Fuel the Fire (Calloway Sisters 3)

“Your glares are far more effective, darling,” I tell him with a smile.

He nods, returning it, even though there’s a tense layer when I make the joke. We both know it’s what’s causing the outside friction.

Lo spins his wedding band, the giveaway that says he’s craving alcohol. “Please tell me you at least screamed or cried or something.”

I remember how I broke down while holding Rose in my arms, but I don’t want to mention this. There’s a large part of me that craves the way Lo looks at me. Immortal. Impervious. A god among men. That has only been altered a handful of times over the years, and today I don’t want to add to the count. So I pivot the conversation, “How’s Lily?”

He shakes his head once. I’ve poked at a sore spot.

“That bad?”

He rubs his temple, anxiety wounding through him. I’m causing this. Me. My past. The thought cages my breath for a second.

“Uh…shit. She wouldn’t want me talking about her.” He taps his fingers on the desk, obviously wanting to share. To get it off his chest.

“I won’t tell.”

“Rose?” he asks. “Because she’ll probably feel the need to talk to Lily about it and then I’m fucked for telling you.”

“I promise.”

His shoulders fall and he stops twisting his wedding band. “She’s really upset about the new fandom name the journalists made for her and Ryke. Celebrity Crush has been posting about it everywhere.” Now that there are rumors of Lo and me together, the rumors of Lily and Ryke have resurfaced. “She said she’s not upset about the actual rumors. It’s just that she’s been promoting freakin’ Raisy for the past year, and now they came up with Rily. She said it makes her sick.”

Lo looks crushed, the weight of Lily’s pain pounding him. It’s this type of love that scares me the most. Feeling that much empathy is crippling.

“Maybe it’ll all pass in time,” I say, letting a shred of hope float into the world. It may be false, but I choose to see it as real.

His eyes are reddened, and he lowers his head so people in the hallway can’t see, his office mostly just glass walls.

“I’m sorry, Lo,” I tell him. I hurt him, whether he wants to believe it or not. Whether he wants to bury it with glares and I don’t give a fucks. The pain that he is going through is the result of my history.

He shakes his head. “It’s not your fault. If anything, Lil and I should be apologizing to you. We’re the ones who started this.” He’s talking about the fame. It all began with Lily and Lo. Their addictions and the salacious headlines.

“It’s kind of you to take credit for this, but it’s unneeded,” I tell him. “We’re all so far past the beginning that the end is no one’s to claim.”

He stares at me for a long moment before he says, “That’s pretty fucking deep, love.”

“I’ve been deeper.”

The innuendo makes him laugh. His eyes trail past me to his door. “Speaking of where you’ve been,” he says.

I follow his gaze, turning my head slightly. I see Rose approaching, a binder in her clutch. Beside her is someone I haven’t seen in years. I know Lo isn’t referring to Theo, seeing as how he has no knowledge that I’ve slept with the Hale Co. employee, but the irony isn’t lost on me.

* * *

“I need to wash my mouth out with soap.” Rose takes the seat across from me. “The words that came out of it were vile.” Theo remains standing off to the side, holding a folder and waiting for Lo to acknowledge him.

Lo’s concentration is on Rose. His brows knot together. “You didn’t call anyone an ogre did you?”

“Not to their face.” She flattens her pin skirt and places a binder carefully on the glass table. “But that’s not what I said that makes my skin crawl.”

I press my fingers to my lips, thinking, and simultaneously keeping an eye on my ex in the corner. He’s quiet, perceptive, blending into the walls like he’s made of transparent glass. Theo Balentine hasn’t changed. I didn’t need to see him to know this.

He wasn’t the one who told the press about my past. That alone tells me he’s still the same moral guy I met in boarding school.

Rose takes a large breath before explaining. “I had to tell the board that I loved the patterns of monkeys eating bananas.” She gives me a look and mouths, ew. I smile. “And then there were the ones with bumble bees.” She glowers at Loren like he inflicted this on her. “Bumble. Bees.”

