Dare Me

I didn’t remember when he’d gotten me to the living room and plopped me at the edge of the table, but that was where I sat as he knelt pleadingly in front of me. He stared at me with as much hot love as he did burning fury and I couldn’t deny him this time.

“I ruined enough of your life, Callum,” I whispered. He was already shaking his head so I spoke over him. “You know it’s true. Your mom knows it’s true. I screwed up so much for both of you and the only reason you don’t see it is because you both love me so much. And I’m so blessed to know that and to have that and to love you back because my heart feels good and full and right when it’s just you and Caroline in there. I owe everything to you both. And with you, Callum, after what happened that morning with Theo – ”

“Don’t – ”

“You can’t keep saying that,” I protested, my face in his hands. “You can’t tell me not to bring that up when it would’ve never happened without me! It was all because of me, Callum – everything always was and I know you hated protecting me but you couldn’t help it. If you hadn’t gone to protect me that last time, you would’ve been a different Callum and your mom would still have your dad and all her friends and your lives would’ve been everything they were supposed to be before I came and turned it into… into – ” Trash. I choked on the word and Callum pulled me onto him.

“No, Lake. You have it wrong.” He knelt on the floor, holding me on top of him, kissing my forehead and my tears between his low growls about how I fucking wrong I was. But I couldn’t help what I thought. He had come to save me after I broke up with Theo and he’d wound up beating his best friend so brutally that the Spencers resolved to retaliate. From the whispers that came after the incident, relayed to me by Isabel, the plot was Nick’s idea. He’d convinced Theo to post my naked pictures and he’d convinced him that with his ex taken care of, it was time to set sights on the one who sent him to the hospital.

I had been locked so shamefully in my room after the naked picture fiasco that I didn’t even realize Theo had contacted Callum – that Callum had actually agreed to meet him before wrestling practice before school. It was just before six in the morning. Callum was waiting at the park near Mercer School when four guys jumped him. One had a stick of some sort – a witness said an aluminum bat. They beat him for ten minutes, dragged him around mercilessly. Theo never showed. Surprise, surprise. He made it well on time to practice. As he wrestled, the four men in the park had Callum saying goodbye to the sport. That morning, they snapped his right arm in two places, broke three ribs, cracked his jaw and split his head. We never got to know how long he was bleeding there alone for. A jogger found him unconscious in a pool of his own blood and that was when Caroline got the call at home.

I cried every last tear out of my body. I couldn’t bear to visit him the first day. He was hardly awake anyway so Caroline stayed with Callum at the hospital and I spent the entire day in his room, hiding all his wrestling trophies and medals, ripping through his closet for his uniforms and shoving them into a garbage bag before crying myself to sleep in his bed. He had been two months from the junior Olympics and three from his freshman year at Hodgson. He’d been accepted on a full ride for wrestling, just like his dad, but now that was all going down the drain. Because of me. He lost his future because of me. He lost the mother that he knew because of me and she lost her husband because of me. Everything was all because of me. All those hateful messages Trish sent me had been right after all. I leeched off this family and eventually, I’d leech off of them enough to become a plague. I was worthless without sucking out someone else’s soul.

I unloaded all that onto Callum as he held me tighter than ever.

“You know that’s not true.” He cupped my face and whispered urgently, his thumbs moving fast to dry my tears. “Look at me – I have everything I never knew I wanted, Lake. I spent my life wrestling because my dad did. I liked having a direction then. I liked practicing discipline and working toward a goal but wrestling itself meant nothing to me beyond the time I put into it.”

“Time is everything,” I protested tearfully.

“You are,” he corrected straightaway. “You are my everything, Lake. You’ve always been.”

I shook my head, refusing all of it even though I knew it was true. “Your life was supposed to be something else. I changed who you became.”

“I like who I became,” he said between his teeth, dogged and adamant. “Why can’t you believe that, Lake? How could you let anyone tell you that you meant nothing to me? She knew nothing. She wasn’t a part of our life. She was nobody.”

She was my mother. She was the only blood I had left.

