When he tips my face toward him and drags my sunglasses down with two fingers, nostalgia slams into me so hard my breath stutters. For half a heartbeat, the party dissolves, and it’s six years ago. Gage Calloway inches from me, the same hunger simmering in his eyes.
I blink, and the world snaps back.
Music. Laughter. Chlorine-thick air. Gage, older and sharper, looking at me like I’m a question he once answered wrong.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” he says. The words are soft, a confession pulled from him.
My throat tightens. “Well, you weren’t looking for me.”
His mouth lifts, half-smile, half something else. “Maybe I should’ve.”
I don’t have a response for that, not one I’m willing to give him.
He exhales and steps back, like he feels the line snap too. “I’ll grab us drinks.”
“Sure.”
“Stay here,” he says. It’s not a command, but it’s close.
I let him walk away first.
His shoulders cut through the crowd, confident and familiar, and then he disappears inside through the sliding glass doors. The same doors I had walked through a hundred times in another life.
I sink onto the edge of a pool lounger, fingers twisting in the fringe of my jean shorts at my thigh.
I grew up in this backyard. This is where summer lived. In stolen beers, late-night swims, the smell of burgers on the grill, and boards stacked against the fence. Gage always a few steps ahead of me, glancing back with that grin like he was daring me to keep up.
And now he’s inside getting drinks like we’re friends. Or something.
I blink hard.Get a grip, Bellamy.
A shadow drops into my peripheral vision.
“Bell.”
My head snaps up.
Cruz Calloway is sprawled on the opposite end of the lounger, forearms braced on his thighs, long legs stretched out.Sunglasses hide his eyes, but not the way his attention locks in. Slow and precise. Like he’s been watching longer than I realized.
For a beat, my brain blanks.
He looks older. Edges smoothed into something more dangerous. There’s always been something unsettling about the way Cruz watched a room. At twenty-three, it lands differently.
“I thought my brother would never leave,” he says mildly.
I swallow hard.
Because my body recognizes him before my brain does, a visceral jolt low in my stomach that I absolutely do not have time for.
“Cruz,” I manage.
He tilts his head, studying me with that razor-edged intensity he’s always hidden behind stillness.
And God help me, I feel every inch of it.
I drag my gaze off him and look out at the party instead. Bodies pressed along the pool deck, water sloshing against the edge, laughter bouncing off tile and stucco. Somehow, even with all this noise, it feels like I’m in a bubble on this side of the patio, insulated, suspended. Like the air is thicker here.
“I should’ve assumed you’d be here.”
