Rewind to Claim You

Don't go. I'm scared of the dark.

The power had gone out in the old house. I kept a lazy hold on Caleb's sleeve, two fingers, like I could keep him there just by deciding to.

He'd filled my bath by feel, in the pitch black, without one word of complaint. Now he stood with his back to me, every line of him pulled tight as a drawn bowstring.

"Cordelia." His voice didn't move an inch. "Do you know what you're saying?"

Of course I knew.

He was the boy my family took in when we were kids. The man I'd dragged down to a courthouse years later and married on paper.

Last time, we were husband and wife by contract for ten years. I didn't find out he'd been in love with me for fifteen until the night he was dying.

Chapter 1

This time, I was going to make him mine.

I'd woken up eighteen again, ten years of memories sitting behind my eyes that I had no business carrying, and exactly one thing I meant to do differently.

Last time I waited too long. I waited until he was almost gone.

Not again. The cold, quiet man who'd called me by my full name for ten years and never once smiled at me. This time I'd take him first.

The man in question sat across the table, grading my practice exams like they'd insulted his family.

Caleb Hale. Nineteen years old. A red pen in his fist, the frown cutting deeper with every wrong answer.

"You're really going to apply to Columbia with this," he said. Not a question. He didn't look up.

I didn't care about Columbia. I tipped my head and leaned across the table until I was close enough to count his lashes, and I asked him the thing I'd gone an entire lifetime without asking.

"Caleb. Do you like me?"

The pen tore a long line across the page.

He went still. When his eyes came up they were doing something complicated. Surprise, and under it something hot and humiliated, churning.

"So what if I do," he said finally. Flat. A dare.

Nineteen. Still too young to shut his face all the way. I tucked that away, said "Hm," and dropped my eyes back to my answer sheet like nothing had happened.

I counted my wrong answers. I took my time.

After a while his voice came again, low, scraped down to the bone, like he'd been holding it back for years.

"Cordelia."

His jaw was tight. His eyes had gone mean. "Don't start with me."

I looked up and let my face go serious, which I almost never did. "Caleb."

His knuckles went white around the pen.

"I'm hungry," I said.

He shot to his feet, gave me one cold look, and walked into the kitchen.

I bit down on the laugh and lost.

My father brought him home the year Caleb turned fourteen.

There'd been a grandmother, the only family he had. When she died there was nowhere left for him to go, so my parents took him in. A roof, a bed, a seat at a table that was never full anyway.

I still remember him in the doorway that first day. Thin. A hand-me-down shirt that didn't fit, scuffed shoes he'd tried to clean. Chewing the inside of his cheek, working to bury how out of place he felt.

I watched from the top of the stairs. He looked away first.

Moody, raw, proud and ashamed in the same breath. That was my first read on him, and ten years barely touched it.

I didn't welcome him. I didn't push him out. As long as he wasn't one of my father's secrets, he was no concern of mine.

He was a year older than me, should've been in college already, but he stayed back a year of high school. Because of me. We grew up in that house side by side, near enough to childhood sweethearts that the word would've fit if either of us had let it.

Years later I married him.

Busy, quiet, competent at everything he put his hands to. A near-perfect arrangement. The only thing missing was love.

In the tenth year of that paper marriage, I found out by accident he'd been in love with me a long, long time.

The next morning I woke up in the summer after my exams, eighteen again.

So.

He came back from the kitchen carrying a slice of cake on a plate. Straight back. A clean, sharp profile.

I wasn't trading him in for anyone else.

I kicked off my shoes, slid down in the chair, and hooked my toe into the side of his waist.

"I'm wiped," I said, draping myself over the chair back. I opened my mouth. "Feed me."

His eyes went cold.

We stared at each other. He broke first.

He'd gotten halfway through feeding me when my foot moved again and he caught it. Clamped it still in one hand, his voice dropping low and sharp, all warning.

"Cordelia. You'd better behave."

Fine. I shrugged and pulled my foot back.

He breathed out, set his face back to cold, and went on feeding me bite by bite.

I pushed the spoon away and tipped my head at him.

"You eat too."

He went quiet for a second. Then he picked up the spoon. Those long, careful fingers. He ate what was left, one slow bite at a time, his throat moving, until a fleck of cream caught at the corner of his mouth.

Delicious.

I wasn't talking about the cake.

Chapter 2

I grinned at him, slow and mean, and propped my chin on my hand.

"Caleb. You used my spoon." I let it sit a beat. "Doesn't that make it an indirect kiss?"

His grip tightened on the handle. "Cordelia."

I ignored him. "No," I said, like I was reconsidering. "On second thought, it doesn't."

I leaned across the table, caught the fleck of cream at the corner of his mouth with the tip of my tongue, and sat back.

"That," I said, satisfied, "is an indirect kiss."

His spine went rigid. A flush climbed his throat and vanished, and his jaw set hard.

His self-control really was a marvel. Even now, all he did was let his eyes go fierce. No reaction at all.

No. That wasn't true. There was a reaction.

I decided to be generous and keep my hands to myself.

"You're so mean to me, Caleb." I tilted my head. "When we both know you liked it. Didn't you?"

