—The Rabid Incident—

CH.1 Part 3

༺✄༻JULES༺✄༻

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Callum's chest moved under my buttock, slow at first, like the tremor of an engine kicking back to life. His shoulder rolled, his stomach tensed, and suddenly it hit me - I was still straddling him like an incompetent paramedic in cosplay.

He coughed, low, guttural as his hands came up on my hips, not aggressively nor intentional, just there. Warm palms settling at my waist as if gravity had pulled them to me. My lungs did a full-body shutdown.

I froze.

And then, very, very slowly, Callum's eyes opened.

Lazy blue. Half-lidded. A little dazed. Blinking up at me like he was surfacing from the bottom of a lake and I was the first thing he saw.

Oh. Hell. No.

Panic took over my muscles before my brain caught up. I scrambled backward with limbs flailing, the crooked nurse outfit flapping around my knees like I was a runaway extra from a cheap Halloween slasher. Glitter puffed off him with every move I made, sparkling into the air like mocking confetti.

Callum sat up in slow motion, shaking sparkles from his hair. He blinked around the caravan like a man waking in an alternate reality, which, to be fair, it kind of was.

His jaw was streaked with dirt, his hair a mess and a lip split. Even like this, he looked like he had no right being this composed about it.

I looked away too late. I almost got second-hand embarrassment. My chest ached, sharp enough to make me squirm. Because no matter how funny I tried to make it, the truth was brutal: he had nearly killed us both. And it had been my fault. My mess.

A sharp spike of guilt jabbed my ribs, and for once, the joke didn't come easy.

“What...Lore? Where…?”

He sat up slowly, his hand dragging across his forehead like he was trying to rub the crash right out of his skull. He blinked hard with his head swivelling side to side, squinting through the dim yellow light of my home. Honestly? There wasn't much to see. Which was exactly the problem.

Welcome to Gora Park: the graveyard of ambition. The place where dreams don’t so much die as quietly rot while your neighbour sells knock-off perfume and suspicious luxury belts out the back of a van and, if you're that desperate, a bit of illegal what-I-like-to-call berserk fairy dust on the side.

The armpit of London. Or maybe the butt crack, depending on the weather.

Forty or so caravans jammed together like a bad Tetris game, most of them home to drunkards, a few unfortunate pensioners, people you don’t ask too many questions about and then, lucky me, people like yours truly.

People too broke to chase their dreams, but too bloody stubborn to bury them.

Callum’s gaze swept across the inside of my caravan, and for a second I wanted to tell him not to look too hard. It wasn’t glamorous, not by a long shot, but it was mine. Mav always said she loved it here; said it had “character”, which was a polite way of saying “absolute chaos but with curtains”.

Scraps of fabric were draped everywhere: over chairs, across the sofa, spilling from half-finished projects like the world’s gayest textile explosion. Colourful rugs, matted with glitter, clashed against a broken mannequin that looked like it had been stabbed in a fit of serial-killer rage. My latest bodysuit design clung to its torso, half-pinned, crooked, and vaguely threatening.

Basically, the whole place looked like a rainbow had food poisoning and chose my caravan as its final resting place. Think 90s cartoons, but on a budget.

“You!”

Callum finally spoke, his voice rough as he pointed a shaky finger at me.

“You! You jumped in front of me! What the hell were you doing out in the bloody storm?!” His eyes flicked to the bunny, who was currently lounging on my sofa like an unbothered prick. “Hunting for rabbit meat?!”

Bun Bun, the fluffy menace, lifted his head like he's just been accused of tax fraud. The twitch of his nose screamed pure indignation.

“Retrieving the creature of doom.” I spoke plainly. Out loud it sounded less like a noble mission and more like a bad review: ‘10/10 would chase again, mud bath included, five stars if you're into cardio trauma’.

“Don’t you know not to wander around the track when the wraiths are riding, little one?” 

“I am choosing to ignore the second half of that sentence.” 

One of his eyebrows lifts.

“I am not little.” I continue to be annoyed.

“You are.”

“I have an entirely reasonable amount of height.”

