The Boy I Wasn't Supposed To Want.

chapter four

Ivy didn't tell Callum about Reagan.

She told herself it wasn't worth mentioning, that it was a five-minute encounter with a girl she'd probably never see again, that making it into a story would only make it bigger than it deserved to be. She almost believed that for three whole days.

Then he texted her.

Callum: Heard Reagan cornered you on the quad. You okay?

Ivy sat with the message a moment before typing back.

Ivy: How did you even hear about that.

Callum: This campus is smaller than it looks. People talk.

Ivy: I'm fine. It wasn't a big deal.

Callum: It was a big deal. I know how she gets when she's decided someone's a threat.

Ivy's thumb hovered over the screen. A threat. Either that meant what she wanted it to mean, or she was building a house out of nothing again, the way she'd done for three years with every small thing he'd ever said or done around her.

Ivy: Why would I be a threat to her? We just met.

The reply took longer this time. Long enough that Ivy set the phone down on her desk and made herself get back to the reading she was supposed to be doing for her Tuesday seminar, though the words on the page refused to settle into anything she could actually follow.

Callum: Because Reagan doesn't miss things. And she clearly saw something worth commenting on.

Callum: I'll talk to her. Make sure she leaves you alone.

Ivy: You don't have to do that.

Callum: I know I don't. I'm doing it anyway.

Ivy set the phone face-down on her desk, chest doing something complicated and warm that she didn't have the energy to examine right now.

She saw him in person for the first time since the dinner two weeks later, at a family lunch Diane had organized at the house that would soon belong to all four of them. The renovations were mostly finished, fresh paint smell still faint in the hallways, boxes stacked in corners where furniture hadn't arrived yet.

Ivy found her room first, the one that would be hers, and stood in the doorway taking it in. Good light. A window that looked out over the backyard. And directly across the narrow hallway, a door with a strip of blue painter's tape still stuck to the frame, and Callum's name written on it in Marcus's handwriting.

She was still staring at it when he came up the stairs behind her, two boxes stacked in his arms, and stopped when he saw her looking.

"Guess we're neighbors," he said.

"Guess so." Ivy stepped back to let him pass, and their shoulders nearly brushed in the narrow hall, close enough that she caught the smell of him, laundry detergent and something warmer underneath it, and had to look very deliberately at the floor.

He set the boxes down just inside his doorway and straightened, studying her for a second in a way that made her feel unusually visible.

"I talked to Reagan," he said.

"You didn't have to."

"I know. I did it anyway. Told her to leave you alone." His jaw tightened slightly. "She won't listen. Just so you're prepared. Reagan doesn't really do backing off."

"Great," Ivy said flatly. "Something to look forward to."

The corner of his mouth moved, almost a smile, gone before it fully formed. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry. About all of it. This wasn't supposed to be part of the deal, you inheriting my mess along with the house."

"You're not a mess."

"You don't know that yet." He said it lightly, but something underneath it wasn't light at all, and for a second neither of them said anything, the hallway narrow and quiet around them, boxes stacked between rooms that hadn't decided yet how close they were allowed to be.

"Ivy! Callum! Lunch is ready!" Diane's voice floated up the stairs, breaking whatever had been building in the silence.

"Coming," Callum called back, not moving yet, still looking at her.

"We should go down," Ivy said.

"Yeah." He didn't move. "In a second."

Downstairs, dishes clattered, Marcus said something that made Diane laugh, ordinary sounds of a family assembling itself in real time. Up here, in the narrow hallway between two bedrooms that would soon belong to two people who weren't supposed to feel anything about being this close to each other, Callum finally stepped back first, putting proper distance between them, like he'd caught himself doing something he shouldn't.

"After you," he said, and gestured toward the stairs, voice back to careful and even, like the last thirty seconds hadn't happened at all.

Ivy went down first, aware of him behind her the whole way, aware of exactly how many stairs were left before she had to stop thinking about how it had felt when he looked at her like that.

That night, back in her own apartment, she stood in her doorway before bed the way she'd stood in the new one that afternoon, and pictured it without meaning to: his door across the hall, hers, the strip of space between them that a house could measure in feet and a person could measure in something else entirely.