[Callum’s POV]
She comes down the stairs avoiding the fourth and ninth step, which means the bathroom floor did its thing again this morning. Seven fifteen, right on schedule, and I'm not going to examine why I've started timing my mornings around her footsteps.
I'm not an idiot. I know what morning sickness sounds like through a floor, what never-touches-alcohol means, what it looks like when a woman's hand drifts to her stomach thinking nobody's watching. She's pregnant, and the father is whoever sent her running into my pub.
If I push, she bolts. So I pour coffee and play dumb, because keeping her here and silent beats losing her entirely.
The lunch shift is a disaster—menu on Gerald's shoe, table four's order to table six, three blank stares toward the harbour like she’s starring in the most dramatic music video ever. Old Reg asks if she's all right, and she smiles so convincingly he believes it. I see the seams.
After closing, I find her on the bar with her legs dangling, shoes off, staring at her hands. "Company or quiet?"
"Company." Her shoulders drop half an inch, and that half-inch is the best tip I've gotten all week.
I pull myself onto the bar beside her. Close enough for almost, far enough for safe. "Did I ever tell you about the time I sailed to France?"
"You've told me about dolphins, motorbikes, and a bear." Her voice is dry and tired and perfect. "I'm running out of shelf space for your fictional memoir."
"This one's mostly real—buddy had a boat, and I'm using 'boat' generously, basically a bathtub with ambitions." I bump her knee with mine, and she doesn't pull away. "Bet me fifty quid I couldn't make Calais."
"You took a bathtub to France." Her eyebrow lifts, and my chest does something acrobatic that I'm choosing to ignore.
"Took a bathtub to Jersey—miscalculated the current, washed up near a hotel, soaking, shoeless, told the concierge I was a guest." I grin, because this one actually happened. "He gave me a robe and a room key, and I stayed three nights before anyone checked."
The laugh breaks out of her raw and startled and exhausted, and every rib I own expands. I've been counting her laughs for weeks and this one is different—it has weight, and damage, and something underneath that sounds like the first full breath after a long time without.
"How are you real?" She shakes her head, and a strand of dark hair falls across her cheekbone.
My hand moves before my brain gets a vote, fingers brushing hair off her cheek.
She closes her eyes and turns her face into my palm, and my pulse slams into my throat so hard I nearly choke on it.
"Callum." My name in her mouth, quiet and stripped bare, and my every nerve stands at attention.
Her fingers find the back of my neck and pull me in, and her mouth is warm and open and nothing like the beach. The beach was a redirect, bodies borrowing each other for anaesthesia. This kiss is slow, deliberate, her tongue sliding against mine, her fingers curling into my hair and tightening.
I pull her closer by the hip, her legs wrapping around me, the bar creaking under us. My hand slides under her shirt and her skin is smooth and warm under my palm.
My mouth finds the spot below her ear where her pulse is hammering. The sound she makes—caught between a gasp and a moan—travels straight down my spine.
"Not here," she breathes against my mouth, and I lift her off the bar, her thighs gripping my waist, her mouth hot on my neck, teeth grazing my collarbone as I carry her through the back hall.
Her laugh vibrates against my throat, and my hands tighten on her thighs, and I am cheerfully, spectacularly losing my mind.
My room. Dark, cedar-scented. Her back meets the mattress and I hold myself above her, and in the half-light her face is completely open—no armour, no performance, just her.
I pull her shirt off. Her bra is plain white cotton and somehow the most devastating thing I've ever seen, and I press my mouth to her sternum where her heartbeat hammers against my lips.
My hands slide up her ribs, thumbs tracing the underwire, then behind her. The clasp gives and I drag the straps down her shoulders.
Her breasts are full and warm. I take one in my mouth, tongue circling her nipple until it tightens, and her back lifts off the mattress and her fingers twist into the sheets.
I move to the other, slower, dragging my lower lip across the peak. Her hips roll up against mine and the friction through denim sends a jolt through me so sharp my arms shake.
She pulls my shirt over my head, nails trailing down my chest. When her fingers find my belt my breathing goes ragged.
She unbuttons my jeans, pushes them down with her feet. Her palm presses against me through cotton, firm and deliberate, and my forehead drops to her shoulder and a sound tears out of me—low, rough, wrecked.
I slide her jeans off, kissing her hip bone, the soft skin inside of her thigh. Her underwear is damp when I press my mouth against the fabric, and the noise she makes when my breath hits her through cotton is something I'll replay for weeks.
I pull them down and my mouth finds her, wet and hot, and her thighs tense around my head. I use my tongue in slow, measured strokes—when her breathing catches I stay there, when it quickens I press harder.
Her hand grips my hair, her thighs shaking. She says my name in a voice I don't recognise from her.
"Come here—" She pulls at my shoulders, and I crawl up her body and she reaches between us and guides me in and we both go still. She's tight and warm and the sensation whites out the edges of my vision, her mouth opening against my jaw, her legs wrapping around my hips pulling me deeper.
I start slow because I'm memorising her—every sound, the crease of her brow when I find the right angle, her nails biting my shoulders when I pull almost out and push back in deep. She meets me stroke for stroke, her hips rolling to match mine.
When I shift the angle her whole body clenches around me and the noise that comes from her is broken and raw. I hold the pace and watch her face, and when she comes her back arches hard and her mouth opens soundless and her body grips me tight enough that I nearly follow.
I slow down, let her come back, press my mouth to her jaw where her pulse is still racing. She opens her eyes and the look in them guts me—wrecked and soft and something too large for this room.
She pushes my shoulder and rolls me over and sinks down, and the depth of it makes us both gasp. Her hands on my chest, her hair falling forward, her hips grinding slow, and everything in me tightens to a single bright point.
I grip her thighs, thumbs pressed into soft inner skin. She rides me until my breathing is nothing but her name.
I sit up, forehead against hers, arms around her waist, moving with her. Deeper, tighter, her whimper against my mouth, my groan against hers—and I come so hard my vision goes dark and I bury my face in her neck and hold on.
Afterward, she falls asleep against my chest. Her breathing evens, her hand goes slack over my sternum, and I stare at the ceiling knowing I am in trouble—the kind I've spent thirty-two years outrunning.
Every story I've ever told is a story about leaving, and the punchline was always the same: Callum Ware, the man who walks away grinning. Except with her breathing warm against my ribs, I can't remember why leaving ever sounded like freedom.
And the secret she thinks I can't hear through the floor every morning—the one growing inside her while she laughs at my stories—is going to blow this apart, and I'm still not moving.