Dare Me

by Stella Rhys

  “Show me.”

  His words ripped the orgasm out of me and I came wildly, unraveling for him, pulsing around his fingers and losing the world around me. I had given Callum everything inside me by the time he pulled me back down onto him, draping my arms over his shoulders and watching me catch my breath. He let himself crack a smile as I shook my head in disbelief of where he’d brought me. His fingers brushed up and down my back as he wrapped his arms around my waist. I could feel the affection in his touch and I could see the admiration in his eyes.

  But swirling through the air were a million words unsaid.

  He wanted to ask me something, I could feel it. I sensed it hanging in the deep silence and I knew it was about me. I knew it was about what he still didn’t know. I could ease Callum’s every physical ache and he could addict me to his passion, but we were still incomplete. And it was because of me. Because of the secret I insisted on keeping.

  Closing my eyes, I rest my head on his shoulder, relishing his gentle stroke of my hair. I thanked God he didn’t break the silence or ask me a thing but at the same time, I felt a weight pulling at my heart. Because no matter how much I filled his need, whatever I gave was sucked right back out but what I refused to tell.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Callum

  I was in my office at The Pike when Ana Hale called from the Times with “good news, bad news and an idea.” Our piece in their magazine was going to run later than expected. Apparently, she’d shown what she had to her editor and it’d been good enough to warrant a single positive concern: that readers would want more.

  “They want it to be longer. More detail – specifically on you, which I don’t blame them for.” Her flirtatious voice on speaker lifted Oz’s eyebrows. He’d come in halfway through the hall and when she said that, mouthed what the fuck while jabbing a thumb at himself.

  “Really? What about Oz?”

  “Him too, of course. Both of you handsome men.” Oz and I exchanged smirks. “My editors were suddenly much more interested in this article after they saw your portraits from the photo shoot.” Her giggle was surprisingly girlish. “What can I say. Sex sells.”

  Oz pumped his fist and I laughed. “Glad for that. So I’ve heard the bad news and the good news at this point. What’s the idea?”

  “You, me and your Viking friend going to Scotland.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. Oz mirrored my expression. We both nodded at each other, slow at first but with increasing excitement as Ana detailed the plan.

  “They want pictures of you two at the actual home of your barrels. Maybe a shot of the pub you met at. We know all about the Scotch and the brand but we don’t know enough about the team behind it, so you two are going to reminisce for us in front of the scenic backdrop of Dufftown – which, of course, will boost tourism and visits to Pike Distillery. Sound good to you?”

  “Yes would be an understatement.”

  “Great. I think we’re going to have a really good time, Callum,” she said, a sultry roll in her voice. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Same.”

  Oz laughed hard when I hung up. “She’s not one for subtlety. I’m sure you’ll have her bent over a barrel on the first day.” When I didn’t give him much of a response, he grinned. “Unless, of course, you’ve got a special thing going on with the River girl.”

  “Lake.”

  “Is it official? Am I gonna be fighting Logan for best man duties?”

  “Doubtful.”

  “What? Trouble in paradise already?”

  The phrase made me snort. My paradise with Lake was defined by trouble. It thrived on it. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “What would you say?”

  “Nothing.” Lake and I were unexplainable. There was a universe of context behind every move we made and every word we spoke. It was pointless to try to get any outside party to understand whatever entity we were on our own. “No trouble in paradise. We’ve been having a good time together,” I said to shut Oz up.

  It wasn’t a lie. I’d been enjoying myself with Lake. I forced myself to forget the shitty dreams that had been plaguing me since she left. I made myself bury the dark thoughts. They still lingered in my head and told me she refused to reveal where she went because she had plans to go back. But I stifled them by just being with her, watching her, taking a million notes in my head about the new things she liked. The little habits she’d either developed while she was gone or I’d never gotten the chance to know. They reminded me that she was real, present and right there with me. They brought me closer to her again, connected me back in a way that made me confident that I’d feel it in the air next time – feel it in her body if she was thinking about disappearing.

  I watched her sleep the way I used to. The sound of her breathing was still exactly the same. But in the night, she always found her way to the very edge of the bed, till she was almost falling off. She’d stay asleep but sigh with relief when I pulled her back and bury herself straight into my chest. In the morning, she wandered aimlessly all over the house while brushing her teeth. A new habit. She sometimes started the coffee machine or flipped through a magazine with her toothbrush hanging out of her mouth. I told her to stop because I loathed the idea of toothpaste existing outside the bathroom but I eventually started following her, mostly because I was curious to see where the hell she was going, what she was even up to. Only she could be so fucking annoying and cute in one shot.

  They were small things that shouldn’t have been a story but I’d been without Lake for long enough to recognize that simply watching her was a privilege. Her every move around the house was something I took in with pure fascination.

  I loved it. But in our fashion, of course, it all came with a downside.

