Brian’s voice grew deeper, “It’s a deal, but one I expect won’t even come into play. So where can I stay? Is there something close by? I don’t want to intrude on your time, sweet pea.”
Yeah, like her life had so much going on. She’d really hate to skip reorganizing her Tupperware cabinet. “So let’s find you a hotel room, Mr. Benson.”
They decided to look on the web to find out the local rates. Brian clicked on a three star or above hotel and nearly everything was booked. “Dayum, what’s going on there this weekend?”
Callie got up and went to her desk to rifle through the local events calendar and discovered it was some kind of festival. “Some wine festival,” she replied.
“I’d really rather not book a room at the Motel Six, ya know? That seems to be all that’s left.” Brian said
Callie giggled. “What difference does it make? I mean it’s just a bed—er, place to—to—to sleep.” Sometimes she felt like such an ass…a bed. Oy.
Brian’s chuckle was wicked. “Yep, it sure is. Don’t be nervous, sweet pea. I’m not going to insist you sleep in it, but I will tell you, I want to hold you all night long…”
Callie was dizzy. She had to steady herself by hanging onto the edge of the desk and closing her eyes. “I want that too, Brian…I just don’t…I don’t know if…” Well, she did know—sorta, but if she chickened out or Brian thought she was a disappointment, then what?
“Callie,” he cut her off. “Listen to me, please. I’m not coming to see you just to get laid. It isn’t like that—even after all of these phone calls. I won’t lie and tell you that isn’t something I hope for—that it isn’t something I’ve thought about since I first laid eyes on you and if we do decide to take that road, I want you to know I’m healthy.”
Callie blushed—she hadn’t thought that far in advance. “Well, I’m on the pill, but not because I’m active—or—or anything…” How did single women give their potential boinks the heads up? God, she felt like an utter imbecile.
Brian continued, picking up the slack for her where she faltered. “I only want you to pack a bag if you’re ready to just let me hold you. It never has to go any further than that, or if you’re too uncomfortable, you can turn right around and go home. If we spend some time together and part after a couple of days and nothing more comes of it than we’ve shared a good time, it’s fine.”
“So what you’re saying is, you don’t just want to nail me?” Callie half-joked because she kinda did want to nail him, but there was more in this for her than just sex. Oh, fine. She really wanted to nail him and she wanted him to want to nail her right back. So she decided no more questions and no unspoken promises about where this was headed. For now she’d live and let live. Not an easy choice for someone like Callie. She was one of the walking wounded after her marriage to Frank, but if she and Brian didn’t make promises and they lived in the moment, for now, that would have to be enough.
“No, Callie. It’s much more than that.” Brian’s tone turned quiet and very somber.
Callie’s heart thumped so hard she could feel it in her pretty, manicured toes. “I know…” Or at least she wanted to know, but she didn’t really know. How did you know for sure? You didn’t and that terrified her. There were no guarantees. None, and the free-falling thing just wasn’t her gig.
“I’m not convinced you do know, Callie, but you will. For now, all I can say is, remember when I told you sometimes you have to take a risk?”
She nodded, remembering his analogy from his airborne days. “The open the door thing?”
“Yep. Sometimes you gotta stand in the door and jump. I promise to hold your hand when you do.” Brian’s promise was gentle, without a hint of coercion in his voice. He was letting her take those reins he’d talked about.
Callie chuckled softly into the phone. “Okay, Brian,” was all she managed.
“Good, so the Motel Six it is. I’ll bring my poncho liner if you’ll bring your pillow.” he teased.
Callie smiled and headed back to her bed where she fingered her pillow. “Deal.”
As they made plans to meet that weekend, Callie teetered between sick with worry over how Brian would perceive her and jittery excitement over actually seeing him in person.
The real thing.
As she hung up the phone, Callie took deep breaths, closing her eyes and cradling her pillow close to her chest.
She was petrified.
This was a risk like none Callie had ever considered. It was risking her heart, and that wasn’t something she put on the line. Ever.
