Right now I wished it were the other way around.
“You look great no matter what you’re wearing. Even if it’s one of my ratty old flannels,” he said, pointing at the dresser again. “Middle drawer is shirts. Bottom is pants. Help yourself.”
“What’s in the top?” I headed for his dresser, not because I was cold from my wet clothes, but because he seemed adamant. My wet clothes were the equivalent of a cold shower and as my totally inappropriate thoughts could confirm, I needed an extra-cold one.
“There’s nothing in there you’d want to put on, I promise.” He opened the door a little more when I kept moving toward the dresser. Maybe if I moved just a little more…
And nope. He wasn’t opening the door any wider, but I caught a nice glimpse of his abs, and that was no small thing. Guy runners had great stomachs, but the sprinters ruled the ab world. Emerson had once whispered to me that the guy sprinters on my track team had abs that were grab-your-ankles good.
I’d thought she’d been exaggerating. And then came Callum’s abs…
“No, but there’s probably something in there I’d have fun taking off.” I raised a suggestive eyebrow in his direction.
He wet his lips, moved like he was about to slide through the door…then slammed it shut behind him. A long sigh followed, echoing under the door.
We’d both been feeling the tension. Bad.
“How was today’s adventure in crafting?” he called as I pulled open his middle drawer.
“Agonizing.” I fingered through a few of his shirts until I found my favorite flannel of his, the black-and-red checked one that I teased made him look like a lumberjack. “How was your adventure in advanced mountain biking?”
“Dreadful,” he answered instantly. “Total torture. Flying down mountains at forty miles per hour. Rolling over Prius-size boulders. Agonizing, every mile of it.”
“If you’re trying to make me feel better, it’s working.” I checked the door to make sure it was still closed before shimmying out of my wet shirt. It landed on the wood floor with a loud thwack. I slid into Callum’s flannel like I was in a speed-dressing contest. I don’t know why, but standing half naked in his room, right next to his bed while he was hot out of the shower a whole ten feet away was a tad intimidating and tempting at the same time. “Ben doesn’t trust me to lead the outdoor activities anymore, does he?” I asked in an effort to distract myself as I wrestled out of my shorts.
Callum was quiet on the other side of the door.
“Hello? Don’t make me come in there and force the answer from you.” I lightly tapped on the wall like I was knocking on the door as I buttoned up his flannel. It was so big it could have been a dress on me, so instead of reaching for a pair of pants, I grabbed a rolled-up pair of wool socks and slid them on my feet. There. Dry. Except for two pieces of underwear I was not going to replace with anything of Callum’s.
“That’s supposed to be a threat, right?”
“Except I don’t make threats,” I answered with just enough insinuation I knew he’d picked up on it.
“Have you talked to Ben about it?” His voice was a note high—yeah, he’d definitely picked up on my meaning.
“No, but his message is pretty obvious.” As I rolled up the cuffs of Callum’s shirt, I inspected my hands. Where dirt had been under my nails at the beginning of the summer, now rubber cement and tempura paint was.
“Well, how do you feel about it? Do you feel ready to get back out there and be responsible for that many people when the danger is more than a runny glue gun or an open safety pin?”
I took a moment to think about that. Long enough to lay my shirt and shorts over the heater to dry.
“What do you think?” I asked, pulling a few books from my backpack before leaning it against the heater, too. “Would you free me from crafts hell if you could?”
He was quiet again. “If you felt ready, then yeah, I would.”
“And if I didn’t?”
“I think you just answered your own question.” The bathroom door opened, and he came out. A plume of steam followed him. I swallowed and imagined a litter of kittens batting at a bunch of butterflies. Anything to distract me from where my mind wanted to go.
I never knew until recently that I had such a dirty mind.
“Do you trust me?” I was still kneeling by the heater, stacking books, but I had to know. Nothing seemed more important, not even what my unruly hormones were trying to convince me of.
Callum hadn’t noticed me crouched over by the heater when he’d first stepped out. When he did, he stopped dead in his tracks. “You’re not wearing any pants.”
I hadn’t felt self-conscious about it before. At least before he looked at me like I was standing in front of him in a scrap of sheer fabric, curling my finger at him.
“Stop trying to distract me from the topic.” I tugged at the hem of the flannel as I stood up.
“You’re the one wearing nothing from the waist down, and I’m the one who’s distracting?” He closed the bathroom door and leaned into it. It looked more like he was gluing himself to it.
“I’ve lived in cutoffs that show way more leg than this thing.” I swiped my hand across where the shirt fell just above my knees. “And I’m not wearing nothing from the waist down. I’ve got on underwear.”
Callum scrubbed his face. “Not helping.”
“Come on. It’s a simple question: Do you trust me?” I leaned into the wall behind me and looked at him across the room. Obviously, neither of us trusted the other to get any closer with him fresh from the shower and me running around in his shirt.
“Right now, that is not a simple question. My head’s so dizzy you could ask me my name and it wouldn’t be a simple question.” When he shook his head, smacking at it with his palm, I laughed.