  Whenever I asked where the new habits came from, Lake gave a strained smile and some generic answer that I knew was a cover-up. A complete lie. I tried not to let that ruin it for me because for all the thrills and success that I’d achieved in recent years from building a business from just about the ground up, I was somehow finding the most satisfaction in living with Lake. Just existing with her again. I looked at her and knew I didn’t want anyone else. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever see in my life and the best feeling I could ever wish for. There was only one thing left to want with her but obviously, it was an important one – the security of knowing that she was here to stay.

  *

  I tossed hard in bed. I felt it yet I didn’t stir or wake and with that, with the first chords of the song, I knew what was coming.

  I’d been having the dreams of Lake for so long that even in my sleep, I knew where I was – at home, in bed, simply enduring the bullshit my sick brain still insisted on putting me through. It started the same every time, with an achingly accurate flashback to the day she left. The memories were still vivid. It was a Sunday and rainy. I was twenty-one, Lake some months from the same age. She lived in a dorm and I had my own apartment but we spent a couple weeks out of every summer living with my mom at the townhouse because it made her happy. She needed the company.

  In my dream, I always carried the context of the night before. We’d been having dinner when my mother had asked Lake if they could do brunch the way they used to when she first moved in – big and theatric, a dazzling event complete with Ella Fitzgerald blaring on the speakers and cheek-to-cheek tangos down the hall. Lake cringed at the childish memory but said yes – as long as my mother made Liège waffles. “Deal. And don’t you back out on it, girly, because I have a surprise for you.”

  I rolled my eyes. I knew what it was. I was there when my mother came home laughing to herself because she’d seen and randomly bought a full-on tango dress complete with a flower hairpiece and dramatic ruffles at the bottom. “Remember when Lake and I used to dance down the hall to the kitchen? Wouldn’t it be funny if I wore this to wake her up one day?”

  “If she was five.”

  “Oh – you,” she huffed. She wagged an accusing finger at
me. “You, Callum Pike, are never any fun at all.” But then she came to the couch, grabbed my head and planted a kiss on it because she was unflappable in her Lake-inspired moods.

  The next morning, I woke up before anyone else. My internal clock hadn’t kicked the early bird habit from high school, when I had an hour of wrestling practice before class even started. I was having my first breakfast when my mother came downstairs to ask me how she looked in her ridiculous dress. I told her she looked like an extra in a low-budget movie. She knew it wasn’t a compliment but she decided to take it as one and that made me laugh enough to follow her and go witness the stupid dance.

  The dream started every time with a flurry of red – my mother’s dress as she rushed to the hall after the speakers finished the first song. She always let a different one play out first – a way of guaranteeing that Lake had already stirred enough to realize that there was music and music meant she should get up and get ready to dance. Her end of it generally started with groaning and calling out from behind her door. “No! Please! I don’t want to do this anymore!” Pretty much every time, she wailed something to the like but it never actually stopped her from laughing her ass off when my mother burst into her room with some deliberately shitty interpretation of a Latin dance move. It made no sense considering the Fifties jazz on the speakers but it didn’t have to because it had them both cackling like it was the funniest thing in the world.

  “Heaven… I’m in Heaven…”

  Their song wafted in my ears. I saw the red ruffles moving, heard my mother’s laugh as she delighted herself down the hall. “You better be awake by now, Sleeping Beauty,” she called when we didn’t hear Lake’s usual protesting. I shouted something about her hurrying up because I was hungry. The food always smelled too good to wait for but everything we did in that house hung on her approval, so I stood there, vaguely entertained but still thoroughly annoyed. I was planted square at the end of the hall when my mom burst into Lake’s room with a laugh and a “ha!” and a big cha-cha move. Her arms were high in the air, reaching straight for the sky.

  I remembered the sound when they fell straight to her sides.

  “And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak…”

  I remembered the twisting in my stomach because while I didn’t have a view of her face, I knew from the way she stood that something was wrong. I was a prideful, eye-rolling kid. But urgency paced my every step down the hall that morning because my mom was standing there as if the world had just ended and for some reason, my heart knew that for once, she wasn’t being dramatic. I could feel the moment was real without even seeing her eyes. The air had decidedly shifted. Joyous just before, it filled suddenly with shadowy gloom and now their gleeful song was grating on me.

  “And I seem to find the happiness I seek…”

  It echoed loud, flared with distortion in my ear. I memorized the tune with those famous lines sandwiching my mother’s piercing cry.

  “When we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Lake

  Three mornings in a row, I woke up in Callum’s apartment alone. I didn’t take it personally because he had work and we still spoke normally later in the day. He still smiled and tipped my chin up to kiss my lips. Little things still bothered me slightly. I caught him looking at me several times when I turned around, and without a hint of warmth in his eye, but I forced myself to dismiss it because it likely meant nothing. Callum always had a serious look to him, even as a kid. It wasn’t till the fourth morning that I confirmed something was wrong. We were making breakfast and he’d been quiet, giving short answers to all my questions.