I thought it but I didn’t say it because Callum had no idea how much of Trish I’d let into my life. He still had no idea that I’d ever let her play such a big role in my adolescence. I was too ashamed to tell him about her and her situation. That, out of curiosity, I’d ever let her find me online, talk to me regularly and spread her poison gradually into me. She was the only reason I stole from him and Caroline and the stealing was something I was still too ashamed to ever bring up. My biological mother was the dark hole I spiraled into every once in awhile depending on what she’d messaged me that week – what her husband, Dean, had done to her this time or how much money she needed from me. The secret conversations I had with her all took place on Theo’s computer at the Spencer’s home. I kept Trish a secret from Callum, Caroline and even Isabel because they were the ones who truly loved me and so I knew they’d try to intervene. But that would only cause for trouble so my heart told me it was best to keep Trish and Dean and Hunt a secret. Callum and Caroline had saved me from having to live with them after my grandma passed and I was endlessly grateful. The Pikes were my real family. I loved them and I’d do whatever I needed to protect them from these psychopaths.

“Do you hear me, Lake?” Callum caught my chin and forced me to look in his eyes. “Let go of that guilt. I gave up a lot for you. You’re right – my life changed for you. But I never regretted a second of it because I’ve never cared about anything more than you. You were my goal. You were what I lived and breathed for and that’s how it’s going to be, always. Do you hear me?”

My lips gave a short gasp for breath. “I hear you.” I held onto him, letting myself melt into the familiar comfort of his body. I was crying too much, too wound with emotion to distinguish what I was feeling but I did feel lighter, as if the weight on my chest had been eased – by only a little, but it was enough to make a little more room in my heart. Once upon a time, when my life was nothing but love, my heart was filled with only that. There were dark patches all over it now, parts that hadn’t been able to breathe in ages. But I could feel Callum reversing that, the tiniest bit at a time.

I trembled in his arms but he reached for a throw and wrapped it around us. “Pretend we’re on the fire escape,” he whispered with a smile in his voice. I managed a laugh as I remembered the day he was referring to. I remembered the reply he whispered to my question after we had sex for the first time – my first time ever. They were the words I remembered forever but told myself weren’t true till he confirmed them for me now. I closed my eyes and let them ring in my head.

“You are and you always will be.”

Chapter Sixteen

Lake

You are and you always will be.

Callum’s words had eased every fiber of my nineteen-year-old soul. A year removed from what had happened to him in the park and I wasn’t quite over it. How could I be? He’d just recently made a full recovery and that was only in terms of broken bones and open wounds. In terms of who he was and where he was going, it wasn’t quite so simple. After hearing that his wrestling scholarship had been put on hold, Callum decided not to attend Hodgson at all.

“Why should I? I was only going for wrestling. I didn’t even have a major declared yet. I don’t actually know what I want to do. Wrestling just tricked me into thinking I did.” That had been his argument to Caroline, who’d legitimately lost her mind over it. She’d been shunned by her society friends at this point but their values still weighed heavily on her and the idea of her child skipping out on college made her want to tear her hair out.

Callum had first said it in the hospital, after the four men attacked him. She didn’t believe him then and neither did I. He was hopped up on pain meds and saying all sorts of crazy shit, most of it to calm me down. I was still a mess of snot and tears over what I’d brought upon him. It wasn’t a pretty sight. But Callum seemed to think so.

His surfer hair was all over the place as he woke up from a deep, drug-induced nap, settling his heavy gaze on me and spreading his lips into an easy smile. “Hey, pretty.”

I looked at him almost in horror. Had he forgotten where he was? Did I have to explain to him all over again that he’d broken almost a dozen bones and was definitely missing the Junior Olympics in seven weeks? “What?” I said harshly, frozen, hugging my knees to my chest on the chair next to his bed. Caroline had gone to get me food but when she took too long, I went out looking for her and found her passed out on a random chair with her head resting on some strange old woman’s shoulder-slash-massive bosom, so I let her be and went back to Callum’s room, hungry, miserable and filled to the brim with self-loathing. He looked so sad when he was asleep, covered in bandages that seeped through with fresh blood no matter how many times the nurses changed them. Watching him alone in silence was the purest torture because he looked beautiful as always but for once, pathetic as well, and it crushed the living hell out of my heart. The fact that he was smiling cluelessly at me now made it feel like it was ripping right in half. “Callum, do you know where you are right now?” I asked with hesitance.

“At home?”

My heart sunk to my stomach. “No.” I exhaled, my shoulders heaving. “You’re in the hospital, Callum. You got beat up yesterday. Real bad.”

“I know that, Lake, I was just fucking with you.”