Dare Me

“Yikes.” Dara gave me a big cringe and went back to her book. “I hope you’re not like, holding out for him.”

“Holding out for him?”

“Like, thinking you’re going to end up with him. Just from what you’re telling me, it seems like anything romantic that happened between you two was out of the convenience that you were living with him and now he’s moving on without you.”

I blinked at her. Nope. I knew it wasn’t the case but I didn’t really feel like arguing because it wasn’t Dara’s fault. Callum and I weren’t something that could be proven with words and Dara would eventually witness us with her own two eyes anyway. It was bound to happen.

For starters, he returned my drunk ass back to the dorms on countless occasions when he hadn’t even been the one I’d been out drinking with. He came over and took care of me that time I caught pneumonia and, according to Dara the next morning, kept asking her to turn her music down when I fell asleep. I was on the phone with him for hours on the nights that I was freaking out and convinced that I was out of my league – that Caroline must’ve bribed someone to get me accepted at the school because I was by far the worst sewer and didn’t really have a vision the way the other kids did. I just sometimes stitched things together at home because Elena taught me how to use a sewing machine when I was ten and it thrilled Caroline to see me make things, even if they were horribly constructed. I got better in college but still, I had many of those panicked phone calls, half of which ended with Callum showing up outside my window. If Dara was awake, he’d come up but if she was sleeping, I’d sit on the fire escape and let him talk me out of my funk.

Still, Dara wasn’t sold.

At least not until the night of the concert. Callum scored backstage passes for a huge, sold out show at Terminal 5. He was going with Logan and invited me but I couldn’t go because I was behind on finishing a dress that looked so raggedy I was certain I should just drop out of school. I told hi

m to have fun and call a car home because I knew he was going to get obliterated. As he proceeded to do so, I focused on cutting and sewing and five hours later, brilliantly dropped my shears so hard on my foot that they stood proudly in my flesh for a second. I leaned in, examined and promptly passed out when I caught a glimpse of skinny foot bone before the blood started weeping.

According to Dara, she nearly passed out too. She had a thing about blood and got so lightheaded she lost her head completely. In her panic, when it was many hours past midnight, she called Callum from my phone.

“Girl. He was so hammered he started talking dirty to me the second he picked up,” she wheezed with laughter after Callum left the next morning, having stayed with me after I got my stitches at the hospital and went back to the dorms. By the time I came to, he was on his way from the venue in a cab, still on the phone with Dara, asking her to stay calm and report my every move. She had my phone sandwiched between her ear and shoulder and I could hear Callum comforting her too, her voice audibly shaking as she pressed a wad of Starbucks napkins to my bleeding foot and Googled what the hell to do on her own phone.

I knew Callum was still insanely drunk when he arrived because I could smell the booze before Dara even opened the door for him. His gait was off but he acted so sober and in control that I wondered if he was a human being or a robot. Or an angel. Maybe he was angel. He looked like the most beautiful angel in the world wearing that sexy white T-shirt. Keep in mind I was losing a lot of blood. It was relevant to my weird thought process and the way I looked at him that day with that messy, dark blonde halo and ripped, booze-stained white V-neck – like my savior freshly descended from the rock and roll Heavens.

I stared up at him as he carried me from my dorm outside to the car, studying his handsome expressions as he reassured Dara that she should go back in, get some rest and take it easy – that he had it from there. And he really did. He took me to the hospital, talked to everyone for me, whipped out my insurance card from my wallet – which I didn’t even realize that he’d grabbed out of my purse – and sat there holding my hand while I got the giant numbing shot for the stitches. He told me funny stories from the concert a few inches from my face, refusing to let me watch the giant needle go into the bony part of my foot.

“Dude. I swear to God. That man is a machine,” Dara said that next morning. “Like, I told you, he picked up the phone and was so wasted that he was just telling me all the things he wanted to do to you while I was screaming, ‘It’s not Lake! It’s Dara! It’s her roommate! She’s bleeding!’ And once he processed it, I could like, hear him forcing away the drunkenness as our conversation progressed and I was like, whoa – I drink two glasses of wine and I’m on my ass till the next day and this guy comes in smelling like he went swimming in a fucking bourbon barrel and he can still get shit done. I was a chicken without a head and you were just like, ghost-white and barely talking. It was such a shitshow and he just came in here and started taking care of business like it was another day at the office. I was just like, what?”

That was the day Dara became a believer and the day I removed her from my shit list for having to wake up and deal with my horrifying foot. I cracked up all morning as we sat in bed and she made impressions of Callum’s “taking care of business voice,” which she described as teetering between “I’ll guide you through this gently” and “I’ll fucking kill you if you mess it up.” I laughed so hard it practically hurt the stitches in my foot because it was such an incredibly and beautifully accurate description of that voice I knew well. So maybe there were a couple things about Callum that could actually be put into words.