His jaw locked. "Is this how you treat me?"

"Cordelia." His face had gone tight and dark. "I'm not your toy."

Nineteen-year-old Caleb. No fun at all. Couldn't take a single thing.

Which only made me want to be worse.

"Of course you're not a toy," I said. I let the laugh drain out of my eyes and went serious. "You're mine. You just don't have the paper on it yet."

That did it. He got to his feet and left, walking like every joint had locked up on him.

I watched him go, the stiff furious line of his shoulders, and felt a little better.

Only a little.

Because I was still angry.

He liked me. He'd liked me the whole time, and in ten years he had never once said it.

I watched his back disappear down the hall, and I smiled. It wasn't a nice smile.

Fine. He wanted to sit on it, he could sit on it. You don't break a wild thing by running it down. You wait it out. You let it get hungry enough to come to your hand on its own.

Here's the thing he didn't need to lose sleep over: my scores weren't the disaster he thought. Columbia was well within reach. Second time around, I didn't even change my major.

I used to think he pushed me so hard toward Columbia to prove something to my parents. To make himself useful, indispensable.

Now I understood.

Maybe he just wanted to keep me close.

Three days after the applications went in, Caleb decided to go home. He'd been gone five years. It was time.

I'd lived this trip before. I knew every mile of it. The only thing different this time was me, packed along like luggage he hadn't agreed to carry, all the way across the country to a place called Mercer Hollow.

A small, worn-out town folded back into the hills. None of New York's glitter, none of its noise. A couple of narrow roads, a few streetlights that didn't quite commit to working.

Caleb stopped in front of an old house, bags still in his hands. Big, generous even. His grandmother's place, standing empty since the last of his family was gone.

He worked through it, in and out, until it was spotless. I lay back in a rattan chair and rocked, studying the carved wood up in the rafters.

I had never washed a dish in my life.

He'd been raising himself since before he hit double digits.

I could forgive the house for sitting empty so long. What I hadn't planned on was the power dying our very first night alone in it.

In the dark, I couldn't help myself. I kicked him.

"I want a bath."

He knew me. I took one every night, and a dead grid wasn't about to change that.

He found a candle. Lit it. Went, without a word, to heat my water.

When it was ready, he turned to leave.

I caught his sleeve. Two fingers. Lazy.

"Don't go," I said. "I'm scared of the dark."

Chapter 3

The candle threw his shadow long across the wall, and the shadow went rigid.

The room was dead quiet. Under the quiet, faint, the grind of his teeth.

"Cordelia. Do you know what you're saying?"

"I do," I said.

I slid out of my skirt and dropped it into the basin beside me, careless about it.

"I said I'm scared of the dark."

Fabric whispered against skin. Small sounds. In a silent room they carried.

His breathing picked up. Fast, then faster. When he spoke again there was a warning riding under it.

"Cordelia."

Heard you. Both ears. Loud and clear.

All that growl in his voice, and he still hadn't moved an inch. Still facing the wall. Didn't dare turn around.

I finger-combed my hair and paid him no mind.

I tipped a scoop of water off one shoulder. Say what you want about the man. He heats a bath like nobody's business.

The sound of the water alone was about to put him in an early grave.

He really hadn't thought I'd go through with it.

I'll own it. I'd been giving him a hard time about hourly.

He seemed to exist these days in a state of low, constant rage.

I was used to it.

I'd been tangled up with this man for the better part of my life, and in all that time Caleb had never once smiled at me. Not before the wedding, not after. Just my whole name, every time, handed down like a verdict. Cordelia.

It got under my skin and stayed there.

Out in the yard he sat by the old dogwood, washing clothes by hand. There was real muscle in his arms, suds caught in the hollows of them, and the whole picture came off domestic in a way that didn't match his face at all. He looked healthy. Not pale, not dark. All that restless teenage spring in him, and eyes that never quite lost the storm.

The version of him ten years on, I could never outplay. Not a chance.

But this one? Nineteen. Green as a new branch, half-broke and all temper, a colt that knew exactly two moves: lock his legs and kick.

If I were really eighteen, the actual eighteen-year-old Cordelia, he'd have run circles around me.

I wasn't.

I crossed the yard slow, stopped right behind him, and draped myself over his back like I owned the deed to it.

I looped my arms around his neck and complained into his ear. "Caleb. I really, truly hate it when you call me by my full name."

I let my eyes go tragic. "Why won't you call me Cora? Just Cora. Even 'babe' would do."

His back went hard as sheet metal. His right hand fisted in a wad of wet cloth, the tendons standing up across the back of it.

He pulled in a slow breath and stood.

"Cordelia."

There it was again.

I hung on, swinging off him, and rubbed my cheek against his. "Caleb, come on. Call me sweetheart and I'll buy you candy."

He didn't dare touch my legs. He kept it verbal. "Cordelia. Don't push your luck."

Don't start with me.

Behave.

Don't push your luck.

Shuffle them in any order you wanted, that was the entire script. Three lines. He'd been running the same three on me for years.

I'd never once listened to any of them.

I tightened my arms around his neck and kept right on. "Caleb. You don't get to be this mean to me. I don't like it."

