Want Caleb.
Get hard.
The pattern was becoming predictable and enjoyable.
I broke my six-foot rule without thinking.
Distance meant options, angles, and exits. But the space between us suddenly felt like an obstacle rather than a precaution, and before the calculation finished in my head, I’d already stepped closer.
Caleb froze and watched me. The kitchen light caught the line of his jaw, the slight stubble there, the shape of his mouth when he lowered the bottle again. My fingers itched with a strange, unfamiliar impulse—an urge to touch.
I could see the pulse in his throat, and if he lifted his hand, he could reach me as easily as I could reach him.
The air between us tightened, the moment balanced on a thin edge of something neither of us had named yet. I watched his mouth again, cataloging the slight hitch in his breathing, the faint tension in his shoulders that said he had noticed the change in distance even if he chose not to react.
See Caleb.
Step closer.
Want Caleb.
Closer still.
He didn’t shift his weight or reach for the gun on his hip. He didn’t straighten away from the counter, and the lack of reaction pulled me in another inch.
Then another.
Now the distance between us was nothing. I could feel the heat coming off him, could see the moment his breathing slowed deliberately. He knew what I was doing and he wasn’t stopping me.
My fingers flexed once at my side, the urge to touch sharpening into something almost painful.
Caleb still didn’t move.
I lifted my hand slowly and deliberately, the way I approached anything that might react badly if startled. My fingers rose between us, closing the last inch of space until theyhovered near his throat, just under the line of his jaw, where the pulse beat against his skin.
I didn’t touch him.
But if I moved my hand half an inch, my knuckles would brush the roughness of stubble along his jaw.
Caleb’s eyes tracked my hesitation. He didn’t step back. He didn’t point his gun at me.
My fingers hovered there another second.
Then I stopped myself.
“Are you done, Arnie?” Caleb asked in a dead tone. The words were quiet, but the edge in them was unmistakable. He’d not called me Arnie for a few days now, and I’d been waiting for his next nickname for me—he’d cycled through Robot, then Freak, then Arnie, and back to Freak, and now Arnie again.
I liked them all because he used the words, and that meant he thought about me.
He glanced at my hand, still too close to his throat, then back to my face. “Fucking personal space,” he muttered.
I stepped away.
I was learning, and I wanted Caleb.
Distance snapped back into place, and I turned without answering and headed back outside to the truck, gravel crunching under my boots as I grabbed my bag from the passenger seat. When I returned, Caleb was still in the kitchen, leaning against the counter as if nothing had happened.
I crossed the room and took the stairs two at a time, and upstairs, a narrow hallway split the space in two. The bedroom to the left was already claimed. Caleb’s bag sat on the bed, laptop case beside it, charger cable trailing across the comforter.
