all was wrong.
“Bree,” he said, flashing me his pearly whites. “I have to say, I thought you’d be a little more excited.”
I probably sounded stupid, but all I could do was say, “Calum. What are you doing here?” My back hurt because I was so twisted in my seat, my fingers curling around the back of the chair so tightly my knuckles were white.
Calum shrugged. “I wanted to surprise you, but it looks like you don’t want me here, so maybe I’ll just go—”
What happened next was a blur. One moment I was sitting there, staring at him, questions racing through my head, and the next I was up, walking to him in a daze, practically slamming my body against his wide, strong chest. His jacket was unzipped, allowing me to grab hold of the fabric of his shirt under it, bury my face against it and breathe him in.
He was here. He wasn’t ignoring me or trying to leave me; he was only trying to surprise me. I didn’t know what to think about that. This almost felt like a dream. A strange, hyper-realistic dream that I never wanted to wake from.
His arms were slow to wrap around me, holding me tight, and I heard the thrum of his voice in his chest as he asked, “So, I can stay?”
I nodded against him, too speechless to beg. I was at that point, you know—where I’d beg this man to stay, plead with him to not go back. If that made me pathetic, if it made me stupid because this could never last…then I guess I was the most pathetic and stupid of them all.
Calum’s arms squeezed me once before letting me go, though he didn’t release me entirely. His hands went to my arms, as if he was afraid to let me go. His sapphire gaze bore into me, holding a dozen emotions I could hardly begin to describe. “I missed you,” he murmured.
Was it weird to feel my body ache when he said that? I had no idea. “I missed you, too,” I replied, watching as he bent his tall frame down and lowered his head to mine. My eyes closed the moment he kissed me, and it was just as sweet and warm as I remembered.
When his lips were pulled off mine, I gazed up at him and said, “You should’ve told me you were coming.” I could’ve showered. I was looking a little ratched right now…though, in all honesty, that’s how I looked every day. It’s just that I was now starting to care about how I looked, at least to Calum and Mason.
“And miss the surprise on your face? Never.” Calum smiled as he stepped back, taking off his jacket and laying it across the foot of my bed. His head tilted as he meandered to my desk, glancing at what I had out. A textbook, along with my notebook—a notebook that was full of doodles, but I would argue that I still paid attention in class better than half of the other kids. “What are you working on? That group project you have with Mason?”
He didn’t sound as jealous as Mason did when he brought Calum up, and I wondered if he didn’t view Mason as competition. If he wasn’t worried at all about it, if he thought he had me in the bag. He never told me to not hang out with Mason, but at the same time, he also didn’t know how close Mason and I were.
Last night…he knew nothing about my date with Mason last night.
“No,” I said, feeling my cheeks heat up as I went to close the textbook. “I have an exam in another class next week, so I was doing a bit of studying.” It was right then when I wondered if I should tell Calum about my date with Mason last night—not every detail of it, but just the fact that he’d had me over, and we spent time alone not working on the project.
Would he be angry? Would he be jealous? I already knew Mason was beyond jealous when it came to Calum.
But as I looked back to Calum, no words formed in my throat, nothing at all to tell him about last night. I just couldn’t do it. Call me weak, call me useless, call me a scaredy-cat. Whatever. If I was a bad person for not telling him, then I guess that’s what I would be.
Calum spent the rest of the day with me.