Page 58 of His Holy Chaos

My chest compresses.

"Jude."

He flinches. He looks up, and his face is devastated. He hides it again in his arms, resting on top of his drawn knees.

"Jude. Look at me."

He shakes his head.

I lower myself to the floor beside him, my back against the bed frame, close enough that he can feel my warmth but not so close that I'm trapping him. I pull one knee up and rest my arm on it, casual, unhurried, like I have nowhere else to be.

"I'm right here," I say, low. "I'm not going anywhere. You don't have to talk. You don't have to move. You just have to breathe."

His fingers tighten in the sweatshirt. His knuckles are bloodless.

"In through your nose," I continue. "Slow. Four counts. Can you do that for me?"

A jerky nod. I hear him try. A stuttering inhale, catching in his throat, breaking apart. He tries again. This time it holds, shaky but whole, four counts.

"Good. Now hold it. Two, three, four. And out. Slow. Through your mouth. That's it."

We do this for a couple of minutes. Gradually, the tremors slow. His breathing finds a rhythm. The crying stops.

"There you go," I murmur. "There he is. Good boy."

The words land. His head lifts. Not all the way, just enough that I can see his face over his forearms. His eyes are wrecked. Red-rimmed and swollen, the honey color drowned in a glaze of tears that keeps replenishing no matter how many times he blinks. His nose is running. His lips are bitten raw. He does that, chews his lower lip when he's anxious, and he's been at it long enough that there's a thin line of blood at the corner of his mouth.

"Hey," I say softly.

"I'm sorry," he whispers, and his voice is destroyed. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, Daddy."

"Stop. You don't have to apologize. Not ever for this."

"I'm ruining it." A fresh wave of tears spills over, and he swipes at his face with the sweatshirt sleeve, angry, frustrated. "Everything was so good. Everything was perfect. This whole week was perfect, and I just… I'm fucking ruining it!"

"You're not ruining anything. Look at me." I wait until his eyes find mine. I hold his gaze and don't let go. "You are not ruining anything. Tell me what happened."

He shakes his head. He looks genuinely embarrassed.

"It's stupid," he says. "It's so fucking stupid, you're going to…"

"I'm not going to anything. Tell me."

His hand moves, and he gets his phone, showing it to me.

"Emmett," he says. "He sent me…" A hitching breath. He presses his palms against his eyes. "He sent me a fucking meme, Daddy. A stupid cat meme. One of those videos where the cat falls off the table. We used to send those to each other all the time. He hasn't blocked me, and I stupidly never got myself to block him. Because I don't hate him. It's not his fault… it never was his fault. He was always clear with me, saying the dynamic was a casual thing. I hate myself for not being able to keep things light. So sometimes he sends me stuff, and I send him stuff, and every time I cry. And now I'm ruining everything here because I'm crying again."

He cries. His body curls tighter. I let him cry, because this is the part most people get wrong. They rush in. They smother. They throw words at the wound: it's okay, you're fine, don't cry, as if language can outrun pain, as if naming the storm will stop it. It doesn't. I learned that in Angel's first eight weeks, those endless, screaming nights when nothing worked and nothing helped and the only thing I could do was hold her and let her feel what she needed to feel until the feeling passed through her like weather.

So I wait.

The crying slows. His shoulders shudder. He swallows hard.

"A cat meme," he says again, and there's a laugh buried in it somewhere, bitter and broken. The laugh of someone who knows how absurd their own suffering sounds from the outside. "He didn't even write anything. Just sent the video. Like nothing happened. Like we're just… like we're friends who send each other cat videos. Like I didn't…" His voice fractures. He presses his forehead against his knees. "Like I didn't spend the last twelve months trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Why I wasn't enough. Why I couldn't just be casual about it the way he wanted me to be."

"There's nothing wrong with you," I say, and I'm careful to keep my voice neutral, not showing the anger that's building. Because I am angry. Not at Jude. At a man who told a boy with a heart like an open wound that the wound was the problem. That wanting too much was the defect. That the depth of his feeling was something to be managed rather than met.

"There is, though," Jude whispers. "There's something fundamentally broken about the way I attach to people. I can't do casual. I can't do light. Everything I touch, I grab with both hands and hold on until my fingers bleed, and people don't want that, Daddy. People want easy. People want fun. And I'm fun at first, I'm great at first, but then I start needing things, and the needing scares them, and they leave."