He stayed inside of me for a moment as my breathing began to return to normal, pulling me close to him as we both recovered. The heat that had burned through my body began to ebb away, and Callum grabbed the blanket and wrapped it around me as he pulled me close to him, holding me in his arms.
Now that I was coming down from my high, reality was starting to set in, and I felt the first pang of anxiety.
I’d let him in again.
I did my best to do what my therapist back in Michigan had always told me to do when I got anxious, which was to try and stay in the moment, to take each thought and label it according to what was really going on, not according to which emotions had attached to my thoughts.
I was trying to figure out how I could keep my emotions out of the fact that I’d just had sex with a man who’d been acting like a total jackass to me, a man who had basically broken into my apartment, when Callum broke the silence.
“I’ve never done that before,” he said, his voice cutting into my thoughts.
“What?”
“What we just did.” His fingers moved lazily down my back, and I felt myself get hot between my legs again.
I laughed. “I think you’ve had sex before Callum.”
“No.” He shook his head. “Not like that.”
“Not like what?”
“Not vanilla sex.”
“What’s vanilla sex?”
“That,” he said. “No ropes. No whips. No handcuffs.”
“You’ve never had sex without that stuff?”
“Not since…” he trailed off.
“Not since what?” I asked gently. My head was against his chest, and I could hear his heart beating slow and steady. I ran my palm over the taut muscles of his chest, marveling at how fit his body was, how strong.
“Adriana,” he said, and he turned and pulled me toward him so that we were both on our sides facing each other. The room was dark, and he was bathed in shadow, but the light that faded into the room from the hallway hit his face softly, causing the blue in his eyes to blaze like a light at the end of a tunnel. “What happened this morning, with Rose. That wasn’t your fault. I was an asshole.”
“You were,” I said, not even bothering to try to pretend it was okay. “You made me feel horrible.”
“I know,” he said. “You were an angel to bring her there, to take care of her the way you did.”
“Is she going to be okay?”
“Yes.” He nodded. “She’s going to be okay. The doctors said if you hadn’t been there, if you hadn’t called 911 when you did, she probably wouldn’t have made it.”
“I did what anyone else would have done.”
“No.” He shook his head. “Rose told me what happened. You could have left. You should have left, after the way I took off like that.”
He sighed and shifted so he was back lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling. He rubbed his hands over the stubble on his cheeks.
“Who is she?” I asked softly. “Rose, is she… I mean, I know you said she’s a friend but she told me she lives there. At your um, that apartment. The one you use for sex.”
“She stays there sometimes.”
“Are you sleeping with her?” I tasted something bitter in my mouth, thinking about him doing what we’d just done with Rose, even though he’d just said he’d never done that before. I imagined him whispering her name instead of mine, making her say his name, his hands in her hair, his lips on hers.
Of course I wasn’t stupid – the man had a whole apartment that he basically used for a sex palace. He was gorgeous and rich and sexy as hell. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how many women he’d been with.
But something about Rose was different, visceral. I’d met her. I’d seen her there, in his apartment, I’d heard him talking to her.
“No,” Callum said. “I’m not sleeping with her.”
“Have you ever?”
“Yes.”
I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach, even though I’d been expecting it.
“Rose is…” Callum trailed off and sighed again. “It’s complicated.”
“Tell me.”
“It will scare you away.” His voice was heavy with emotion, the first time I’d heard that kind of rawness from him, the first time I’d seen a real sign that he might be able to let his walls down.
“No,” I said, taking his hand and intertwining my fingers with his. “No, it won’t.” As soon as I was done saying the words, I realized I was making a promise I wasn’t sure I could keep. But it was too late. I couldn’t take them back. I wanted to know what it was he was hiding, what dark thing was twisting him up inside.
He swallowed and turned his head to look at me, reaching his thumb out and tracing it down the line of my cheekbone. “God, you are so beautiful,” he said. “You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
I closed my eyes and let the comment wash over me, biting back the instinct I had to protest that I wasn’t.
“You deserve better, Adriana,” he said. “You deserve better than me.” He shook his head. “The problem is, I can’t stay away from you. I can’t control myself when I’m around you, you’re in my head, and you’re fucking me up.”
“Then tell me,” I said. “Whatever it is, just tell me, Callum.”
His eyes searched my face in the darkness, like he was looking for a clue, some indication of whether or not I could handle whatever it was he was about to say. I tried not to show any judgment on my face, and honestly, it wasn’t that difficult.
I’d felt him inside of me, felt his soul, his being.
I couldn’t explain how I knew, but I just did, that he wasn’t a bad person. Whatever he was about to tell me couldn’t scare me away. It was impossible.
He opened his mouth. “Rose was my sponsor.”
“Your sponsor?” I frowned, turning this new information over in my head. “Like for AA?”
He nodded. “Yes. I’m an addict, Adriana. I started drinking when I was a teenager, and it progressed to the point where it became a problem.”
I swallowed and waited a moment before I spoke, trying to more fully absorb what he’d just said. I knew that people didn’t become addicts for no reason, that usually it was related to something else – trauma, depression, anxiety, all of the above. The fact that he was telling me he was an addict was only the tip of the iceberg, and I didn’t want to push him too hard. “Drugs?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No. They were never my thing. Rose, she… she helped me to get clean. We meet at a meeting five years ago, and she’d been clean for three years. She became my sponsor.”
“So what happened?” I asked softly.
His eyes lost a bit of their focus, like he was being pulled from the present into the past, going back in time to remember something he obviously tried not to think about. “We got clean. Well, she got me clean, and everything was… it was going well. We were friends. And then, one night we had sex.” He gave a bitter laugh. “It was stupid really. I don’t even remember how it started. My family, they were –” He cut himself off before he could say more. “The reasons aren’t important. But we had sex, even though we knew it was a horrible idea.”
My heart hitched in my chest at his words, but I forced myself to hold steady, not wanting to give him any reason to shut down.
I stayed quiet and gripped his hand tighter under the blanket.
“But the next night, we did it again.” He took in a shuddering breath. The next morning, we had a talk about how it couldn’t happen again. She seemed fine with it and I’d thought we were in agreement. She went home. That night, she relapsed.”
“Oh, Callum,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I took her to rehab, but she…” he trailed off and shook his head, as if he were remembering. “She never got clean again. She checked herself out of rehab, and ever since she’s been drinking. And then about a year ago she moved onto harder drugs.”
“And that’s when you made a promise never to be with a woman for more than one night,” I whispered.
He nodded, the tortured look in his eyes apparent even in the shadows of the bedroom. He turned and looked at me. “Except for you.”
He pulled me back into his arms and I snuggled against him, feeling a lump of emotion in my throat. Nothing Callum had just told me had scared me away. If anything, it made me understand him more, and my heart ached for him, for the fact that he obviously blamed himself for Rose’s relapse.
I wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault, that he wasn’t responsible for Rose’s choices. But something stopped me, something made me feel like it wouldn’t be what he wanted to hear, that it might just make him return to his cocoon.
But how could I not say it? How could I let him tell me something like that and not let him know it wasn’t his fault?
“It wasn’t your fault, Callum,” I said, and I felt his body go rigid next to mine, proving that my instinct had been right.
I glanced up at him and saw his jaw twitch.
“I know,” he said. But obviously he didn’t, otherwise he wouldn’t have made it a rule that he could only have sex with a woman for one night, wouldn’t have the urge to dominate and control them so completely.