by Stella Rhys
“Poor Cal his life sucks. We all knew since middle school that his mom had mental issues. No one just takes in some random teenage girl unless they’re a fucking basket case.”
“If she was crazy she probably went extra crazy after Lake HAD SEX with her husband. Before she was even legal. Heard it from a reliable source *cough TS cough*”
“Disgusting. But not a shocker.”
Caroline told me that as tempting as it was to indulge negative thoughts, I should find the courage not to and take a sabbatical from the Internet for awhile. “I’ll take a break from the computer with you,” she suggested brightly. “It’ll be a pact of solidarity.”
“You never even go on the computer.”
“Okay, so I’ll quit something I love. What do you suggest?”
Well, you’ve kind of quit on your son. “I don’t know.” I shrugged, acting bored since I was vaguely pissed at her. “Coffee?”
“Oh, no, darling. That wouldn’t bode well for either you or Callum. Try again.”
“Shopping.”
“Jesus, Lake. Don’t take it too far.”
I let myself laugh and we brainstormed till we landed on something stupid, like Splenda, at which point I took the soup I reheated for Callum and went to his room. I stopped at the door because I found it ajar even though I’d closed it tight when I left. And he was pretty much bed-ridden. Once I got inside, I saw him wincing with his blankets all messed up despite the fact that I’d tucked him perfectly into bed before.
“Callum! Why the heck did you – ” I wanted to ask in horror why he’d gotten up but I figured it out fast, based on another time this had happened. He’d opened the door to hear his mom’s voice. I wasn’t sure if it was because he was curious about what she was saying or if he just missed the sound of her talking and laughing, but the fact that he was willing to hobble in pain to the door made me hurt for him. But I understood it – all sides of it. Caroline was recently kicked out of her social circle and just discovered that her only son was going to be merely high school-educated. She was too angry to bring herself to be fun and sweet with him.
So with love for them both, I was stuck awkwardly in the middle, arguing diplomatically for one if the other started complaining. But much as I loved Caroline though, and never spoke a bad word about her, I silently boiled at the fact that she had to choose Callum’s most vulnerable time to be crueler to him than ever before.
So, despite the fact that it wasn’t my style, I tried to make up for it.
I started with tucking him nicely back into bed and being patient when he decided that he didn’t want the soup anymore. Under normal circumstances, I was quick to snap, even if I wasn’t totally serious, because that was just the nature of our relationship. But I made a resolution to stop, the same way I was going to quit the Internet for a little. Callum dipped in and out of shitty moods thanks to Caroline and the pain and the silent grappling with the fact that wrestling was over, but when he got short with me I stayed nice. I did to him what he did to me while he was high off his ass at the hospital – a time he apparently didn’t remember – and killed him with kindness. It wasn’t that hard because I found something weirdly pleasurable about showing him a different side of me. I liked letting myself be completely sweet to him and, of course, I kind of liked how visibly uncomfortable it made him.
The mornings that he didn’t answer my “How’d you sleep?” or “Want some breakfast?” and I could see dark thoughts already storming in his eyes, I knew I was in for a rough one. He’d spend those days testing my patience, telling me to get him this, get him that, cook him this, buy him that. Half of the time, he didn’t eat a bite of what I made. I’d breathe deep through my nose and tell myself not to get mad. I had no idea what was going on in that brain of his but it could be any number of things. He’d sent his best friend of ten years to the hospital, dealt with Caroline during my naked photo fiasco and been beaten unconscious by four strangers and a bat. The incident was likely set up by Theo, Callum wasn’t going to wrestle again for a long time and he was set to skip not just the Junior Olympics but college. In the grand scheme of things, the way he flicked his hand to reject the omelet I made him was probably small.
So I persisted with the kindness and in some strange way, it opened up my heart. It had always belonged to Callum but tending to his needs when he came home did something different to it. It made it feel fuller. I wanted to take care of him, to for once please someone else instead of gladly hogging all the joy and attention for myself.