But Callie wanted this. Like nothing she’d ever wanted before. It was real and tangible. She could feel it more deeply than she’d ever felt anything in her life. Callie had never met a man like Brian before and she didn’t want to miss this one opportunity to meet a man who’d made her feel like there was no one in the world but her.
Just once, she wanted something that was all hers. Something she didn’t have to share. Something that while she was afraid to feel, made her feel any old way.
If Callie did one thing in this lifetime, if she was ever going to take a risk, she wanted that risk to be with Brian Benson…
Of course, that had been last night. Today, as she sat in her bathroom her heart sat thickly in her throat.
If she turned Brian off, she was going to hurl herself from the tallest building in California.
Wait, maybe she could do it from Frank’s roof?
Barbie would shit a brick.
Callie giggled.
At least in death she’d have the satisfaction of knowing Frank had to clean her scattered body parts up while Barbie stood by, crying that Callie had gotten blood on the driveway.
Chapter 14
Brian packed for his trip to meet Callie as Jeff sat and watched from the futon in his bedroom. His big legs sprawled out in front of him and his hands over his stomach. “So you’re finally going to meet this chick, huh?”
“Yep.” Brian said, giving Jeff little to go on with his clipped response.
“Ya pumped or what?”
Brian nodded as he threw some underwear into his duffle bag.
“Ya got a hard-on?”
He threw a towel that lay nearby at Jeff. “Shut the fuck up, Jeff!”
Jeff ducked and caught the towel between his beefy hands. “Yup, you got a hard-on and that you’re not willing to confirm that with me is all the proof I need.”
“What are you talking about? I’m meeting a woman for a weekend. So what?” Brian tried to shrug it off, but Jeff knew him well enough to read Brian and his bullshit.
“Bud, if she were just some woman, you wouldn’t spend all this time on the phone with her. You never wanna go out anymore. You never wanna hang out and catch a game. All you do is talk all night long to that woman on the phone. This isn’t just a weekend, my friend.”
Brian went to his closet to get his poncho liner. The poncho liner he hoped Callie would spoon under with him. Naked…naked would be great because it would relieve this perpetual hard-on he’d had since the moment he saw her picture, but it wasn’t all Brian wanted from Callie and he hadn’t met too many women he’d wanted much more from. “Look, I don’t know what this weekend will end up being. Maybe she won’t like me.” If Brian were brutally honest he’d admit that did concern him a bit, but not nearly as much as Callie’s fears did. Getting her to believe his intentions—believe in him—wasn’t going to be easy.
“Well, you better hope she does, cuz you sure as hell like her.”
Brian more than liked Callie, and meeting her would help him determine if what he was feeling was what he suspected was something a shitload deeper than like. “Yeah, I do hope she likes me. Like you said, she’s hot. Who wouldn’t hope a hot chick liked ‘em?”
Jeff waved his hand at Brian, dismissing his casual claim. “Bullshit. You can hand me whatever crap you want to, but I can see this is different than the chicks you’ve been involved with before. Ya know what, Brian?”
Brian stopped packing and said, “What, Jeff?”
Jeff eyed him from the futon with a look usually reserved for when they were in possible deep shit in Iraq. “Don’t fuck this up. If this chick is worth it, then do what ya gotta do, but don’t wait around for it to just happen. Make it happen.”
Brian shook his head. “She’s got a lot of shit leftover from her marriage, Jeff. It’s not going to be easy.”
“Yeah? And that’s gonna stop you? Please, since when did a tough mission stop you from going in and gettin’ the job done? Never, Brian, so she had an asshole for a husband. Make it up to her.”
“It isn’t just that, Jeff. From what I can tell, he fucked with her head on so many levels I’ve lost count. He was a freak and she doesn’t trust her instincts. She sucks at communicating anything. I can’t force her to do something that goes beyond these boundaries she has mentally, or she’ll run scared.”