“Yeah, fuck it, girl. I was a total skeptic at first but you two?” Dara held her hands up in surrender. “It’s real. You two are the fucking truth.”

Chapter Seventeen

Callum

Lake came back from my mom’s house one evening with her old sewing machine. She lugged the bag full of fabric she brought into her bedroom that she never slept in, but I nixed that idea and helped her set up in the empty room so she’d be free to cut on the floor and make a mess, which she thoroughly did. She spent the rest of the night preoccupied, tinkering with the machine and sewing little pairs of “practice” shorts that looked maybe big enough for a doll. I had no idea what inspired it but it worked out well because I needed the time to write out the itinerary for the distillery tour with the Times. And, of course, I liked dropping in on occasion to see her listening to her old pink iPod, pins in her mouth and hair falling into her eyes as she worked with such concentration that she didn’t notice me once. It was so fucking cute I wound up just sitting in my office, staring into space and remembering things about her.

The sewing obviously brought me back to her days at FIT. My mother had somewhat pushed fashion onto her. I wasn’t sure that Lake was hugely passionate about it but I knew she had the time of her life at college. She worked and played hard while I did the same at my internship. My apartment was in Chelsea, close enough to her dorm that I saw her as often as I had when we lived together in the townhouse. She was always behind on assignments and her heavy sewing machine was in the dorm room she shared with her sarcastic, slightly weird roommate, so I spent far more time there than I’d have preferred. It was always a treat when I got to have her for an entire weekend in my apartment.

She came over unexpectedly one night because her date was cut short. She’d met this guy at a club she snuck into and I was wary because I actually knew he was. Not personally but I recognized his name as one of the Mets’ shittier relief pitchers who’d been on the DL forever and wasn’t much to consider in the sporting world. But he was a young and wealthy professional athlete so Lake’s girlfriends collectively lost their minds when they spotted him at the club. I wasn’t surprised to hear that Lake was the one who walked away from that situation with his number and plans to go out. I never thought twice about the random dates Lake went on but I paid attention to this one because my assumption of pro athletes was that they were slightly more entitled than the rest of the male population when it came to sex, and Lake was still every bit a virgin.

I didn’t worry though. She was smart and strong and after high school, not one to be coerced into doing anything she didn’t want to do. It would be a lie to say that I wasn’t so easy about the random dates she went on because I had the luxury of knowing that she’d never have sex with any of them. The same way she didn’t have sex with the Met. She had a wry grin on when I opened the door of my apartment and stared at her.

“Christ, Lake,” I laughed with the end of my fist at my mouth. “That poor son of a bitch.” I stepped back to take her in from head to toe. She was wearing a casual outfit but it was the kind that pumped male blood straight to the cock – ripped shorts, a white crop top and heels. Seeing her in these outfits was still new to me because she hadn’t dressed that way when we lived with my mom. It was a thrill for me to see her tanned skin peeking out through shredded denim. It would probably always be.

I fell back to look at her ass as she walked over to the couch and planked dramatically onto it, face first. I smirked and climbed onto her back, letting my hard-on rest between her thighs as I kissed the back of her neck. I knew the drill. She felt bad after dates that ended because she could feel the guy getting impatient for sex. She felt weird and hypocritical for wanting it and being flirtatious but never having the guts to actually do it. She either called me or came to my apartment when she got in these moods and I told her not to feel guilty – that batting eyelashes while insanely sexy didn’t make her a tease. It wasn’t exactly her fault that she commanded wood with one look.

“Don’t worry about it, Lake,” I said, kissing her collarbones as she rolled onto her back. I was happy to please her up to her limit – basically do everything to her besides penetrate her. I knew she flirted with dates, grinded with them, kissed them sometimes but she knew that getting naked for these guys could strip them of their control, so she rarely let them touch her body where she wanted it touched. Lucky for me, that was and pretty much always had been my job.

“I’m starting to worry about it,” she sighed as I kissed down the luscious mounds of her cleavage. I grinned against her skin when she started squirming. I always waited for that moment.

“Why?” I asked, reaching under back and unclasping her bra. I pulled the straps down each shoulder and off her arms, till I could pull it off her breasts and fling it aside. “It never seemed to bother you until recently,” I said, sucking her nipple over her shirt. She arched her back into my mouth.

“I just want it more now,” she breathed, arms over her head and writhing under my body as she watched me push her shirt up her stomach. “I feel like I can’t hold it in anymore. And I don’t want to wait forever till it becomes a thing and I’m scared and I die a virgin.”

“We won’t let that happen.”

She laughed. “Did you always know it was going to be you?”

“What?” I looked up at her but her eyes closed as I licked the swell of her naked breast.