Bare and Burning

Too Close

"Take off your jacket."

Callum looked up from the chair slowly. "Excuse me?"

"Your jacket," I said again, keeping my voice completely professional. "And loosen up. You are sitting like you are about to fire someone."

He held my gaze for a second longer than necessary, then reached up and shrugged the jacket off his shoulders in one smooth motion. He laid it across the armrest and leaned back, and I immediately regretted the instruction because the grey shirt underneath fit him in a way that made the word professional feel suddenly very thin.

"Better?" he asked.

"Much," I said. "Now. Last week you mentioned someone. A woman from a few years ago. You said she was the point where everything changed."

"I did say that."

"So tell me about her."

He was quiet for a moment, his fingers loosely linked together in his lap. "Her name was Diane. We were together for almost two years, which is the longest I have ever done. I thought I wanted to marry her." He paused. "Turns out she was sleeping with my business partner the entire second year."

"How did you find out?"

"I came home early." His voice did not c***k, did not even dip. He said it the way someone says a thing they have already made peace with on the outside while something underneath is still quietly bleeding. "They were in my bed. My sheets. She did not even look sorry."

I wrote nothing down this time. I just watched him.

"And after that?" I asked.

"After that I was fine," he said. "Completely fine. Went back to work the next morning, closed the biggest deal of that quarter, never cried, never lost sleep." He looked at me directly. "That was the problem."

"Feeling nothing felt wrong to you."

"Feeling nothing when your life blows up is not normal, Cyrene." It was the first time he had used just my first name without the last and something about it landed differently. "I knew that. I just did not know how to get back to the other side of it."

"So instead you kept trying with other women."

"Kept trying," he repeated with a short quiet laugh that had no humor in it. "That is a polite way to say it."

"I am a polite person."

He looked at me then, really looked, and the temperature in the room did something I was not prepared for.

"Are you?" he said softly.

I held his gaze and kept every single thing I was feeling completely off my face. "Tell me what trying looked like. Walk me through it."

"You want details."

"I want honesty. There is a difference."

He shifted forward slightly in his chair, closing a few inches of the space between us, and rested his forearms on his knees. His voice dropped just slightly when he spoke again, not intentionally lower, just quieter, like what he was about to say was something he had not said out loud before.

"Every woman I have been with since Diane, I kept waiting to feel something that actually meant anything. The want was there. The physical part worked fine eventually. But afterwards I would lie there and feel completely hollow, like I had just gone through a routine and nothing about it touched me anywhere real." He paused. "Every single time."

The room was very quiet.

"Until?" I said, because something in the way he stopped told me that sentence was not finished.

He looked at me for a long moment without answering.

"I did not say until," he said.

"You did not have to."

Something moved across his face. Not quite a smile, not quite discomfort. Something I did not have a clean name for yet but that I felt sitting low and warm in my stomach in a way I had absolutely no business feeling.

I looked down at my notepad.

"Same time next week," I said.

When I looked up he was still watching me with that same unreadable expression.

"I will be here," he said quietly.

I did not doubt that for a single second.