Well, that was if whatever was going on with Santos had anything to do with the military. He hadn’t specified, and it felt wrong to make assumptions. It was probably irrational, but it felt like I’d fucked up enough with those.
“Are you close with Santos?”
Yeah, because this was the right way to approach someone I wasn’t that close to myself.
I would’ve face-planted if there had been any surface close enough for it.
As it was, I just pretended I wasn’t fidgeting too much while I saw the man grow alert right away, and I had to pretend everything was fine, and I wasn’t fucking up again by making someone else worry. It would be fine if it was serious, but was it serious? I still didn’t know. It could all just be in my head, and Iwas blowing everything out of proportion because that was how I worked.
“I’ve had a couple drinks with him.” The vein in his neck popped as if he was keeping himself from saying something else. Even though both of them had been in the military, Carlos had the kind of body I associated with it more—the hunky kind with the perfect posture that screamed business. “What’s up?”
“I don’t know.” I cringed. This had been a terrible idea from the start. I shouldn’t have agreed to do this, and I shouldn’t have left the car without him, and I shouldn’t have let this go on as long as it had. “He’s acting weird, and then I act weird, because I’m a fucking mess, and it’s all…”
I waved my hand around. It felt wrong to call it a mess again, but words were hard, and I’d never claimed to have the vocabulary my education should’ve granted me.
“And you’re shocked?” Carlos gestured for me to sit down in one of the couches placed around the rustic open space that gave way to a hallway full of doors for every themed room—from a rope dojo to a Littles room and an orgy room that hadn’t started out that way, but it now was exactly that. “It was about time the guy lost it.”
“What does that mean?”
I knew Santos was struggling. I knew he had reasons to. I probably knew more than Carlos, because I highly doubted that a couple of beers or whatever they’d had had led to a confession from my bodyguard slash best friend slash soulmate slash Dom without the pressure of high protocol dynamics. For all his attentiveness with me, and how affectionate and warm he was, he wasn’t like that with everyone. Not without checking first that he wasn’t about to get hurt or rejected.
“We’re all a mess when we get out.” He sighed. “Well, maybe not all of us, but the ones who aren’t all about the bravado andaren’t surrounded by people with their same toxic ideologies sure do.”
“So what do I do?”
“Be patient?” Carlos frowned. “I don’t actually know. Jimena might be a better person to ask. I’ve never had to be there for someone whose life as he knew it imploded, and now has to accept the world is nothing like he’s been used to for the past decade.”
I hummed. Jimena was Carlos’s sister and María’s Dom, but neither of them were here, because Carlos and Jimena had a split custody thing going on with the club to avoid seeing each other in any compromising position, which made a lot of sense, but I was antsy. The club banned phones, too, so I couldn’t even text her to get a quick course on how to fix shit when I got back home.
Ugh.
Maybe I could sneak downstairs to send a quick text so that he didn’t think I hated him.
At the same time, I froze at the idea.
I didn’t want him to think that I hated him, but I didn’t know what I felt. What I wanted to say.
I just wanted to go back to the first few weeks of him being here, when it was about reconnecting, and all about following commands and feeding my touch-starved ass in all the ways it could be fed. I just wanted to understand, to be fully certain, of what had changed between then and now. Tony would say it was Sir Israel’s presence. Carlos or León would probably say it was him revisiting the reasons he was here, and the trauma or whatever he was working through in therapy. It could make me a narcissist, but I kept going back to how it was just me. Me, needing too much. Being too much.
But I didn’t know, and I didn’t know that I could really do anything about it until I did.
“What helped you, then?”
“Time.” He shrugged. “My niece. Knowing that my sister was there and she’d beat me up before I could take anything too far.”
“Too far?”
Carlos grimaced. “I would’ve never done anything, not with Ali there, but everything is overwhelming when you get out, and if you have more demons in your closet for any reason? It can get dark.”
“Should I leave?” I still wouldn’t know what to say. I’d probably make it worse, just like I’d been doing lately, but now I was going to have visions of that darkness. Of having abandoned Santos to it. Santos, who had issues around rejection because of his fundamentalist parents and their obsession with appearances that a queer man couldn’t keep up with even if he’d been willing to try, which I knew he had been. “I can talk with Erika about rescheduling.”
“Do you think he’d do something?”
Carlos was alert again. I made myself smaller on instinct. More people were starting to arrive. Most of them, I didn’t know. From what I’d seen online, Erika, Eli, Carlos, and Danny were the only ones from the inner circle in attendance. I’d gotten texts from a few of the others, apologizing because they’d already had plans or they were out of town for a getaway. It sucked, but I was also glad the four who were here weren’t as high-energy as some of the others. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to take in all the exuberance that came from the Littles or the pups in the group when they were in the mood for it.
“I don’t know.”
Carlos placed a hand on my shoulder. He never touched me, so it sent a shock through my system. “My advice? If you’re absolutely certain he could be in danger, go. Absolutely. Otherwise, it hurts, but you can’t be his cushion 24/7.”
