He found Callum just as attractive as I did.
Then again, I didn’t blame him. Not when you looked at Callum and you felt things inside of you come to life that you never knew could breathe.
“What, exactly, was that about?” he asked as he helped me into my seat, and then took the one across from me.
“Umm...” I hesitated. “My sister is kind of crazy.”
His eyes focused on me as he reached for a roll, and then the butter.
He lathered one up and then took a bite so big that he might as well have eaten the whole thing.
I offered him another one—after I buttered it—and then he ate that one in two bites, one big and one small, too.
“I’ll take a sweet tea, but only if it’s actually sweet. I don’t want one of those watered-down versions of ice and some tea. I want it strong and sweet. No lemon because that’s fuckin’ gross. You order any appetizers, baby?”
Baby.
God, that made my heart soar.
“Umm...” I hesitated again. “I usually don’t eat any appetizers here because they’re really big. And I can’t finish one.”
He flipped open the menu that I didn’t need, scanned his eyes over it, and then nodded. “Queso with bread chips, or do you want the fried cheese curds?”
Those were both favorites of mine.
Both was my immediate answer.
But there was no way I was ordering two…
“We’ll have both,” Callum said. “And then when we get those, we’ll order.”
My lips twitching, I waited until he left, and got a good glimpse of my sister’s startled eyes focused on our table, before turning back to Callum.
“You make me so happy,” I announced to him.
CHAPTER 17
Squirrels are behind most power outages in the United States.
-Useless facts
CALLUM
I wasn’t sure what made me start heading her way.
Call it intuition.
Call it a need so potent I couldn’t stop myself from following behind her, even if I’d wanted to.
When I’d arrived into town and gotten her text message telling me she was eating alone because her family had gone out to eat without her—after telling me she always ate with her family on Sundays—I knew then I’d made the right decision.
Had she not contacted me, she would’ve never known I was there.
But now that she had…
“Your sister’s a bitch,” I said, likely loud enough that the sister could hear.
The gasp at the table a few over from ours confirmed my suspicions.
I got the laugh out of Iris that I’d wanted, though.
“I tend to agree sometimes,” she said, sounding better by the second. “How do you like those rolls?”
The next couple of minutes we talked about what was good here and what I should order.
Finally, after placing my order—a big ass steak sounded heavenly—I leaned back in my chair and looked at the girl that was quickly becoming something that meant a lot to me.
“Tell me what happened?” I asked.
She sighed and reached for another roll. Instead of buttering it, she just dipped the entire thing into the butter, and came back with a big blob of butter on her roll before shoving the entire thing into her mouth.
I chuckled as I watched her chew, her mouth popped out obscenely.
When her bite was more manageable, she crossed her arms over her chest and then said, “I got to the house and all their cars were there, but they weren’t. I looked up their locations, and all of them were out to eat without me.”
As I listened to her tell me about how she was always forgotten about by her family, the angrier I got.
I gritted my teeth and had to grab hold of my shaking legs to keep myself in my seat.
Now, listening to her replaying her sister’s comments in my head, they made me even more mad.
“Well,” I said after she’d finally calmed down. “The good thing is, you don’t ever have to do this by yourself again as long as you want me here.”
She smiled, and I felt my heart jerk inside of my chest.
“If you want to be here, I want you here,” she blurted.
Before I could say anything in reply, the waiter arrived with my sweet tea, the appetizers, and two more baskets of rolls.
We were halfway through our appetizers when an older man and woman headed toward our table.
The dad was rather bland looking, but the mom was a knockout. Like her daughters.
It hadn’t escaped my attention how beautiful Abby, Iris’s sister, was. Though she had a great body, she didn’t have the correct body parts that did it for me. Where Iris had strong, muscular legs, you could tell by just one look that Abby’s legs would probably not hold much more than her own weight easily.
Then there were Iris’s back muscles. Every time Iris did something as simple as wave, those muscles were playing in her back, moving and bunching and making me want to trace them with my tongue.
Abby was wearing a halter dress thing that exposed her back, and from what I could tell, the only muscles in her shoulders were little dinky ones that probably wouldn’t support much more than the halter holding her boobs in place.
So no, though she had the beautiful hair like Iris, Abby definitely didn’t do it for me.
The mom looked exactly like Abby, but with a bit more hair.
“Iris,” her mother said stiffly. “Why didn’t you just join us for dinner?”
Before Iris could answer, I said, “Probably because you’re a jerk and went to eat without her despite inviting her and knowing she would come.”
I’d really wanted to say ‘bitch’ but I curbed that instinct since I didn’t want the woman to completely hate me. But only for Iris’s sake.
If this thing with Iris went the way it felt like it was going, I definitely didn’t want to cause too much strife with the family. Especially when I was thinkin’ I was going to be there for a really long time.
Iris’s mother looked at me and I noticed that her eyes were a pale gray that were captivating.
“I don’t believe I asked you,” she said stiffly.
I shrugged, uncaring. “Just tellin’ you why she didn’t want to sit with you when you treated her as if she didn’t matter.”
Her mother opened her mouth to say something more, but Anderson came up then, placing his hand on Iris’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that you were coming. Mom and Abby said that you were busy. I assumed it was with him, so I didn’t say anything.”
Anderson jerked his head toward me as he said that, his lips turning up into a small smile.
A young Asian woman walked up to him and fit herself underneath his arm, staring at me curiously.
I could tell she had plenty to say, or ask, but she didn’t want to voice those things in front of the parental units now staring at me with varying degrees of curiosity.
“You’re her new friend?” the dad asked.
“Yep,” I confirmed. “The new man.”
Iris snorted at my correction. “Mom, Dad. This is Callum, or Shine if you want to call him by his road name. Shine, these are my parents.”
I stood up and held my hand out for her father to take.