Crashing into Love by Flora Ferrari

Chapter Ten

Callie

His heartbeat pounds against my ear, the vibrations moving through me until it’s like my own heart joins the rhythm of his.

I smile despite how surreal this all feels, despite the memory of the panties wrapped around the door, if they were panties. His words whisper through my mind, his claim on me, how badly he wants me.

One sentence in particular thunders into me.

I swear on my dead mother.

“Conrad,” I whisper. “Are you asleep?”

He chuckles, causing a smile to touch my lips.

“I can’t sleep when I’m lying next to you, Callie.”

A joke rises up inside of me, a note of banter. Part of me wants to fight it down, my anxiety telling me he’ll laugh at me and not in the way I want. But then I find myself saying it away, blurting it out.

“That’s going to make the rest of our lives difficult, Conrad.”

He laughs again, deeper this time, as his fingers make tingling patterns in my hair. The sensation slinking from my scalp all over my body, pricking my neck, my breasts, my everything.

“Do you believe me now then?” he teases.

I cuddle closer to him, praying this isn’t a dream, that I won’t wake up in my crappy apartment on a lumpy couch with that awful music pounding through the walls.

“Yeah, I think so. It’s what you said. About your mom.”

“When I swore on her?”

I nod, knowing he can feel the up-and-down movement against his chest.

He sighs. “She died when I was a child, a botched surgery. She was only supposed to have her ACL repaired but somebody fucked up, fucked up bad, and… That’s why I wanted to become a surgeon.”

His voice has taken on a dark quality, as though he’s become momentarily lost in the past.

“I wanted to make sure that nothing like that ever happened again. It’s what shaped me, sharpened me like a scalpel. It’s all I thought about, all I dreamt about, for years. And maybe…”

“What?” I urge when he trails off.

His fingers pause in my hair, his movements stilled for a moment. The night is truly dark now, the city silent, making it seem like we’re the only two people who exist, who matter. A shard of guilt stabs at me when I think of my mom elsewhere in the penthouse, probably sleeping deeply.

She always sleeps deeply these days, as though not wanting to face reality, her life.

“And maybe it broke something in me,” he growls. “After Mom’s death, Dad said I changed. I became colder. Less emotional. Maybe that’s why he thought I was crazy when I said I had to wait for the woman who’d make me feel, truly feel, bone deep in the way you do. Soul deep.”

Tingles radiate from my chest and fill my body and I huddle closer to him, coughing back a sob. “My dad died last year.”

His arm tightens around me. “Fuck. I’m sorry.”

“A car accident,” I go on, somehow finding the words when this is the first time I’ve properly spoken about it.

Mom doesn’t want to hear about it, ever, and I find it difficult to spoil my best friend Simone’s bright life with talk of such darkness.

“It was raining and he slipped on the road, and that was that. Mom – it shattered her, Conrad. I was in school for interior design. Community college. Not the greatest college in the world, but I was holding it together. I was working at a restaurant part-time and paying mom and dad rent. Dad was working his ass off at the garage and mom was working at a movie theater. None of us had amazing jobs, but it was enough to get by.”

He gives my shoulder a squeeze, leaning down and kissing the top of my head. “It’s okay.”

“After dad died, mom withdrew into herself. It was like she wasn’t even the same person anymore. She used to be so confident, so vivacious, so ready to take on the world. She used to laugh all the time. She has the most infectious laugh. But now she’s… it’s like she’s not even there. And I don’t know what to do. We had to move when she couldn’t work anymore. I had to drop out of school. But I don’t know what to do to help her, to make her feel better.”

I whimper and a sob escapes me, and then it’s not just one sob. It’s a whole freaking stream of them.

I bury my face against his chest as the tears spill out of me, the torrent erupting as all the pent-up emotion bursts free.

“It’s okay,” he whispers, sliding his fingers through my hair over and over again. “It’s okay. Let it out.”

“I feel so selfish,” I croak. “I know my mom is hurting worse than me and—”

“You never have to apologize or feel bad for being upset, Callie,” he interrupts with a growl. “Or for feeling anything. Not to me. Ever. You can always be yourself. I want you, all of you, no matter how you feel, no matter what you’re going through. Forever.”

“Forever,” I whisper, coughing back a sob. “I’ve never had a chance to talk about this. I just… I miss my dad so much, and I want to do right for my mom. I want to help her.”

“I’ll help you both,” Conrad says firmly. “I can get some recommendations for grief counselors, for both of you. You can go back to school when the semester starts in September. You don’t have to worry about anything.”

I think about the pink bundle on the door handle, the way he quickly snatched it away, the panic and possible guilt that flitted across his expression too quick for me to properly read. If it wasn’t for that, I’d be dancing around the room right now, relieved for a chance to let the pressure go for a little while.

But it weighs heavily on my mind, and I sigh.

“You don’t have to do all of that,” I whisper.

“I do, and I am,” he growls. “I’m going to take care of you. I want you to be able to follow your dreams. I want you to be happy. And for your mother to get the help she needs.”

I sniffle, shivering as I hug closer to him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to blubber all over you.”

He squeezes me harder. “Callie, I don’t want to hear the S-word every again. You have nothing to apologize for.”

I huddle closer to him, trying to find the strength within me to believe his words, to claw onto them and let them sink deep inside of me. Otherwise, I’ll blurt about the panties, calling him a liar, telling him he must be playing a trick on me.

But he just told me what happened with his mom and he swore on her. There’s no freaking way he’d do that if he didn’t mean it.

This is real. He wants me as badly as I want him.

Can I really go forward without knowing the full truth?

I need to ask him, get it out in the open, so he can chuckle and run his hands across my cheeks, calling me silly as he explains the completely innocent reason for the way he behaved earlier tonight.

My gut tightens as I open my mouth, chords of anxiety pulsing through me, telling me no, no, no – telling me to keep it buried deep and quiet, to not ruin what we have.

If it wasn’t for Conrad and his impossible enticing claim, Mom and I would be sleeping in a dingy apartment with no power, the lock broken because of Todd and his friends.

But I can’t allow myself to endure this silently. It will drive me insane.

“Conrad,” I whisper.

“Yes?” His voice rumbles through me as his fingers whisper through my hair.

“When we got here, what was that—”

Suddenly an alarm blares through the apartment, high-pitched, rending my ears and seeming to multiply in the air. It sounds like a dying animal, screeching its last, howling.

“What is that?” I yell, and then through the screeching, I hear mom’s voice raised in panic.

She moans wordlessly, sounding more vulnerable and at threat than I’ve ever heard her, sounding like she’s going to lose her mind.

“The fire alarm,” Conrad snarls. “It’s always been too goddamn loud. But they had some trouble a few years back, so they turned it up. Come on. We need to get downstairs.”

“It’s like the night doesn’t want to end,” I say, chuckle without humor.

“Yeah. Tell me about it.”