Page 126 of Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys 5)
“Are you ready to talk now?” he asks me, in that infuriatingly calm voice of his.
“Fucking stalker,” I grumble, thinking about all those nights that I lay in bed and trembled in fear over Neil, how all that time, Cal was right there. He would’ve saved me, would’ve killed Neil if he had to, even if it meant spending the rest of his life in prison. Before I even know what I’m doing, my arms are around him and I’m sobbing into his chest like somebody who isn’t hard-as-nails Bernadette Blackbird.
“I feel pathetic,” I moan as Cal strokes my hair with his pretty fingers, his big body curled around mine, trapping me against his cotton-y sweet scent. The faintest undertone of fresh sweat colors that smell, adding a certain sense of danger to it. My body immediately reacts in the most inappropriate way possible, nipples hardening to sharp points, cunt flooding with liquid. “Why am I crying again, when I’ve known about this for a whole goddamn month?”
“You’re crying because you have to finally accept that somebody you love has done something unforgivable,” Callum tells me with brutal honesty. I pull away just enough to look up at him, wondering if he’s talking about his grandmother again.
“I do not love Pam,” I tell him, because that’s true. I don’t. But maybe I did, once upon a time.
“You did,” he says, echoing my thoughts, as if those gorgeous azure eyes can read every single emotion that flits through me. “But unlike my grandmother, you don’t have enough good memories to balance out the bad. You’ve just realized that Pamela Pence is as dead and gone as Penelope.”
I look down at my sneakered feet, pressed up close to Cal’s booted ones.
Pamela has to die for what she did. Fuck, I really and truly wish I’d buried her alive. Since it’s too late for that, I guess I’ll be seeking help from one of Stacey’s girls. Death by sheets is now a very real possibility.
“She didn’t give me any answers, Cal. None. Like, she couldn’t even be fucked explaining to me about my dad, or her relationship with her parents, or even how she … how …” I don’t want to finish that sentence, put to words my question about how, exactly, Pamela convinced Pen to take those pills or what Sara Young saw on that security camera that caused her to make an arrest. “And I wanted answers. I wanted all my troubles wrapped up in a bow. But that’s never going to happen. I have to just … exist with the not knowing and the wondering, and I fucking hate that.”
Callum cups my face between his hands and leans down to look at me, his mouth so close to mine that I swear I can taste his breath, and it’s the most delicious thing in the world. He tastes like pure, unfiltered obsession mixed with true love and doused in honesty.
“Sometimes, we don’t get everything that we want. Sometimes, there are unknowns and we just have to learn to live with them. Life is messy and weird and fucked-up, but even amongst all those thorns, there are roses.”
“Fuck, I want to kiss you so bad right now,” I murmur, covering his hands with mine and pressing them into my face. Callum smiles, but he doesn’t oblige me, not just yet.
“All I know about my grandmother is what I’ve pieced together from other people, and from those brief few moments a day where she forgets to be careful, where she forgets that she killed her own daughter because she so desperately wanted a son.” He traces my lower lip with his thumb, and I stand there mesmerized. Mesmerized and aching and needy. “She killed her own daughter because once, she’d had that same daughter help dispose of her husband’s body. And then, later, when that same daughter threatened to testify against her, she killed her, too, and stole her son and raised that son as her own.” Cal pauses, and I realize that as much as I needed to talk about my past and my fucked-up family, so did he. “So, I understand how you feel. Because I’ll never have all the answers. My grandmother is … she’s too far gone in her illness to give them to me. Even if she did, I doubt she’d ever give me the full truth. So I just tuck it away, behind more important things, and then it doesn’t seem to matter so much anymore.”
“More important things like what?” I whisper, and Cal licks his lower lip.
“Like my love for you,” he breathes, and then he’s kissing me with the full power of that fairy-tale mouth. I swear, for the entirety of that kiss, I forget that he’s actually the villain in the story. For the entirety of that kiss, I’m convinced that I’m the princess he’s just rescued from the tower, the one that he’s going to spirit away into an eternity of bliss.
