“Never mind.”

“Can I see a picture of him?”

I jumped at the chance to show her.  I’d proudly shown my group of friends from class and they’d gasped, pointed at my face and then burst into a chorus of crazy squealing – about how hot he was and how I totally loved him.  It was enough that my instructor came to see what the ruckus was about.  She leaned in, looked at the picture and then said “hoo-baby.”

I grinned when Dara looked at a photo I’d taken of Callum at the beach the month before.  He was healed up enough to surf – not as well as he used to, but still.  I’d gotten a shot of him coming out of the ocean, water dripping from his hair and his triceps bulging as he carried his board back to where I sat on my towel.  I was pretty fucking delighted that even jaded old Dara was not immune to his looks.  “That’s him?” she asked skeptically, as if I’d just pulled some picture off a Google search for smoking hot blonde surfer dude.

“That is him.”

“He looks older than eighteen.”

“He’s just muscular.  And he’s actually nineteen now.”

Dara nodded and kept staring.  “Yeah.  He seems like he’d be mature for his age,” she said.  I smirked.  She loved to describe herself as mature for her age.  “Does he have a girlfriend?”

“He was on a date yesterday but he doesn’t have a girlfriend.”

“You’re in love with him and you don’t mind that he was on a date?”

I paused.  No? Was that weird? I’d been on a date last night too but it was just for shits and giggles.  And maybe a little titillation.  It started Friday night when there were no cabs and I asked a guy if I could share his across town.  He was hot, probably in his mid-thirties and just as drunk as I was.  Our conversation was flirty from the jump.  He revealed, to my delight, that he was a fashion designer.  “A straight one,” he said right away.  “It’s important for you to know that.”

“Is it? Why?”

“Because I’m going to ask you out before I get out of the car.”

“You should just do it now.  I’m going to say yes.”

“Cool.  You wanna go out?”

And that was that.  Our date was fun.  He took me to a Japanese restaurant that didn’t serve sushi, when all I knew about Japanese cuisine was sushi, and then we randomly hit a karaoke bar.  We made out in an alley and he dry humped me against the wall and then I texted my friend to call me with an “emergency” and he sent me home with cab money.

Callum’s date was similar.  Similar-ish.  His girl was someone he’d met randomly at the marketing firm he was interning at on Fifth Ave.  She was tall and gorgeous, a little older and had been in the building for a casting call.  I’d met up with them toward the end of their first date ever and while she seemed surprised, she wound up flirting with me when she realized Callum liked it.  She murmured close to my lips and touched my knee and played with my hair till we all kind of wound up together in his bed that night.  Hailey, my go-to friend for fake emergency calls, said threesomes weren’t abnormal and that she’d had one at camp when she was even younger, so I decided it wasn’t weird.

Especially since no sex wound up happening.  There was everything but penetration before we all fell asleep.  The closest we got to that was when Callum followed me into his kitchen in the middle of the night when I went for water.  He was wordless as he pulled me from the fridge, kissed me hard and slid his fingers inside me.  He stroked me to an orgasm that he muffled with his hand before we went back to bed, where he spooned me to sleep.  The next morning, the girl got cab money to go home and planted a sultry kiss on my lips before leaving.  I wasn’t totally surprised.  She was nice but I knew she liked Callum and was just trying to show him that she was game in case I came as part of a package deal.

So maybe it was weird.

But even if it was, that was just what Callum and I were.  Weird.  Indefinable.

“Yikes.”  Dara gave me a big cringe and went back to her book.  “I hope you’re not like, holding out for him.”

“Holding out for him?”

“Like, thinking you’re going to end up with him.  Just from what you’re telling me, it seems like anything romantic that happened between you two was out of the convenience that you were living with him and now he’s moving on without you.”

I blinked at her.  Nope.  I knew it wasn’t the case but I didn’t really feel like arguing because it wasn’t Dara’s fault.  Callum and I weren’t something that could be proven with words and Dara would eventually witness us with her own two eyes anyway.  It was bound to happen.

For starters, he returned my drunk ass back to the dorms on countless occasions when he hadn’t even been the one I’d been out drinking with.  He came over and took care of me that time I caught pneumonia and, according to Dara the next morning, kept asking her to turn her music down when I fell asleep.  I was on the phone with him for hours on the nights that I was freaking out and convinced that I was out of my league – that Caroline must’ve bribed someone to get me accepted at the school because I was by far the worst sewer and didn’t really have a vision the way the other kids did.  I just sometimes stitched things together at home because Elena taught me how to use a sewing machine when I was ten and it thrilled Caroline to see me make things, even if they were horribly constructed.  I got better in college but still, I had many of those panicked phone calls, half of which ended with Callum showing up outside my window.  If Dara was awake, he’d come up but if she was sleeping, I’d sit on the fire escape and let him talk me out of my funk.

Still, Dara wasn’t sold.

At least not until the night of the concert.  Callum scored backstage passes for a huge, sold out show at Terminal 5.  He was going with Logan and invited me but I couldn’t go because I was behind on finishing a dress that looked so raggedy I was certain I should just drop out of school.  I told him to have fun and call a car home because I knew he was going to get obliterated.  As he proceeded to do so, I focused on cutting and sewing and five hours later, brilliantly dropped my shears so hard on my foot that they stood proudly in my flesh for a second.  I leaned in, examined and promptly passed out when I caught a glimpse of skinny foot bone before the blood started weeping.

According to Dara, she nearly passed out too.  She had a thing about blood and got so lightheaded she lost her head completely.  In her panic, when it was many hours past midnight, she called Callum from my phone.

“Girl.  He was so hammered he started talking dirty to me the second he picked up,” she wheezed with laughter after Callum left the next morning, having stayed with me after I got my stitches at the hospital and went back to the dorms.  By the time I came to, he was on his way from the venue in a cab, still on the phone with Dara, asking her to stay calm and report my every move.  She had my phone sandwiched between her ear and shoulder and I could hear Callum comforting her too, her voice audibly shaking as she pressed a wad of Starbucks napkins to my bleeding foot and Googled what the hell to do on her own phone.

I knew Callum was still insanely drunk when he arrived because I could smell the booze before Dara even opened the door for him.  His gait was off but he acted so sober and in control that I wondered if he was a human being or a robot.  Or an angel.  Maybe he was angel.  He looked like the most beautiful angel in the world wearing that sexy white T-shirt.  Keep in mind I was losing a lot of blood.  It was relevant to my weird thought process and the way I looked at him that day with that messy, dark blonde halo and ripped, booze-stained white V-neck – like my savior freshly descended from the rock and roll Heavens.

I stared up at him as he carried me from my dorm outside to the car, studying his handsome expressions as he reassured Dara that she should go back in, get some rest and take it easy – that he had it from there.  And he really did.  He took me to the hospital, talked to everyone for me, whipped out my insurance card from my wallet – which I didn’t even realize that he’d grabbed out of my purse – and sat there holding my hand while I got the giant numbing shot for the stitches.  He told me funny stories from the concert a few inches from my face, refusing to let me watch the giant needle go into the bony part of my foot.