She spins around, marches back to my car, climbs inside, and drives away with a dust cloud following her screeching tires.
“You see, that’s why I don’t do relationships,” Donovan comments, shaking his head. “All exes seem crazy as shit.”
Kaleb, sitting behind the driver’s seat, reaches over me to close the door. “Not all relationships end badly,” he lectures, bent like a pretzel because guys his size were not meant to sit in the back seat of trucks.
“Oh yeah, they could end like yours,” Donovan taunts, starting the engine. “Does she know you guys are broken up? Pretty sure she's still planning the wedding.”
“Just drive,” Kaleb sighs, and I drift back out of consciousness to the familiar sounds of their bickering.
Chapter 15
Kaleb
Iland soft-footed on Callie’s balcony, masked by the twilight of the dark indigo sky. I’m not totally sure why I’m here. That’s a lie. I know why I’m here, I just don’t know if it’s the right thing to do.
Visions of Connor bent over, puking his guts up, while my mother did her best to soothe him are burned into my mind. Her hands running softly over his back, careful of every laceration. Holding him every time he collapsed back in exhaustion, rocking him gently as she sang a Spanish lullaby. The same one she would sing to Donovan when he first came to stay with us and couldn’t sleep through the night.
Callie sits in the middle of her bed, legs crossed in front of her, hunched over a book with ragged pages and what looks like handwritten words. She chews on her lip, and her fingers hover over the page like she wants to feel the marks against her fingertips but is too scared to damage what she’s reading.
I lift my hand to knock on the glass door but something holds me back. Instead, I flatten it against the wooden frame.
She should know. We claim she’s one of us. We tell her she can trust us. But as soon as it comes to something that might upset her, we close ranks. Even Felix has managed to pop in quickly to check on Connor.
He’s fine now. With the silver nitrate out of his system, he was able to shift about an hour ago and is currently resting in my room. When he fell asleep, I knew I needed to get out of the house. I just wanted a little air. Some time to think, but here I am outside her door.
Sorry, Con. She has a right to know.
Determined, I knock on the wooden frame, careful not to rattle the glass.
Callie startles at the sound, then seeing me at the window, her eyes widen in surprise. She quickly closes her book, placing it on her nightstand, and hurries to open the door.
“Is everything okay?” she asks while her gaze flits from my face to my bare chest to the large wings on my back.
The truth sits on my tongue, demanding to be spoken, but when I notice the dark purple smudges under her eyes, the bracing hunch of her posture, the tight press of her lips, I remember this morning. Her breaking under the continued weight of her past, and I can’t do it. I hope she can forgive me, but I can’t lay another burden on her shoulders. Not today.
“I came to check on you,” I lie, my smile gentle.
An answering wan smile spreads across her lips, and she sighs, tugging on a piece of her hair. “I’m surviving. I got a whole new fancy book to study. It’s…” her gaze softens and her eyes take on a glossy sheen. “It’s my mother’s grimoire.”
She fidgets, her arms dropping to her sides, then on her hips, then crossed over her chest, and she stammers, “Would you like to come in and look at it… with me? Or, you know, there’s Agata’s journal if you’d prefer. That’s her name… I mean the Volkov spirit witch who…” she groans. “You know what I mean.”
I laugh. My first instinct is to accept immediately, excited to finally see a real witch’s grimoire and touched that she’d want to share something so precious with me, but there’s an itch that runs down my skin. The desire to be more to her than what I am to the others.
It’s too late with the guys. They’ll only ever see me as the stick-in-the-mud, know-it-all peering up from my giant books so I can warn that whatever they’re about to do is dangerous, stupid, or both.
But with Callie, it can be different.Ican be different. Figure out what I am under this false facade of perfection. I want her to know the real me… whoever that is.
Start with what you do know.
“Yes, I definitely want to see them, but first I want to show you something,” I answer, my heart picking up speed at the thought of what I’m about to do.
“Oh?” she replies, her fine blonde brows furrowing.
My smile turns into a playful smirk and I murmur, “Do you trust me?”
Nerves dance in my stomach, realizing too late that my question reaches further than this one excursion.
“Of course, I do,” she answers, quirking her head to one side.