He said nothing.

See that? See? Sulking again.

He didn't reach back to catch me, either. He just let me hang off him like a backpack and walked straight inside. Then he pried my arms loose with one hand and dropped me on the bed.

Not an ounce of tenderness in it.

And then he didn't move. Didn't leave, didn't speak. Just stood there with his hands hanging at his sides like he didn't trust what they'd do.

Chapter 4

I rolled over twice on the bed, hooked a finger under the strap of something thin and silky off the edge of it, and lobbed it into his arms like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"Wash these with yours."

He caught it on reflex. Looked down at what was in his hands. His face cycled through about four colors.

I gave him my most innocent eyes. "I can't put my hands in cold water. You know that."

He held it. And kept holding it.

Then he turned, good as gold, and headed for the yard.

"Caleb."

I picked the book up off the bed and called him back. Flipped to the page I'd dog-eared the night before, and reminded him, helpfully, "That thing in your left hand. Don't wash it in with mine."

I wrinkled my nose, perfectly serious. "It's got a smell to it. I don't care for it."

"Cordelia!"

He whipped around, the back of his neck gone red, staring at me like he couldn't trust his own ears. "Do you have no shame at all?"

Oh?

Was that him, getting flustered?

I tilted my head and considered the pale blue scrap balled up in his left hand.

"Honestly," I said, "I'd like you better in something with less to it."

A cut like that probably wasn't comfortable on him.

Not my problem, though. Was it?

Caleb hadn't spoken to me in three days.

He still waited on me hand and foot, mother hen that he was. Tea, water, meals, no complaint. But the second I opened my mouth, he turned and walked.

He'd stand out in the yard, straight as a young tree, and pretend I wasn't there.

After all the very thorough field research I'd done on the man, I happened to know those briefs of his ran a little tight.

I thought about that and licked my lip.

A little hungry all of a sudden.

So I called out. "Caleb."

He turned and walked.

This time he went straight out the front gate.

I pouted, drifted over to the doorway, and looked out. Already gone.

I didn't go back in. I turned and went next door instead.

There was a girl in the next yard, hair in two little braids, flopped over a stool with her homework. She looked up, saw me, and her whole face went bright.

"Miss Cora!"

It would never have crossed Caleb's mind that if he wouldn't play with me, I'd just find someone who would. In the handful of days he'd spent refusing to look at me, I had struck up a deep and abiding friendship with the little girl next door.

Her name was Nellie.

Nellie was a sweetheart. She liked coming around to find me.

Always, naturally, when Caleb wasn't home.

The heat had teeth that week, but Mercer Hollow sat right up against the water and grew its trees thick, and it ran cooler than New York ever managed.

Nellie finished the last of her homework. She'd already made plans to head down to the creek that afternoon with her friends, wading after crawfish, and when she saw me sitting there with nothing to do, she generously brought me along.

The creek?

That sounded like fun.

I accepted on the spot and went along happily.

I spent the whole afternoon with the kids. We flipped every rock in the shallows, filled a bucket to the brim with crawfish, picked more wild blackberries than the lot of us could carry, and lost all track of the hour.

By the time I wandered home that evening, Caleb was waiting.

Furious.

Chapter 5

He was waiting in the doorway when I got home, his face like weather about to break, looking at me like he could have swallowed me whole.

"Cordelia!"

I drifted past him with a couple of wild stems I'd pulled from the creek, let my skirt drag across his shin on purpose, and set about arranging them in the jar by the door. Couldn't be bothered to look up.

"What?"

His expression got worse. His voice, somehow, came out level.

"Why would you run off without telling anyone? Do you have any idea" He cut himself off. Tried again, flat. "I looked for you all afternoon."

Why didn't I say anything?

Because you walked, Caleb. You walk, I walk.

"Mm," I said, light as air, and went back to the flowers.

Then the level broke.

The stem never made it into the jar. He had me by the wrist, towing me toward the bedroom, and I stumbled in after him and landed on the bed.

One look at his face and I scrambled for the far corner on pure instinct.

He was faster.

His hand closed over my wrist and reeled me back. Both my wrists in one of his now, and his grip wasn't steady. It was shaking.

"Do you know what these hills are." Not a question. The anger was a thin skin stretched over something far worse. "How high they go. How deep. Do you know what happens to a girl who wanders off into them and doesn't come back? The ones they don't find. Do you have any idea what I"

His voice split clean down the middle.

I twisted. Couldn't get an inch. The smart thing, the grown-up thing, was to tell him I was an adult and could make my own calls.

What came out was, "None of your business."

He laughed. Nothing in it. Nodded, like I'd just proved his point. "Right. Sure. You're really something, Cordelia."

And then the fury just drained out of him.

His hands came off my wrists like they'd forgotten the job. He stared at them. Then at me. Whatever he'd been about to say died somewhere under his throat, and what was left on his face wasn't anger anymore.

It was the other thing. The one he never let me see.

His hands wouldn't go still. He shut his mouth over it, jaw locked, like one wrong breath would let the truth out.

He said nothing.

Came apart where he stood, and said nothing at all.

The tears came before I decided on them, fat and ridiculous, dropping onto the sheets