“Fine. I’ll throw a blanket on and cover myself.” I padded over to his bed in his thick wool socks that already had my feet all toasty warm and threw the covers open before crawling in. I dropped my stack of books on the nightstand. “Better?” I asked as I layered the sheets and blankets over myself.
“Oh yeah. You’re crawling into my bed half naked.” He shoved off the door and rolled his eyes. “So much better.”
“Do you trust me?”
He moved to the heater and turned it up a few degrees. “As the guy who cares for you, absolutely.”
“And as the other guy? Whoever that is?” I watched him move to the table pushed against a wall at the front of the cabin. That was where we usually studied, but tonight I was kinda digging his bed. It smelled like him, which made me picture him sleeping in it, which made me imagine what it would be like to be in it with him.
“Exactly. There isn’t one.” Callum opened the book we’d left off on last night and slid into one of the chairs. “The only one I want to be, and the only one I am when I’m with you, is the guy who cares for you.”
I folded my hands over my book. “So you trust me?”
He smiled. “So I do.” He held up a book and stuck his finger in it. “Picking up where we left off last night?”
I lifted my own book. “Math problems. They make my world go round.”
“And here I’d been under the impression that was my job.”
“Strong in this one, disillusionment is,” I said in my best Yoda voice. When he laughed, it was definitely more the kind of laughing that was at me instead of with me.
I was barely through my first problem when Callum leaned away from his book. “How are things with your mom?”
My shoulders went tense. The topic of parental units had been a sensitive one this week after I found out Harry and I would be in a school district that wasn’t exactly known for its above-average test scores or state championship sports teams. Jefferson School District was well known for a few things, though: its dropout and pregnancy rates.
“About the same as they were yesterday when you asked,” I answered.
“And how’s Harry dealing with things?”
I was thumping my pencil against my workbook. Spending so much time together, we’d clearly picked up on a few of each other’s habits. “He’s dealing better than I am.”
“That must make you feel at least a little bit better about the move.” Callum was keeping his voice level, not because he was an impartial party when it came to The Move, but because he was almost as opinionated as I was. He was upset because I was upset, and we were both upset, because at my old school, I was a whole hour closer to where he and his mom lived. At Dropout Pregnancy High, a two-hour drive across some seriously congested interstates separated us.
“It makes me feel a ton better that he’s okay with it, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay.”
He nodded and slid the wet strands of hair behind his ears. “You know why they didn’t tell you, though, right?”
“They’re selfish jack-holes?”
“They didn’t want you to worry,” he said after popping off a quick laugh.
“It didn’t work.”
“But they didn’t know that. They were hoping they could fix things before you or Harry had to find out. Before things had to change.” His voice was the equivalent of a warm hug, and usually I would have let myself be comforted by it, but not right now. Not with this.
“They lied because that was the easy thing to do. The path of least resistance.” I drew my legs up to my chest so he couldn’t see my face. I didn’t want him to see me cry, and I felt close to crying the angry kind of tears.
“Lying to someone you care about isn’t easy, Phoenix. Whatever a person’s reason or justification for it, keeping the truth from a person you love is never easy.”
He didn’t say anything after that, and when I heard his pencil scratching across his book, I lowered my knees enough to get a glimpse of him.
Callum was focused on his workbook, moving through each problem almost methodically. As it turned out, there was so much information and advice on how to overcome test anxiety we’d been on information overload for a few days. After that, though, we were able to sort through what worked for him and what didn’t, and each day he got better. Each practice test he took, he improved.
He’d slipped into a light gray thermal shirt that clung to him in all the right places, and he was wearing my favorite pair of jeans. My stomach started the process of tying itself into knots, so I distracted myself with something other than my study guide. Mathematical proofs were just not going to do it for me tonight.
I glanced over at his nightstand. A couple of study guides were stacked on it, his headlamp, and two photos. I knew the one was of his mom because he carried a photo of her in his wallet, too. Callum had the same brownish hair she had, and the same smile. She was really pretty but had this tough look about her. Maybe tough wasn’t the right word; maybe it was more strength I saw when I looked at her picture.
I could only imagine the strength it took to raise two boys alone in California, a state not exactly known for its stellar cost of living.
It was the second photo that caught my attention. “Is this your dad?”
Callum didn’t look up from his book. “Yeah.”
“I thought you never knew him.” Their dad was holding an about-two-year-old Callum in one arm and his brother in his other arm. Both of the boys were smiling. Their dad was, too.
“I didn’t. Not really. Every once in a while, when he needed a place to crash or ran out of cash, he’d come home for a ‘visit.’ Which I figured out later meant he came home to raid Mom’s coffee can of money and throw down a few home-cooked meals before skipping out on us again. You know, usually right when my brother and I were just getting used to him being back.” Callum’s pencil starting whacking at his book. “He’s a real piece of work, my old man.”
“But you keep a picture of him on your nightstand,” I said gently. “You must have some good memories, too.”
“I keep the picture close by to remind me of the kind of person I don’t want to become, not to remind me of the person pretending to play dad in that photo.”