I liked the loving superpowers I developed. I became in tune with all his needs. I could read what he wanted – medicine, food, a pillow fluff, the AC turned down – before he even realized it himself. The look on his face when he was trying to mask surprise or appreciation was always fun too. That was the thank you I never got in words and I didn’t mind. I knew that I’d always been the pampered princess of the house, even when I didn’t really want to be. So I loved finally knowing what it was like to be good at giving and providing comfort.
And I was happy that the first person I could discover that with was Callum.
He finally acknowledged it one random afternoon. I was sitting with him in bed watching a baseball game I didn’t understand when he put his hand on my knee. I stared at it for two seconds before looking at him. My voice was light and playful. “What’s up, buddy? Do you need something?”
He shook his solemn head. “No.”
“Then what’s up?”
He brows pinched for a second like he was trying to figure it out too. “I just wanted to touch you.”
My breath shortened. “Yeah?” I played it off. I did okay but my heart was suddenly flitting like hummingbird wings in my chest. Two seconds into the moment and I already knew that I didn’t recognize this Callum at all, despite the fact that he touched me all the time. We’d seen each other naked on too many occasions to count. Sometimes, we’d just be sitting on the couch watching a movie when he’d take my hand and cup it over his dick. He played with my tits pretty much constantly. But this was different. It wasn’t sexual, it was tender. Sweet. His eyes weren’t full of that lust that it sometimes clouded with when I wore a certain outfit or moved a certain way. He just gazed at me softly, with content.
“Yeah.” He took forever to answer my question with the same damned word. Then he looked down at his hand on me knee and tilted his head, moving his thumb back and forth. I rested my head against his for a bit and watched with him as he stroked my skin over my leggings.
“What are you doing, Callum?” I asked quietly. When he didn’t answer, I turned to him, my forehead pressed to his. “Are you okay, buddy?” I whispered. He nodded.
“Better than that.”
I smiled. “Okay. That’s good,” I said brightly. I was about to say something else to lighten the mood but he spoke over me.
“You know how much I love you, right?”
Any attempt to play things off was shot by instant emotion. Callum’s expression was pained but sweet and genuine, too, and it brought me straight to tears. Luckily, they didn’t fall. They just sat pretty in my eyes. “I think so, Callum.” He was cupping my cheek now, gazing into me. He nodded with satisfaction at my answer, his stare dipping down to my lips. His murmur was the softest I’d ever heard it.
“You have my back the way I’ll always have yours. No matter what, Lake. You’re the most important thing in the world to me and I’ve always known it. I just want you to know it now, too.”
I couldn’t help my giant smile. “I know it.”
“Good,” he exhaled. And then he kissed me tenderly for, oddly enough, the first time ever.
*
It was important to Caroline that at least one of us go to college so I enrolled at FIT and started classes that September. She helped me move into my dorm, strung Christmas lights on my walls the way she’d seen on Pinterest and invited my roommate, Dara, with us to lunch at a three-star restaurant. Dara said no, assumed I was one of those girls
who hated her mother and later said, “That was so pretentious,” effectively landing her on my shit list.
“Wait. So that wasn’t your mom?” she asked me one Sunday night when it was pouring and none of my new friends were willing to go out, forcing me to hang out with just Dara. I braved the rain and bought two bottles of Cabernet with my fake to make the night more tolerable.
“No, but she’s raised me. With my grandma.”
“How did she meet your grandma?”
“My grandma kind of raised her. She was her housekeeper growing up. And I guess she stayed her housekeeper till she died.”
“Wow, that’s depressing.”
I gave her a look. I didn’t think it was. What was up with this chick? She was like negativity in walking human form. “Do you want some more wine?” I asked hopefully.
She adjusted her hipster glasses. “No, thanks. So like… that Callum kid is your brother-ish but you guys are like… vaguely romantic?”
