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I’m sitting in class like a good student, doodling in the margins of my notebook. I’m drawing hearts, of all things, in different sizes, up and down the margins with my pencil. I’m early to class, as is my usual schtick since I don’t feel so shitty if I have to dip out early to get to work on time.
And while I’ve seen Callum at work, this is the class that we have together, and I’m curious to see if he’s going to sit next to me or not, going to acknowledge my presence or not, that I exist in the same space as him.
Ever since he scared the shit out of me last week, we haven’t talked much. Surprise, surprise.
Callum doesn’t look like he talks a lot, one of those silent types that tend to listen more than spouting off whatever comes in their heads. Which is a nice change of pace from all the guys that I know, the random ones I’ve dated casually. I find myself getting tetchy, waiting for him to speak, wanting him to speak.
It’s only the second week of school, and I already have an assignment due by the end of the month, and the nervous flutter in my stomach’s making me feel queasy. It could be the three coffees I downed before coming to class, but I don’t think so.
I’m pulled from my thoughts when the seat next to me is taken, shaking the entire table and the bench where I’m sitting, knocking me out of my downward spiral of thinking I’m not good enough to do this. I glance over, blinking slowly at Callum, who’s sitting down and sliding a cup of coffee across the surface of the table, and a paper bag with something that smells like a donut, and I’m already starting to drool.
“Hi,” I say, looking down at his offering and wondering what it’s all about. “What’s this for?”
“Sugar and caffeine.”
I open up the paper bag, glancing inside at the maple-flavored donut and want to scream with excitement. I glance back at a wiggling Callum, his hand in the kangaroo pocket of his sweater, pulling out a bunch of milks and creams, and packets of sugar and sliding it on over.
“I don’t understand.”
Callum glances over at me, his face impassive, blinking at me, waiting for me to catch up. But whatever it is, I’m not getting it.
“Why are you being nice? I wasn’t expecting you to be nice,” I blurt as I grab the creams and two packets of sugar to start doctoring my coffee. “And don’t say you’re a nice guy. People who have to tell you that they’re nice are anything but. Leave me some of the mystery, huh? I’m still trying to figure you out.”
Callum snorts and glances away when I catch him in the act of finding me funny.
I don’t know, but it feels a lot like a win.
“Thanks for the coffee and the donut. If you ever want to keep them coming, I’m not going to say no.” I take a chunk off the donut like a shark taking a piece out of a seal, munching around it and humming happily, taking a slurp of sweet, creamy coffee and sighing after the first swallow. Looks like my day’s changing, and I hope it keeps it up for tonight.
“Did you read the case for today’s class?” Callum asks, and I’m startled that he’s still talking to me. He always gives off this aloof vibe and the fact that he’s brought me food (and coffee!) and is continuing to speak to me is going to occupy my thoughts for the next little while.
The guy’s wrapped in a shroud of mystery, and I know myself—I’m interested in trying to unravel him, trying to find what’s underneath all those layers of his.
He’s the kind of guy I’m interested in for a single night, and that’s it. And honestly, I’ve turned over a new leaf. I can’t keep repeating the same patterns and expecting the outcomes to change. I’m not a kid anymore. I can’t keep doing this.
So while the coffee and donut were a super nice gesture, and yeah, Callum is the kind of interesting person I would have been interested in, that’s not the case anymore.
Yeah, right.
“Sure did,” I say, nodding, sad that half of my donut is now gone and disappeared into my stomach. I slurp up some more coffee, sighing happily at the taste. “You?”
I’ve never been terrible at awkward conversation, it has the opposite effect on me—it makes me laugh, giddy, in a secondhand embarrassment kind of way. So the whole thing where we just trade a couple of words back and forth, try to search for topics to talk about?
It’s hilarious to me.
Plus, it’s absolutely precious that Callum’s ears start to turn red, and I can’t help but grin even wider at him.
How can a person be so mysterious and aloof, and then his ears turn red when he’s embarrassed or feeling awkward?
“I haven’t bought the textbook yet,” he says. “Haven’t found a used copy.”
“Well,” I say, wanting to be nice, wondering if it’s going to bite me in the ass. “I could photocopy the relevant material from my textbook and give it to you. Or I could take pictures with my phone and email them to you, if you want?”
Callum glances at me sharply, eyes narrowed, trying to figure me out.
I don’t know much about him, true, and while tuition isn’t as entirely prohibitive here as it is in the US, textbooks are expensive, even used copies. And what’s it going to cost me to send a few pictures over? Not much. Not much at all.
Consider it a thank you for the donut and coffee, and for making sure I made it to my car okay. We’re bartering, that’s all.
I’m allowed to barter with a gorgeous guy who I happen to work with, totally.
“You’d help me out like that?” he asks, finger pointing at himself, and Jesus, maybe he is a cyborg and has forgotten how to human or something. All I know is I’m finding it cute, and that’s a dangerous place to be.