  When he finally gave a full sentence, I wished right away that he hadn’t.

  “I’m going to Scotland on Friday.”

  My head snapped up. I stopped chopping the basil. “You’re – what?”

  “For the Times article. They want to extend it so Oz and I are going to fly there and give Ana a tour of Dufftown and the distillery.”

  “I…” My voice drifted off because I realized my question – “How long will you be there?” – was pointless. He wasn’t going to fly there for less than day and come back. I stared with pure awe at his blank expression. “You’re leaving the day before my birthday.”

  “Yes.”

  “You remembered that?” I would’ve preferred that he’d forgotten and made the plans by mistake. But he confirmed it wasn’t the case.

  “I remember your birthday, Lake.”

  My heart beat fast. I could’ve sworn there was something accusing in his tone. I remember your birthday, Lake. I’ve remembered six September Fourteenths since you left and every single one has ripped me to fucking shreds. He might not have been implying those words exactly but it was probably something similar because those words were mine. I’d spent every July Eighth for the past six years tearing myself apart. I agonized by midnight of each birthday, my mind starting with the image of Callum’s shirt splashed in champagne as he had drunk, celebratory sex. By night, I’d be tired but sleepless, wondering what changes this year had brought the boy I’d grown up loving – the boy who was now, unquestioningly, a man. I imagined how his looks, his mind, his heart had changed and I was convinced, no matter what new Callum my brain conjured up, that I’d still love him like I always did.

  And that was exactly how it ended up happening, even despite what he said – that he hadn’t thought once about me after I left. It hurt but it was for his sake that I hoped he was lying. Because I’d thought about him every day in the two thousand or so that I was gone, readying my heart gradually, piece by piece for the moment I would return to him and be face to face with the pain and passion that was us. But since coming back, I still was rocked with daily guilts and regrets and memories both wretched and beautiful that stole the air straight from my lungs. Even when I’d been preparing myself for it.

  If it was all coming back to Callum at once, I could only imagine that he was silently, stoically warring through the most jagged tempest of emotions.

  Still, I couldn’t quite forgive him for this.

  “You said we had plans for my birthday. I thought you said we were doing something special.” Hurt quivered in my voice but I could feel the anger creeping in to overwhelm it as Callum stared back at me, vacant. Unfeeling.

  “Our flight had been for another day but we had to reschedule. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

  He was using his business voice on me. On top of that, I knew he was lying. I was as well versed with his lies as he was with mine. But what bothered me most was the fact that he knew. He knew I knew but he didn’t so much as care to sound convincing or apologetic to lessen the blow. I was visibly wounded and he didn’t bat an eye. The attitude was nothing like the Callum I’d been living with for the past month or so and I could tell, with all the fury in my racing heart, that it was deliberate.

  “What’s going on with you?” I demanded straight to the point. I kept my cool but I knew I was fighting a losing battle.

  “It’s work.”

  His generic answer peaked my rage. “You know you’re ignoring what I’m really asking you about, Callum. At least give me an explanation here. I understand that work happens but I’m not stupid – I know every part of you and the way you’re speaking to me right now is you making an active decision to shut me out and let me know that you’re doing it. I am not asking you why you have to go to Scotland, I’m asking you why this… this flip suddenly switched!”

  “You can demand answers but I can’t?”

  I dropped my knife with a clack. “That’s separate.”

  “No, it’s fucking not,” Callum fumed, his enraged eyes paralyzing me from across the kitchen counter. “I tried, Lake. I did. I keep trying to get us back to where we were but it’s really hard without an answer to the six years that you were gone. I can’t fully enjoy what I have with you because I’m actively pushing away the shit that’s nagging me at the back of my head and you refuse
to free me from that prison by doing the most obvious thing in the world. You owe me an explanation at this point. I can’t overlook the impossible, Lake! Put yourself in my shoes – it would eat at you too and you know it.”

  The tears spilled without warning because I did know it. I had known before even coming back that I’d be asking far too much of Callum. The realization had me thinking of Colorado, California, all these great but starkly different places from New York – cities in which I could start my life over for the last time, because I couldn’t imagine Callum accepting the terms to my homecoming. Yes, I disappeared on you and Caroline without warning and made no attempts at contact for six years but do you think you can let all that go and take me back without question because I can’t stop loving you? It sounded stupid every way I tried to put it so I looked up Denver, Boulder, San Francisco. I knew I would eventually find work, friends, some sort of love despite knowing I’d never stop comparing every man I met to Callum and my imagination of what he’d become since I’d gone. I had a flight booked to Denver International, a hotel room paid for and a job interview lined up for the following morning. I was at my gate at the airport when I went back on my decision to forget New York because I couldn’t muster up the courage to ask an impossible favor of Callum. There was no one else in the world that I’d ever love more than him. That much I knew. So I’d be shameless, audacious and downright insulting before I gave up on him without even trying.