Chapter 14
Callie
I woke up the next day alone on the loveseat. I felt like an idiot for climbing in with Asa, but when I’d woken up in the dark my instinct had been to find him. I lay next to Gram, trying to force myself to stay put, but I couldn’t. My anxiety had built and built until I’d finally crawled out of bed and went to find him.
Now I couldn’t see him anywhere. The house was really quiet, a big change from how crowded and noisy it had been the night before. When I sat up and started to fold the blanket I was using, I noticed two men out of the corner of my eye. They were sitting casually at the table, turned toward me, and the dark haired one I’d kicked in the face gave me a little smile.
“Your Grandma went with Poet to get your brother from the airport,” he informed me, watching closely. Knowing that I must have looked like a basket case the day before, I met his eyes calmly and nodded nonchalantly, as if to prove that I wasn’t going to start screaming and running around the house like a lunatic.
I’d caught some kind of second wind, and the weak little girl I’d been the day before was pushed to the back of my mind as I stood up slowly and turned my back to him. I was afraid, that feeling wasn’t going away, but somehow in my sleep I’d formed some sort of a barrier between my emotions and my actions. I wasn’t panicking. The fear was a throbbing mass in my belly, constant but controllable.
I focused on cleaning up my sleeping area and quickly walked to Gram’s room to get dressed before I asked where Asa was. I was trying to act relaxed, but it felt like I was going to jump out of my skin. I knew Gram wouldn’t have left me alone with those guys if she didn’t trust them, but I was still uncomfortable that they’d been in the room while I slept. The longer I was awake, the more aware I was that I hadn’t seen Asa, and by the time I was dressed, I was almost in a full-blown panic. I guess I wasn’t as calm as I’d thought. I knew it wasn’t rational. I knew that I was acting like a freak, clinging to him when I barely knew him. He was probably irritated as hell that I wouldn’t leave him alone. But I couldn’t stop myself; it felt like he alone could protect me from the outside world.
I stayed in Gram’s room for as long as I could, straightening her bedding and going through the bag I’d brought with me. Asa hadn’t packed much, but at least he’d remembered the essentials. I found my iPod at the bottom of my bag and held it to my chest, thankful that he’d thought to pack that small piece of technology. It was silly, but it felt like one piece of normalcy in my suddenly upside-down life.
When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I took a deep breath and made my way out into the living room. The men were still sitting at the table, and I stepped as close to them as I could make myself, stopping six feet away. I battled with myself whether or not to ask where Asa was when he suddenly walked into the kitchen from the small hallway leading from the bathroom. He was fully dressed, his hair wet, and he held a towel up to his beard, rubbing it from side to side.
I stood in silence until he noticed me, running my tongue over the cuts in my mouth to keep me from speaking. I catalogued where my braces had rubbed against my cheeks and tried to focus on remembering if I had wax in my purse or not, acting as though I wasn’t waiting for him to acknowledge me. I refused to be the one who spoke first or to run to him like I wanted to; I needed him to come to me.
“Hey, sleeping beauty. These boys wake you up?” he asked me with a small smile, walking slowly toward where I was standing. The men at the table hadn’t noticed that I’d come out of the bedroom, and both their heads swiveled around quickly in surprise.
“No, they didn’t wake me,” I replied, begging him silently to come closer.
He seemed to understand what I needed, or maybe he needed it too, because he came right to me, wrapping his arms around my waist and lifting me up in a bear hug until my feet were dangling off the ground. His beard tickled across my neck and I grasped his shoulders tighter in response. It was exactly what I needed.
I was disappointed when he let me down, but he kept his hands on my hips once my feet were safely on the floor. He was about to say something, but I’d never know what it was, because just seconds later the front door banged open. The noise startled me so badly that I jumped up, knocking my forehead into his chin as I wrapped my arms and legs around him. I wasn’t tall enough, so I ended up lower than I’d wanted and ended up pulling and scratching my way up his chest until his hands gripped the back of my thighs and hoisted me the rest of the way.
It must have only taken seconds, but by the time I was safely in his arms, I heard my brother yelling.
“Who the hell is he? What the f*ck? Let go of my sister!”
I wanted to go to him. His voice was so strained it was cracking like it hadn’t done in years, and I knew he would be embarrassed, but I was too wrapped up in making myself breathe that I didn’t have the capacity to comfort my brother.
“Cody, that’s Callie’s friend. You just leave them be a minute and she’ll come talk to you,” Gram told him in a no-nonsense voice I’d heard before.
“Screw that! That guy’s like forty years old! What the hell is going on?” he yelled again, his voice once again his usual deep tenor.
They argued some more, but I didn’t catch what they were saying, because all of a sudden we were moving and Asa was speaking quietly in my ear.
“It’s all good, baby, but you need to climb down. Your brother’s about to stab me with one o’ your Gram’s kitchen knives and she’s gonna be pissed,” he told me in an amused voice, his hand rubbing soothingly up and down my back.
I’d finally gotten my breathing under control, so I slid my legs down the outside of his body and stepped away, mumbling, “Sorry,” before I faced my brother.
Cody and I faced each other across the room, both of us uncomfortable with our audience. Any other time, we would have already been hugging and pushing each other around, but we were so far out of our comfort zones that we just stood there staring. He didn’t want to seem like a p-ssy to the men who filled the house, and I was embarrassed that he’d just seen me wrapped around Asa, so neither of us made a move until I finally found my voice.
“I don’t think he’s forty. Maybe thirty,” I told him with a small grin.
That was all it took.
We met in the middle of the room, wrapping our arms around each other as he swung me around slowly. It was what we always did when we saw each other for the first time during his visits. A few years before, he’d grown taller than me, and to prove that he was bigger he’d swung me around, teasing that he wasn’t the little brother any longer.
Having my brother near always made me feel like the world was right again, but this time I knew it was just an illusion. Nothing would ever be right again, and breathing in my brother’s familiar scent reminded me in a flash that I was the reason we’d lost our parents.
How I’d managed to put it from my mind, I didn’t know, but the minute he set me on my feet, I stumbled to the side as if hit, hearing the voices of the men who killed my parents inside my head.
They were calling me by name.
He reached out for my arm, an alarmed look on his face, but I pushed him away, unable to bear his comfort.
“It’s my fault,” I told him, surprised. “Oh, my God. It’s my fault they’re dead.”
His face drained of color as he watched me, but I didn’t see anything else because I was running for the bathroom with my hand over my mouth as if to hold in the vomit that was pressing at the back of my throat.