I’m finally starting to get my life together, and I have no time to find Callum cute, none whatsoever.
No distractions, just 100 percent focus on getting my shit together, figuring myself and my life out.
I bite down on the meat of my inner cheek and pull in a deep breath through my nose to try to calm myself down. I take another sip of coffee since I apparently can’t take my own advice.
“I can, sure. It’s not that big of a deal,” I say, turning my body toward the front of the class, giving Callum nothing to look at but my profile.
“It is. I’d really appreciate it,” he says, and the words sound like they’re being ripped out of him.
Huh.
I glance over to see that his ears are still red (not like he can hide them with his hair being so short), and his jaw is clenched, and the whole thing has me confused. “What? What is it?”
“I just didn’t expect you to want to help me out, that’s all,” he says, shrugging those hulking shoulders, moving them casually, not in a display of strength. Or so he thinks.
I gulp, hating that I’m noticing at all, paying attention to every little thing about him like he’s a cornucopia of delicious food and I’ve been starving for years.
What the hell is wrong with me?
Shut it down, shut it down.
“Okay, well, like I said, not that big of a deal. Don’t mention it,” I say, highlighting the threat underneath the words. Seriously, do not mention it.
“How are you getting to work later?” he asks, crossing his arms over his chest, as defensive as they come.
“Driving,” I say, because I know that he knows that I have a car. “Sorry, I’m not comfortable enough driving you over,” I say, laying it out there so he doesn’t even get the chance to ask me.
Callum shakes his head, but the corner of his mouth that I can see from his profile quirks up, and I don’t believe I said anything funny. “No, I wasn’t going to suggest that,” he says, then lets the words hang so I’m sitting there, waiting for him to finish his thought.
When he doesn’t, I huff out an annoyed breath, shaking my head at myself, and pick up my pencil again to doodle on the next page of my notebook, hearts in the margin because apparently I didn’t get enough of them before.
“You don’t like me very much,” Callum says, both of us startling when somebody comes into our classroom, that poor door cracking against the back wall and ricocheting back with enough force to kill a man.
The guy who comes into class is wearing a freaking three-piece suit; he’s gotta be some guy who probably works in finance or whatever and is looking to get a diploma or add some more letters to the end of his name to get a salary bump.
Which is another reason why I’m nervous—this class is shared between the graduate diploma cohort and the cohort of people in the MBA program.
As if I didn’t have enough of a complex about being here already. I’m pretty sure the university picked me for this program because they wanted the money; I don’t have anything else really going for me.
I sigh, pissed off with myself.
I made this decision carefully, and now... a whole two weeks in, I’m questioning everything.
Why am I like this? Why?
“There’s nothing not to like,” I say belatedly. “I don’t know you, and you don’t know me. I don’t know enough about you to make a decision one way or the other.”
Which is a total, big, fat lie. Because I know that his ears turn red when he’s nervous and/or embarrassed, and he took my punch to his face like it wasn’t anything, and he’s quiet and mysterious, and yeah I want to know more because I’m a very curious person that needs to know everything at all times, but again, bad idea.
Bad idea.
Callum’s probably another guy who’d take me for a spin and break my heart.
He looks like a cyborg heartbreaker anyway, something out of that '90s movie.
Definitely.
For sure, for sure.
Callum smiles at me, and I swear I can feel my heart give a shiver in my chest, and I know I’m in trouble, the deep kind, the kind that I’m going to have a hell of a time crawling out of.
I shrug, leaving that as my answer before going back to doodling, my heart beating hard and fast.
Class starts soon after that while I stifle my giggles from being in such close proximity to Callum and all the awkwardness between us. I mean, we’re colleagues, after a fashion, and yet we’ve never spoken, never even said hello to one another (we do the nods, and the quick smiles as hello instead).
I pay attention for as long as I can, writing down more often than not, although my attention keeps being swayed by whatever Callum is doing, taking his own meticulous notes, hunched over the desk and his notebook, like he’s afraid somebody’s going to steal it from him and never give it back.
We learn about productivity, and how common eight-hour workdays are still too long for humans to adapt to. I found it super interesting to learn that most people have two to five hours of high productivity in them, peak performance type stuff, and depending on the person and situation, you could average that out to three hours—that’s it.
That’s it.
Huh.
I take notes diligently, and by the end of the three-hour class (ha!), we’re dismissed for the night, and after a quick bathroom break, I head toward the elevators where Callum is waiting for me.
It makes me stop in my tracks, tilting my head at him, giving him a look that screams What the hell are you doing here? What is this?
“It seemed rude to leave you behind without saying anything,” he says, stepping into the elevator car and waiting for me to make a decision. “Coming in?”
I step inside, holding my breath, zipping up my coat to brave the outside. I’m probably going to have to clean my car off, and that’s going to cut into my time to get to work.
Great.