“I assume everything went well then,” I say, knowing her ploy.

“They told me they’re going to take some time and rethink the designs,” she says, her lips rising. “That’s when I called one of them an ogre.”

Loren lets out an annoyed breath. “Great. Just great. You know, even I can hold my tongue in a board room.”

“It was all for show, Loren.”

Lo has been informed about her new strategy to pretend to like all the board member’s ideas that she actually hates, and every time she agrees with them, they change their minds. She’s guiding them towards her styles and designs without them realizing. So far her plan seems to have worked to her benefit.

Lo looks to Theo in the corner. “Do you have the alternate designs?”

“I do…” He coughs into his hand and pushes the folder on the table. He edges closer to me, his eyes flitting my way.

Lo looks between us. “You two know each other, right?”

“From boarding school,” I say calmly. We both meet each other’s gazes and I nod, not offering a handshake, never rising to my feet. I just don’t care enough to.

My phone buzzes and I procure it from my pocket.

“From Faust,” Theo nods, looking mildly uncomfortable.

“Was Connor just as fun back then as he is now?” Lo says with a half-smile, more enjoyment from this scenario than I’m receiving.

When was your last period? – Frederick

I almost laugh. My therapist is off his A-game. I text: Let me guess, Cobalt and Calloway are far too close in your phone book or you just text us more than your other contacts?

I look up and Rose is giving me a weird look, a glare that’s half contorted in curiosity and half in confusion.

I mouth, later.

She lets out a small huff, a lot more impatient for details than me, but I love the way she crosses her ankles and her arms, her breasts rising with a deep inhale.

Theo answers Lo, “It was interesting. Every time he caught me smoking, he’d tell me that my ambition was being asphyxiated.”

“I wasn’t wrong,” I say my first words to him in years. I glance at my phone when it buzzes.

Ignore that. – Frederick

I do ignore his texts since I have Theo frowning at me, and Lo lets out a long whistle at my statement, breaking a string of tension.

I meet Rose’s fiery, incensed gaze for a moment and she mouths, who? She’s hardly concerned about Theo, just my texts since we’ve been working together to handle this mess with the media.

I’m mostly worried about her OCD flaring, so I pass her my phone.

She reads quickly and hands it back, her shoulders relaxed, probably thankful it’s not Scott. Her eyes meet mine again, and they still possess that fire.

I remember the time I asked her what she thought of Theo. And she called him “a guppy in our ocean”—our ocean. I love Rose, and it’s easy for me to be amiable towards Theo when he sits so far in my past, a past that I don’t cradle like everyone else.

I let people go all the time, and he’s one that has drifted a thousand leagues behind me. I don’t care enough to go swim after him. I wouldn’t. I won’t. But I do wholeheartedly appreciate his morality. It’s one of those values I admire but know I don’t always own.

“I still have ambition. Don’t you see where I am?” Theo tells me, pulling my gaze from my wife. Rose hardly seems to mind. We have so much confidence in our relationship that it’d be nearly impossible for a person to wedge themselves between us and cause

doubt and friction in our marriage.

Don’t you see where I am? His gray eyes repeat the statement.

He’s in a Fortune 500 company. He’s in a higher salary-paying job than most at Faust. He’s climbing his way to the top.

“It’s not what you wanted,” I tell him. He dreamed of writing poetry, of living off the land with life’s bare necessities. He dreamed of throwing his arms in the air, half-naked in the wilderness where he’d commune with nature and learn great, untouched meanings.

Now he’s in a suit, in the city, stuck within a high-rise where poetry has little use except within his own mind.

“Dreams change,” Theo says, and I can see that he’s accepted this new life now. Maybe it is what he wants.

Dreams change.

I think there’s good change where we see our path diverge and we willingly follow the new road. And then there’s forced change where debris impedes us from our path and we’re searching desperately for a route back onto our planned destination.

The dream I’ve always desired—to grow a family with Rose—is being forced to change.

And I can’t see any way around the debris.