I sat in bed and peeled the label off my bottle of Cab, wondering why I’d ever told her that. I had just been trying to open up with her and like her but it didn’t quite work. “Yeah. We’re hard to describe.”
“Have you slept with him before?”
“No, I’m a virgin.”
She smirked, adjusted her glasses and made a face like wow. “And you’ve never officially dated and called yourself boyfriend and girlfriend? Or friends with benefits?”
“No.”
“Then you’re not anything.”
“We are.”
“I…” She made that wow face again. “I beg to differ.”
“He loves me,” I blurted stupidly.
“Like a good friend,” she decided, as if I’d given her all the information she needed to make conclusions about my life.
“It’s not… I’m pretty sure there are a lot of people who have weird, complicated relationships with people that are still deep and meaningful but can’t be put into any sort of… like…” Fuck. I was losing my words to the wine.
“Like…?” Dara challenged me with that all-knowing, smug-ass look on her face that made me suddenly aware of how annoying I probably was when I was sixteen.
“Never mind.”
“Can I see a picture of him?”
I jumped at the chance to show her. I’d proudly shown my group of friends from class and they’d gasped, pointed at my face and then burst into a chorus of crazy squealing – about how hot he was and how I totally loved him. It was enough that my instructor came to see what the ruckus was about. She leaned in, looked at the picture and then said “hoo-baby.”
I grinned when Dara looked at a photo I’d taken of Callum at the beach the month before. He was healed up enough to surf – not as well as he used to, but still. I’d gotten a shot of him coming out of the ocean, water dripping from his hair and his triceps bulging as he carried his board back to where I sat on my towel. I was pretty fucking delighted that even jaded old Dara was not immune to his looks. “That’s him?” she asked skeptically, as if I’d just pulled some picture off a Google search for smoking hot blonde surfer dude.
“That is him.”
“He looks older than eighteen.”
“He’s just muscular. And he’s actually nineteen now.”
Dara nodded and kept staring. “Yeah. He seems like he’d be mature for his age,” she said. I smirked. She loved to describe herself as mature for her age. “Does he have a girlfriend?”
“He was on a date yesterday but he doesn’t have a girlfriend.”
“You’re in love with him and you don’t mind that he was on a date?”
I paused. No? Was that weird? I’d been on a date last night too but it was just for shits and giggles. And maybe a little titillation. It started Friday night when there were no cabs and I asked a guy if I could share his across town. He was hot, probably in his mid-thirties and just as drunk as I was. Our conversation was flirty from the jump. He revealed, to my delight, that he was a fashion designer. “A straight one,” he said right away. “It’s important for you to know that.”
“Is it? Why?”
“Because I’m going to ask you out before I get out of the car.”
“You should just do it now. I’m going to say yes.”
“Cool. You wanna go out?”
And that was that. Our date was fun. He took me to a Japanese restaurant that didn’t serve sushi, when all I knew about Japanese cuisine was sushi, and then we randomly hit a karaoke bar. We made out in an alley and he dry humped me against the wall and then I texted my friend to call me with an “emergency” and he sent me home with cab money.
Callum’s date was similar. Similar-ish. His girl was someone he’d met randomly at the marketing firm he was interning at on Fifth Ave. She was tall and gorgeous, a little older and had been in the building for a casting call. I’d met up with them toward the end of their first date ever and while she seemed surprised, she wound up flirting with me when she realized Callum liked it. She murmured close to my lips and touched my knee and played with my hair till we all kind of wound up together in his bed that night. Hailey, my go-to friend for fake emergency calls, said threesomes weren’t abnormal and that she’d had one at camp when she was even younger, so I decided it wasn’t weird.
Especially since no sex wound up happening. There was everything but penetration before we all fell asleep. The closest we got to that was when Callum followed me into his kitchen in the middle of the night when I went for water. He was wordless as he pulled me from the fridge, kissed me hard and slid his fingers inside me. He stroked me to an orgasm that he muffled with his hand before we went back to bed, where he spooned me to sleep. The next morning, the girl got cab money to go home and planted a sultry kiss on my lips before leaving. I wasn’t totally surprised. She was nice but I knew she liked Callum and was just trying to show him that she was game in case I came as part of a package deal.