“How are you getting to work?” I ask, pinching the sensitive skin underneath my chin when I zip my coat all the way up, up, up. “Metro?”
Callum nods, and this is the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had. “See you at work.”
“Ugh, you’re making me feel like an asshole,” I groan, heading out of the elevator, and spinning on my heel to look at him, bringing my hand up to point at him.
Callum shakes his head. “There’s no need. I’m going to take the metro, and I’ll see you at work.”
“You’re not even going to try to convince me to give you a ride over?”
Callum shakes his head again, in that infuriatingly slow way, like he’s making sure I’m getting all the signals he’s broadcasting.
“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. It’s not a problem. I’ll see you there.” He lifts a hand in a wave, and there’s a small smile on his lips, and it sort of changes his whole face from killer cyborg to cute guy that’s doing alarming things to my heart.
Shut it down, Izzy! Shut it down! We don’t need this right now!
We do not!
Callum waves bye to me and heads down to the escalators toward the metro station. He looks back once and gives me a nod.
I wonder what it’s going to take to get him to smile at me like he means it.
***
“HEY, IZZY,” MY COUSIN Evie says once I’m in the car and have accepted her phone call, her voice a little tinny over my speakers. I’m seriously going to have to tone down the volume of my music or I’m not going to have any speakers to listen to it with. Jesus. “You on your way to work?”
“Hey. Yeah, that’s me, going to work,” I hum, navigating traffic now that there’s a shit-ton of snow all over the place, falling down in big, fat globs instead of delicate snowflakes. I tighten my hands along the steering wheel, keeping the ten and two position and sitting a little closer to the wheel, at the edge of my seat. “Weather’s turning to shit, though.”
“Yeah, I called ‘cause of that.”
I snort. “Sure you did, sure you did. What’s up?”
“I don’t really want to keep you while you’re driving...”
“It’s fine, I’m five minutes away. I’m just stuck at a red light right now. Wow. There’s this guy riding a bicycle in the middle of traffic,” I say.
“A bicycle? How?”
“I don’t know, man, the tires are thicker than my head. Kinda looks like fun, actually, but more like an accident waiting to happen, you know?” I babble, waiting for Evie to tell me why she called. She doesn’t call unless there’s a reason. She hates talking on the phone as much as I do.
“I just wanted some company,” she says, and it’s only because I know her so well that I can hear the thread of fear in her voice.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“Maybe I’m being stupid, but I’ve been feeling scared these last few days. And the bookstore creaks and whatever, right? Maybe there’s a ghost in here that wants to get my attention or whatever.”
“I don’t think it works that way, Evie.”
“You don’t know that. Shit. Shit. Okay, okay, I’ve got some customers before close. All right, everything’s fine. Thanks for being on the phone with me.”
“If you’re that scared, close up early, okay?” I call into the car, driving past the green light and heading two blocks east. “And please, text me when you’re done and you’re at home, all right? I’ll call the freaking cops if I don’t see a message when it’s my break. I’ll do it, you know I will.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Evie sighs. “All right, gotta go. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye!”
I pull into the back lot of The Arsenal, locking up my car and heading toward the back door, unlocking it and yanking on it until it unsticks, stamping my feet once I’m inside.
The heat inside is already incredible, and I’m starting to sweat even as I’m unzipping my coat and heading to the coatroom to stash my stuff, talking a little with Kayla, trying to find out what she’s studying. The kid’s barely eighteen, and she wants to get into med school—path already planned out and ready to be walked on.
Why couldn’t I be like that? Why am I so...adrift?
I get back behind the bar, the night starting off slow as dinner wraps up, and the dinner tables in the lounge area are removed slowly, slowly. The guys out in front eventually start letting in more and more people, and then it’s just a crush of bodies crowding the bar, demanding my attention, some of them giving me good tips, the others opening tabs and leaving me with a whole lot of nothing by the end of the night.
I start my car from a distance, like I do almost every night, and I whirl around, trying to catch Callum in the act of coming to see me and making sure that I drive off all by my lonesome and completely safely.
Except there’s no Callum, even if he said he was coming to work. We had that whole conversation together back at school. He said he was coming to work, that he’d see me here.
Weird. Super weird.
Not once did I glance up to see him prowling the room, watching and waiting for some asshole (male or female) to start being a class-A dick and starting fights, or throwing shit because someone got their feelings hurt. I didn’t notice him when I went out for my break, needing the fresh air, and checking my phone for A-OK messages from Evie that will keep me from calling reinforcements to go and save her, which I really should be talking to all the cousins about, anyway.
But no Callum, zero Callum.
Did something happen on the metro? Did the green line get delayed somehow because of the storm? Is that what happened?
I check on the STM app, and no, there’s no delay or anything like that, so he should have been here.
Maybe he just left early and didn’t say anything to you. That could happen, you know. He doesn’t owe you a thing.
No, no he doesn’t.
I’m sure he’s fine, totally fine.
Why do I even care, anyway?