Jeff shook his head and pointed his finger at Brian. “But you know this shit about her—your instincts are still good, Brian and if she’s not talkin’—this info you have is based only on what you’ve picked up from her signals. That means you’re still sharp and you can prepare for it, just depends on how much work you’re willing to do to get her past it. Man, I hate ex-husbands—they fuck up everything for us, but where there’s a will there’s a way.”
Brian sucked in a breath. Right about now, Callie was panicking and he knew that in his gut. The same gut that told him exactly what meeting Callie would mean.
“You gonna tell me her name?” Jeff asked, knowing full well Brian would.
Brian smiled against his will. “Callie—it’s Callie.”
“Nice name, but this kinda sucks. I think I’m gonna be replaced. You’re breakin’ my heart,” Jeff joked.
Brian threw his razor into the duffle bag. “I get the feeling she’ll probably be a whole lot nicer to sleep next to than you ever were. Consider yourself replaced.”
Jeff rose and nodded again. “Yep, you remember that too, otherwise it’s you and me, walkin’ hand and hand into eternity. I dunno ‘bout you, but that would totally suck if I could have Callie instead.” Jeff slapped Brian on the back as he headed for the door he said, “Have a good time, Brian. Go get her.”
Brian sat at the edge of the futon and sighed. Two damn months of this and he was ready to explode. Callie turned all of him on. Not just parts of his body, but his mind. When she spoke to him about her life, her dreams, her world, he wanted to be included. Brian wanted all of Callie Winston and that included her trust.
He’d never believed in love at first sight—he was still a little fuzzy on how it’d happened.
It just had.
From the moment he’d contacted her, it was as if he’d known. The more time they spent on the phone, the more Brian wanted Callie. She wasn’t just a challenge to him—he’d had plenty of those. She was a soothing palliative of warm, genuine sincerity that very few people were made of.
Callie fit him. He fit her. Somehow, she’d made sense of the jumbled mess his head was in over where his life was going and now he wanted to get there.
Brian couldn’t wait to see Callie, touch her, talk to her, but he knew the moment they met would begin a whole new path for Callie. A path that didn’t have the security of a phone between them and she was either going to sink or swim.
Brian would be her lifeguard if she’d just let him.
* * * *
“Hey, Kath. I just wanted to let you know I’m off, so you can let Aston out for me. Got any words of wisdom for this first-timer?” Callie paced her kitchen floor, twirling a strand of her hair as she did.
“Eyes open, heart open, sweetie. Don’t look at this like a fling, but keep in mind that you’ve known each other two months, which by most dating standards is forever, but for you is a short period of time. I really believe, from what you’ve told me, Brian’s intentions are real. I can smell a snake from a hundred miles away. He seems like a really good guy. He’ll have his faults, Cal, we all do, but don’t focus on those, baby. Not unless he has a habit of grabbing his crotch in public places. Focus on how you feel about yourself when you’re with him. If Brian makes you feel as good as you claim and that’s just been in phone calls and instant messages, I imagine the real thing is going to be explosive.”
Callie’s feet were cold and her fingers were numb. “I’m scared, Kath. Really scared.”
“To meet him in person, or scared that he’ll be just as good as you’d hoped, maybe better?”
Callie shook her head—she was so confused. “What does that mean?”
“Look, honey bunny, you’ve had a very bad time of it and even if you hadn’t, skeptical would be a good thing, but sometimes you hide away from everything as a result and use your skepticism to cover you like a blanket. You won’t let anyone in because you’re too afraid they’ll get too close. Brian seems to be able to really read you. He knows when to push and he knows when to stop and let you be you—freaked out and neurotic in all your glory. It passes and you take another step forward. I want you to keep doing that, sweetie. Keep taking baby steps towards Brian or whatever ends up making you happy. Don’t let your skepticism—your fear rule you, because sometimes you just have to let go. Let it happen and be what it is. Don’t try to control it and run away to hide if it isn’t, or even if you feel just a little bit scared. You can’t run forever Cal, and not everyone is Frank. If Brian turns out to be as genuine and forthcoming as he seems, don’t question it to death. You do that, you know. Pick at everything like it’s a scab. You won’t let it heal. You won’t apply the medicine daily so it heals completely. You just get to the healing stage and you dig at it.”
