisto didn’t respond, but his smile was evident. A few more moments passed, neither of us keen to break the hug. I certainly wasn’t, wrapped as I was in Calisto’s scent and warmth.

“I think we’re quite similar, you and I,” Calisto finally said.

“How do you work that out?”

“We both take on the weight of things we shouldn’t. You can only make the decisions you feel are right at the time, and beating yourself up for them years after won’t do anything except make you die of an early heart attack from stress.”

“So, are you ready to forgive yourself for what happened with Edmund Wainwright?”

“Maybe.”

I lifted my head to make eye contact with him. “You were a child.”

“I knew it was wrong when I did it.”

“You wanted him back. You were selfish. Nothing more.”

Letting go of me, he stepped back. “Yeah…”

I looked around, changing my mind about this being a bizarre place to talk. It was the perfect place. Private. Zero chance of anyone interrupting us. “Me and you?” I ventured. I got that far before the words dried up in my throat.

Calisto’s lips twitched up into a knowing smile. “What about us?” he teased.

“Is there one?” The wait for him to answer stretched for an entire millennium.

“Yeah,” he finally answered. “There is. It might not be what you expected it to be, but we have something. Something I’m not willing to throw away.” It was all I could do not to break into an uncharacteristic dance of celebration. Calisto pulled a face before I could find any words. “I’m going to have to tell my mother.”

“Are you worried she won’t be happy?”

“Oh, no, on the contrary, I’m worried she’ll be too happy.”

“Can you be too happy? Is that a thing?”

“She can.” I might have interrogated that thought more, but Calisto chose that moment to back me against the wall and kiss me so soundly I forget everything: that Cade was waiting for us; the conversation we’d just had; my own name.