I turned from the picture to look at him. His forehead was creased and his back was tense. He might have looked like his dad, but he wasn’t like him. “You’re a good person, Callum. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
He managed a smile and then returned to studying. Or at least pretending to study. I knew he was because I was pretending, too. Crawling into his bed had been a bad call because now it was the only thing I could focus on. His bed. Me in it. Scheming ways to lure him into it.
I needed to move to the desk where he was if I actually wanted to learn anything tonight. But I was wearing his shirt, and even though it covered more skin than my everyday outfits here at camp, the way he looked at me in it was like I was prancing around in lingerie. So I stayed put.
My pencil went from my hand to my mouth to behind my ear, and back to my hand again. My feet wouldn’t stop bouncing as I tried to focus on the problem in the study guide instead of the question playing on repeat in my head. I’d wanted to ask the question for a while, but I’d chickened out each time I’d come close.
“Have you ever had sex?” The words spilled out all at once, sounding more like haveyoueverhadsex.
Callum’s face flattened from the concentrated one he’d had as he slowly turned away from his workbook. “And how ’bout them isosceles triangles?”
My cheeks were hot and probably fire red, but I didn’t care. He looked almost as uncomfortable with the question as I did.
Callum set down his pencil and closed his book. “Is that you asking because you want to know the truth? Or what you hope is the truth?”
I bookmarked my spot with my pencil and closed my book. “You really have to ask me that?”
He glanced at the door for a moment before he turned in his chair toward me. “I just know from personal experience that when a girl asks a guy if and who he’s been with, she usually wants to hear he’s never looked, touched, or been with anyone else. That he’s never even thought about wanting to look, touch, or do.”
I lifted my shoulders. “Not this girl. This one will take the cold, hard truth all the time, every time.”
Callum rolled his neck. I heard it crack. His eyes stayed on mine the whole time, though, giving me a chance to change the subject or change my mind on the “cold, hard truth” thing.
I didn’t blink as I stared back.
He clasped his hands together. “Yeah, I’ve been with a few girls before.” He was still looking at me, so I tried not to show anything that might have cut him short. “But that was a long time ago.”
My heart was thudding in my ears, and my stomach was twisting. It wasn’t the good way I was used to them feeling when Callum’s mouth was on mine or when his thumbs scrolled along my lower back. It was the other way.
“You’re eighteen,” I said. “How long ago could it have been?” My voice didn’t sound right, so I cleared my throat.
His hands unclasped, then clasped together again. “I got an early start.”
I wasn’t going to ask just how early. My imagination could fill in that dot, dot, dot just fine.
“And since?” My voice sounded normal, but now it was too quiet.
“My brother got a girl pregnant when he was sixteen.” He rolled his neck again; it cracked twice that time. “That scared the shit out of me and made me realize I didn’t want to have sex again until I could imagine raising a kid together, you know? ’Cause that’s forever. I’m not cutting and running like my dad did.”
My eyes narrowed as I tried to wrap my head around it. “So you’re saying you don’t want to have sex with someone unless you can see marrying her and living happily ever after?” I’d heard a lot of reasons for either waiting or not waiting to have sex, but this was a foreign concept coming from the mouth of a guy.
“No, I just don’t want, in the crazy event I did get someone pregnant, the mom to be someone who can barely take care of herself, let alone a kid.”
I didn’t know what
to say. Were we really having this conversation?
“You’ve given it a lot of thought.” I wiggled my toes under the blankets, burning off some nervous energy. Callum and I were talking about sex—there was no shortage of nervous energy bouncing around.
“I kinda did it backward, though. Had sex, then thought about it, but”—he shrugged—“it is what it is.”
After that, awkward silence. The kind that made me reach for my book and wish I could be working proofs instead of rolling in awkward silence.
I’d just opened my book when he shifted in his chair. “Have you ever been with anyone?”
I had gone from bouncing my toes to tapping my feet against the mattress. He’d just admitted he’d been with other girls before. I was about to tell him I had the experience of a nun. “Is that you asking for the truth? Or what you hope is true?” I asked, delaying the inevitable for a few more seconds. I wasn’t embarrassed or anything by my lack of experience in the intimacy department, but admitting it to Callum felt really personal—like I was sharing a deep, dark secret instead of how many, few, or no guys I’d slept with.
“Do you really have to ask?” he repeated, his smile as thin and stretched as a crescent moon.
I sucked a slow breath in through my mouth. “No,” I said. “Close, but no, not all the way.”
Callum leaned forward in his chair. “And this is the real truth version?”
I turned my hand up. “That’s the cold, hard truth version.”
The skin between his brows creased. “Really?”
I slid my ponytail over my shoulder. It was still wet and had formed a damp ring on the back of Callum’s shirt. “Why are you acting all surprised?”
“Because it’s not that common.” His hands had been resting on the arms of the chair, but now they were gripping them. I watched his knuckles fade to white. “So if we…you know”—he shrugged, filling in the unsaid—“I’d be your first?”
Trusting You and Other Lies Page 20