Callie could find something wrong in everything if she gave it enough thought. It was how her brain worked. She’d been conditioned to please people and as a result she worried endlessly that she wasn’t enough. “I don’t know if I can go into this like that, Kath. I know most would think, okay, this will be a nice memory to keep me warm on a cold night if it doesn’t work out, but I don’t know if I work that way. I’ll probably take it as a sign I shouldn’t ever have anyone in my life but Aston.”
Katherine clucked her disapproval. “No, honey, that’s not true. If this doesn’t work out, it just isn’t meant to be and I’ll help you heal, just like I did with Frank. Don’t make excuses for why it isn’t meant to be, just chalk it up to experience is what I’m saying. These are things you didn’t experience in your twenties because you were married to the freak.”
Well, she’d survived a bitter, ugly divorce with Frank. Surely she could survive a three-day memory with Brian if it didn’t work out. “Okay, Kath. I will, I promise,” Callie said on a quiet note.
“Cal? Brian is a great guy. He’s so many things that I can’t even believe he’s real sometimes. But he’s very real and he’s human too. Don’t hurt him in the process of protecting yourself either.”
Callie stopped pacing for a second, incredulous. “Hurt him? I don’t think I could do that. Brian’s far more experienced than I am at this, Kath. He’s had relationships—he knows the score.”
Katherine paused for a moment and then she spoke. Her words rang in Callie’s ears. “I’m sure he does, but it doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt and if my vibe is right, this man really wants you, Callie. If you let your fear and residual Frank-ness take over, you’ll hurt him.”
“I can’t help who I am, Kath. I do have baggage.”
“Yep, baby, you do. Let’s leave it in Cleveland. It belongs to Frank, okay?”
Callie laughed in to the phone. “I’ll at least try a layover.”
“Good, honey. Now go have a wonderful time. Remember, no glove—no love, and most of all enjoy this, Cal. Savor this man and how he makes you feel, okay?”
Callie’s throat tightened. “Okay, Kath.”
“Call me if you need me. I love you, honey bunny.”
“I love you too, Kath. Thank you. Bye.”
As Callie
hung up the phone she smiled. Katherine was the best friend she’d ever had and she might be over protective and difficult sometimes, but no matter what she always looked out for Callie.
Callie took one last look at herself in the full-length mirror in her bedroom. Her jeans were snug enough that she didn’t look like she was trying to dress like a teenager, and her thighs were under control for the moment. She’d chosen a black, clingy sweater that hugged her torso, but covered her ass. Her long dark hair fell in waves over her shoulders and just skimmed the top of her breasts. Thankfully, it had been a good hair day.
Callie moved closer to her reflection and ran her middle finger over her lips. The lips that everyone had a nickname for, smoothing out her lip gloss and sucking in her cheeks.
Her cell phone chirped and she knew it was Brian. Callie grabbed it and looked at the caller ID. “Hey, you,” she said softly.
“Heyyy, guess where I am, sweet pea?”
Callie’s insides shifted in excitement, fear, anticipation. “Cleveland?”
Brian’s deep chuckle tickled her ear. “Yep, just waitin’ on you.”
“What room number?”
“One-fifty-six.”
“Give me about twenty minutes, okay?”
“I’ll see ya then…”
“Byyye,” Callie said into the phone in a long drawn out fashion and heard the now familiar chuckle that always followed close behind her signing off.
“Bye, sweet pea.”
Callie hung up her phone and blew out a breath, hauling her bag over her shoulder and stuffing her pillow under her other arm.
Her last thought before closing the door behind her was, I’m a big girl, I can handle this…
Stand in the door and jump, Callie.
Chapter 15
Callie’s hands shook as she prepared to knock on Brian’s hotel room door. She ran a hand through her long, dark tresses and took a deep breath. She was plucked, waxed and plucked again.
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