“You nearly fit under my bike.”

“That-” I take a deep breath. “-How am I supposed to know when a bunch of lunatics decide to throw themselves through a forest, in the rain, at seventy miles an hour?” 

“Seventy?” He laughs, then immediately doubles over, clutching his stomach, probably because of the injury. “More like a hundred.”

“Ugh.”

He chuckles under his breath and clicks his tongue against his teeth while giving me a long look. I refuse to look his way.

Lore, ever the killjoy, stepped in with his trademark bluntness.

“Tom stopped the race after he found your bike in pieces. You were gone man. How did this short thing drag you here?”

“Guys, can we fucking not? I am average-sized.”

I cross my arms. Everyone immediately gave me the exact same look. The ‘yeah, absolutely not’ look. Even Mav.

Traitor.

Not my fault everyone around me is built like a wardrobe. Even Mav. Since we were kids, she’s always been ridiculously tall. At school she could spot trouble three corridors away and probably had her own weather system. Honestly, standing next to her for most of my life may have permanently skewed my understanding of human proportions. But we liked it that way. I grabbed things from the lowest cupboards, the ones that made her knees threaten mutiny, and she got everything from the top shelves. The ones I’d need life insurance to reach in case I slipped while climbing up for a box of cereal. 

“I'm stronger than I look, bozo.” I lie looking straight at Lore, wiping mud from my forehead with maximum dramatic flair. I dragged the fucker here using what can only be described as improvised mud slides. It did not go well. I’m fairly certain I’ve pulled at least three muscles I didn’t know I owned.

Lore responds by rolling his eyes so hard I’m convinced they’ll disappear into the back of his skull and reappear sometime next week. Then he crouched, hands steady as he inspected Callum's scrapes like it was second nature, like he'd spent his entire life patching up engines, bruises, and idiots. His tone shifted, now softer.

“You okay Cal?”

Callum brushed glitter off his collar, my glitter, thank you very much and muttered.

“Fine, fine. A lil' dizzy, but nothing feels broken.”

“Yet.” Mav piped up.

We all froze and swivelled toward her as if she'd set off a smoke alarm.

She took a dainty sip of her drink, calm as a nun at a rave, then shrugged.

“Never mind. Back to my caravan princess. You're a fuckin' mess.” Lore got back to his feet.

“You call him Princess?” I have to physically bite the inside of my cheek to stop laughing.

The look Callum gives me suggests he's one minor inconvenience away from chokeslamming me through my own caravan wall. His eyes always catch me off guard. They look hard and severe at first, but somehow they always melt into something playful. 

“He likes giving me pet names because it makes me squirm,” Callum says, nudging Lore. “But I got used to that one. ‘Princess’.”

Right. Lore.

Now that I think about it, we went to the same school. He was a few years above me, but we seemed to share a particular talent for getting blamed for things we hadn’t actually done. I ended up in detention often enough to start recognising the regulars and Lore was usually one of them. I remember him sitting at the back of the room, chewing on a half-destroyed pen and staring out the window like he was serving a life sentence instead of a forty-minute detention. I think he still lives out by the scrapyard, close to the dirt-bike trail. Close enough that I should run into him more often but I don’t. It’s like he has his own route to places.

“Hold up.” I muttered, pawing through drawers like a raccoon on a scavenger hunt. 

The caravan smelled oddly of burnt toast and glue - ambience, darling. Across from me, I could feel Callum looking. Not staring exactly, just...looking. And it was. Mostly.

There was something strangely cool about it too, like flipping your pillow over in the middle of a heatwave and immediately regretting how much you enjoyed it. Which was a deeply unhelpful comparison. My dignity immediately objected. I wasn't sure what I was feeling. Uncomfortable, definitely. But also curious, very curious unfortunately.

After a very long meeting, victory! I found bright strips of fabric. Sure, they were technically from a botched bodysuit experiment, but that's my version of a first aid kit. I dropped cross-legged beside Callum and started tying one around his forearm, my fingers brushing skin that was very warm. For a ridiculous second, my caravan shifted around me. The damp rugs, the lopsided mannequin, the glitter haze...it all faded, and what was left felt holy, like the walls had stretched into a chapel.

