“We need a minute, Rose.” His comment was both a question and a warning.

“Go on into my room,” she told us with a small nod of her head.

As we made our way out of the kitchen, I heard Cody tell Gram, “This is bullshit,” and Gram replied that he wasn’t too old for her to wash his mouth out with soap. Normally, I would’ve laughed at the exchange, but my chest was tight with an emotion I couldn’t name as I followed Asa into the bedroom and watched him close the door.

He sat on the bed and pulled me with him until I was standing in between his spread knees, looking down at him. He was so tall that his face wasn’t far from mine, and I watched him closely as he swallowed, and then swallowed again.

“Had to get outta there—they were watching us like fuckin’ bugs under a microscope,” he told me, rubbing his hands up and down the outside of my legs. I hadn’t had that impression at all, but now I was alone with him and I wasn’t going to argue.

“Okay,” I mumbled back, waiting to see why he’d brought me in there.

“I don’t want you thinking it’s your fault, Callie. Okay? I don’t wanna hear that shit come outta your mouth ever again.” His voice had taken on a stern quality, his fingers digging into the skin of my hips. “It was my fuck up. I should’ve stayed where I could protect you. I should’ve seen that shit coming. This is on me, not you,” he told me harshly, giving me a small jerk.

He was sitting there taking the blame on his shoulders, but I knew it was both of our faults, or maybe no one’s fault at all. I’d gone to what I thought would be a party like I’d been to a hundred times before, and ended up in way over my head. Grease had been there to do whatever sort of business he did, and ended up saving a girl with braces on her teeth from being raped by a guy twice her age. Neither of us had planned how things went down. Neither of us could’ve anticipated the events.

I felt so much for him right then, my chest was burning with it. I wasn’t sure what it was—not love, it couldn’t be love—but something so close and consuming that it made my heart race.

“You saved me,” I whispered as I put my hands on his head and pulled the rubber band out of his hair. When I started to run my fingers through the strands, he groaned low in his throat.

“Callie, you gonna start crying again, Sugar?” he asked, scooting himself back on the bed and pulling at my knees so I was straddling his lap.

“No,” I answered him, wondering at the question as I wrapped his hair around my fingers and softly outlined one of his ears.

“Good, ‘cause I’m gonna kiss the fuck outta you.

Chapter 16

Grease

I knew that all the shit that had happened to Callie was on me. It was my call to pull her out of that house, and my call to leave her helpless when I’d finished my business. They were both bad decisions, but there was only one that I would’ve changed.

There was no way I could have left her passed out and alone on the floor of that house. The longer I knew her, and the more time I spent with her glued to my side, the more I knew that the decision to keep her safe had been the right one.

It was the decision to walk away that hadn’t been right.

At some point, Callie was going to realize that her fucked up life was entirely my fault. She was going to blame me and hate me and wish she’d never met me.

But at that moment, in her Gram’s bedroom, she wasn’t doing any of those things. Instead, she was standing in front of me, pulling the rubber band out of my hair far more gently than I ever had, and running her fingers through my hair.

I wasn’t a fucking saint.

I asked her if she was planning on crying again, mostly because I wasn’t sure where her head was at, and when she told me no, that was it.

I pulled her onto my lap, on her grandmother’s fucking bed, and I kissed the shit out of her.

I was so distracted by the taste of her that I didn’t notice her whimper at first. It wasn’t until the taste of blood filled my mouth that I ripped my head back to see what the fuck was going on. She had blood pooling in the corner of her lip, and for a second, I was afraid I’d fucking bitten her or something.

She wiped at the blood, swallowing thickly as her face turned beet red.

“I’m sorry! My mouth’s just—well, my braces…” she stuttered, looking at me apologetically.

“Holy fuck! Did I just do that to you?” Shit, I kissed her and drew blood. My thoughts were completely self-centered until she started trying to pull herself off my lap.

“No. Um, yesterday my mouth was really dry—and I wasn’t being careful.” She tried to lift her leg over me to crawl off the bed, but I grabbed both of her thighs and pulled her tight against me, effectively ending her squirming as her breath caught. “My braces cut a bunch of little sores on the inside of my cheeks. Totally not your fault.”

“Ah, sweetheart, why didn’t you say anything?” I asked her quietly, finally understanding what was going on. I’d never been with a chick with braces, and I couldn’t remember any of the kids at the club having them growing up, either. But it wasn’t hard to see how having metal fucking brackets in your mouth could fuck your shit up.

“Let me see, Sugar.” I hoped that the damage wasn’t bad enough that she’d need stitches or something. Fuck. That was all we needed.

She pulled her lips out on the sides and turned them a little inside out so I could see the little red sores in her poor mouth. The things must have burned like hellfire, but she hadn’t said a word about them until I’d fucking attacked her.