Page 47 of Beautiful When He Breaks

Julian

Eli fell asleep the way people do after something inside them finally gives out. There’s this exhausted stillness in him that worries me more than the sobbing did.

That’s what I keep thinking while I sit in the chair by his bed and watch him breathe. He’s propped half upright against the pillows with Mila sprawled on his chest, one tiny hand curled into the collar of his shirt, her face turned toward his throat as if she knows exactly where to settle when the world gets too loud.

His arms are wrapped around her with that same fierce, shaking protectiveness he had in the driveway when I dragged him out of the car, only now the panic has burned itself down into exhaustion. His face is wrecked. Even asleep, his brow won’t fully smooth out. There are tear tracks dried tight on his skin and a rawness around his eyes that makes something in me want to start breaking things with my bare hands just to have a place to put the anger.

I don’t know every word his parents said, but I know what came out of Eli in pieces between the sobs in the driveway, enough to understand that they didn’t just reject the situation; they rejected him. They took a knife to the exact places he was already bleeding and then had the nerve to call it righteousness.

I know they told him to marry Celeste while dismissing the possibility that he was assaulted because it was easier for them to believe he was immoral than vulnerable.

I know they said they didn’t accept Mila if he refused to marry the woman who abandoned her. I know his father probably said the kind of shit a man never gets to unsay, and his mother let it happen. I know Eli folded in my arms like his whole skeleton had been holding itself together by obedience, and someone finally cut the wires.

That was enough.

I can see the love he has for Mila so clearly it almost makes me sick. There’s no hesitation in it, no confusion, and no doubt. She’s his. He knows it all the way down. That’s why the disowning cut the way it did. He didn’t want permission to love her; that part is already settled. It cut because some piece of him still hoped his parents would hear he was violated and choose something softer than shame. Instead, they chose punishment.

Mila shifts once and lets out the tiniest sleepy noise, and his hand flexes protectively over her before he even wakes. The sight of it hits me in the middle of the chest because there it is again, the thing his parents deserved to see and definitely did not deserve to judge: the love. Not theory, or duty, or obligation dressed up to look holy. Love—full and absolute and terrified and real.

That’s what they rejected.

Not just Eli. Not just a scandal or the version of events that best serves their pride. They rejected this. Him with his baby on his chest, his life already rearranged around her. Their son, trying so hard to be better than what happened to him.

But his parents disowning him isn’t just emotional violence. It’s logistics. Money. Stability. The whole boring, brutal infrastructure of a life.

He’ll have the money from his trust in two years, and the full-ride football scholarship keeps him in school and on the team. But a full-ride does not buy diapers, formula, legal fees, a crib that lasts beyond six months, childcare, pediatric co-pays, gas, clothes, or the thousand silent expenses babies drag into a room with them. It does not repair the simple fact that the people who were supposed to be there just cut him off with surgical precision.

He has football, housing through the Sin Bin, the trust, and us. That’s not nothing. It’s also not enough unless we make it enough.

I look at him again and make the decision so quietly that it almost feels like instinct rather than thought.

Tomorrow, I’ll make plans. I’m talking to Killian and Luca and whoever else has the right mix of brains and fury to build something around him fast. We’ll figure out accounts and legal coverage and whether his full ride can be stretched any further than it already is. We’ll figure out how much childcare Mrs. Alvarez can realistically give and what it costs. We’ll figure out how to keep Eli in school and on the team without making him feel like some charity case he thinks we’re all dragging behind us. He can argue with us later. Right now, the plan matters more than his pride.

Not tonight, though. Tonight, he needs sleep more than spreadsheets. He needs someone in the room and silence that doesn’t hurt him and the right to keep his daughter on his chest as long as he fucking wants. Tonight, he needs one night where the world stops demanding he solve every consequence at once.

Mila sighs in her sleep and turns her little face farther into his shirt, and Eli’s breathing changes just enough that I know he’s about to wake or drift lighter. I move before he can catch me staring too openly, crossing quietly to the bassinet and straightening the folded duck blanket Liam left there earlier since this house is now haunted by waterfowl.

The movement gives my hands something to do. It also keeps me from doing anything as stupid as brushing my fingers through Eli’s hair while he sleeps, which I’m horrified to realize I want with enough force to be dangerous.

He wakes slowly, confused at first, then instantly alert the second he registers Mila on his chest. His hand tightens over her back before his eyes even fully open. When he sees me standing by the bassinet, his expression eases.

“You still here,” he says, voice rough from crying and sleep and everything in between.

“Yeah,” I answer. “You were snoring too tragically to leave alone.”

That gets me the faintest roll of his eyes, which is honestly more relief than humor, but I’ll take it. He doesn’t argue. He just looks down at Mila and then back up at me, and for a second, I can see all the things he’s not saying stacked behind his eyes.

Thank you.

Don’t leave.

I can’t believe they did that.

I can’t believe I still wanted them to choose me.

I can’t lose anything else.

I don’t make him say any of it. “Do you need water?” I ask instead.