So maybe it was weird.
But even if it was, that was just what Callum and I were. Weird. Indefinable.
“Yikes.” Dara gave me a big cringe and went back to her book. “I hope you’re not like, holding out for him.”
“Holding out for him?”
“Like, thinking you’re going to end up with him. Just from what you’re telling me, it seems like anything romantic that happened between you two was out of the convenience that you were living with him and now he’s moving on without you.”
I blinked at her. Nope. I knew it wasn’t the case but I didn’t really feel like arguing because it wasn’t Dara’s fault. Callum and I weren’t something that could be proven with words and Dara would eventually witness us with her own two eyes anyway. It was bound to happen.
For starters, he returned my drunk ass back to the dorms on countless occasions when he hadn’t even been the one I’d been out drinking with. He came over and took care of me that time I caught pneumonia and, according to Dara the next morning, kept asking her to turn her music down when I fell asleep. I was on the phone with him for hours on the nights that I was freaking out and convinced that I was out of my league – that Caroline must’ve bribed someone to get me accepted at the school because I was by far the worst sewer and didn’t really have a vision the way the other kids did. I just sometimes stitched things together at home because Elena taught me how to use a sewing machine when I was ten and it thrilled Caroline to see me make things, even if they were horribly constructed. I got better in college but still, I had many of those panicked phone calls, half of which ended with Callum showing up outside my window. If Dara was awake, he’d come up but if she was sleeping, I’d sit on the fire escape and let him talk me out of my funk.
Still, Dara wasn’t sold.
At least not until the night of the concert. Callum scored backstage passes for a huge, sold out show at Terminal 5. He was going with Logan and invited me but I couldn’t go because I was behind on finishing a dress that looked so raggedy I was certain I should just drop out of school. I told hi
m to have fun and call a car home because I knew he was going to get obliterated. As he proceeded to do so, I focused on cutting and sewing and five hours later, brilliantly dropped my shears so hard on my foot that they stood proudly in my flesh for a second. I leaned in, examined and promptly passed out when I caught a glimpse of skinny foot bone before the blood started weeping.
According to Dara, she nearly passed out too. She had a thing about blood and got so lightheaded she lost her head completely. In her panic, when it was many hours past midnight, she called Callum from my phone.
“Girl. He was so hammered he started talking dirty to me the second he picked up,” she wheezed with laughter after Callum left the next morning, having stayed with me after I got my stitches at the hospital and went back to the dorms. By the time I came to, he was on his way from the venue in a cab, still on the phone with Dara, asking her to stay calm and report my every move. She had my phone sandwiched between her ear and shoulder and I could hear Callum comforting her too, her voice audibly shaking as she pressed a wad of Starbucks napkins to my bleeding foot and Googled what the hell to do on her own phone.
I knew Callum was still insanely drunk when he arrived because I could smell the booze before Dara even opened the door for him. His gait was off but he acted so sober and in control that I wondered if he was a human being or a robot. Or an angel. Maybe he was angel. He looked like the most beautiful angel in the world wearing that sexy white T-shirt. Keep in mind I was losing a lot of blood. It was relevant to my weird thought process and the way I looked at him that day with that messy, dark blonde halo and ripped, booze-stained white V-neck – like my savior freshly descended from the rock and roll Heavens.
I stared up at him as he carried me from my dorm outside to the car, studying his handsome expressions as he reassured Dara that she should go back in, get some rest and take it easy – that he had it from there. And he really did. He took me to the hospital, talked to everyone for me, whipped out my insurance card from my wallet – which I didn’t even realize that he’d grabbed out of my purse – and sat there holding my hand while I got the giant numbing shot for the stitches. He told me funny stories from the concert a few inches from my face, refusing to let me watch the giant needle go into the bony part of my foot.