My bad hand trembled as I pulled the knot tight. I'd almost forgotten about it during the chase. Almost.

“Did you get hurt?”

His question was quiet and careful while Mav and Lore were still caught up in their own conversation, their For a second, his eyes lingered on the bandages.

Then he nodded.

Nothing more.

No questions.

No pity.

He understood my discomfort.

I focused on the knot, pretending it required all of my attention. Beneath my fingertips, his pulse carried on, steady and warm. For some reason, that made it harder to breathe.

I bit back something reckless. A joke, probably. Instead, I kept my eyes on the fabric.

“There,” I muttered. “Functional and fashionable. If anyone asks, you're bleeding on purpose. Very avant-garde.”

Callum's mouth tilted into the smallest, crooked smile. And damn me, it lit up the whole place brighter than the string lights I could barely afford to keep plugged in.

“I'm sorry.” 

I blurted, because apparently my brain thought an apology was the quickest route back to oxygen, as if words alone could stop my heart from rattling out of my chest.

“It's alright, Bunny,” He said, and the nickname...delivered with casual certainty, like it had always belonged to him, lodged itself in my chest like a glowing stone I couldn't dislodge. “Lore and the hospital know me by name anyway.”

“Bunny?” Mav crowed, already vibrating with mischief. “Cute. I'm calling you Bun-Bun from now on.”

I turned the full force of my glare on her, then swivelled to the rabbit. To my horror, the resemblance was...there. Insolent ears, judgmental eyes, messy and curly-blonde hair, that permanent look of why are you like this? As if on cue, Bun Bun thumped his foot.

Lore hoisted Callum up like he was hauling a sack of potatoes and within minutes they were headed for the door. I hovered awkwardly, pretending to tidy up. The same mug had somehow been wiped three times.I hovered awkwardly, pretending to tidy up.

I wasn't avoiding saying goodbye.

I just... wasn't in a hurry for him to leave.

Which was ridiculous. I'd known this man for all of five minutes and half of those had been spent unconscious in the mud. Something about him kept catching on the corners of my mind. The way he carried himself. The strange sadness tucked behind his eyes. The little glimpses of warmth that appeared when I least expected them.

Every time I thought I'd figured him out, the feeling slipped away again.

Like trying to hold water in my hands. I didn't understand why he fascinated me so much.

I only knew that he did.

Then, just before the door clicked shut, he shifted ever so slightly, a small tilt of his head, a micro-flicker of eyes that met mine for barely a heartbeat. Not enough for anyone else to notice, not a full turn, just...enough.

Enough that my chest thudded, enough that I swore the air had thickened, enough that the tiny stolen moment felt like the world had hiccuped and left us suspended in it.

And god, it was heavy. Not crushing, but weighted, like a secret you're not sure you're allowed to keep.

A fraction too long.

A fraction too tender.

A fraction too dangerous.

I froze, pretending to scratch my eyebrow, like that could somehow make me look less like a rabbit caught in full headlights. Pun intended? But inside? My ribs were a drum, and he'd just hit the strike.

And then the door closed, and the whole caravan seemed to exhale, settling into silence except for the faint patter of rain against the thin roof.

Mav collapsed back into the sofa.

“Twinning,” She announced, pointing between me and Bun Bun with a grin that could gut me alive.

I sank onto the cushion next to her, sighing, the fabric still faintly warm where Callum had been, though the cold rushed in fast. And hell, his scent still clung to the air; warm, spiced, a little rough around the edges, with just a hint of something sweet beneath it. My chest felt both full and hollow at once, swollen with something I couldn't name but couldn't chase away.

That look, the one that said a secret had been exchanged without a single word, coiled around my ribs and refused to let go.

Is it all just in my head?

It was a dangerous thought, like a flame cupped too close to bare skin. It was like the sky went still before the rain.

It wasn't the beginning.

No.

It was a strike - the small, precise blow that splits everything open before the storm truly breaks.

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