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“Shh… I gotcha.” Caleb’s voice wrapped around me where his arms already were.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pull away or get closer, so I just stayed where I was, blinking my eyes open and staring up at the ceiling, waiting for the panic to ooze from my chest to my stomach, spreading out until it was just a dull, even throbbing swallowed up in my bloodstream instead of a big, hard knot.
“School,” I finally said, and he nodded.
“Yeah.”
“What time is it?”
He checked his watch. “Quarter to seven.”
The panic slid back up. “Fuck. We’re gonna—” I cut myself off mid-freakout when I realized I didn’t have to navigate land mines before a twenty minute walk to school, we were five minutes away with no reason to hurry. Fuck.
“Plenty of time,” he told me, running his hand up my side, and Jesus, I never would have thought I was the kind of guy who liked waking up to somebody touching and stroking and just generally being in my space, but he was just so warm and soft and safe and goddamn. I was some other person when he was in my space.
“When do you wake up?” I asked him, because it felt like he’d been awake awhile.
“I don’t know. Around six.”
“Fucking why?”
“I’m a morning person. It’s when my eyes open.”
I groaned and flipped over on my stomach, and he pulled me close up next to him where I wanted to be. Damn, he was good at reading my mind.
“You just lay here watching me like a fucking stalker?” I muttered, and he laughed.
“I have a book.”
“Jesus, you get up at six in the morning to read a book? That’s worse.”
“So grumpy,” he murmured in my ear, and I shivered. “You can sleep a little longer if you want. I’ll take a shower and make some coffee and come back for you, how about that.”
How about that. Sounded like I was out of my mind spoiled and I didn’t much know how to deal with it. I grunted and shoved my head further into the pillow and he squeezed me close and then rolled out of bed.
I liked it better when he squeezed me close and stayed.
My ass was still quietly sore, inside and out, and there wasn’t much I wanted to do more than stay home in bed and make that pain louder. Monday morning and class and practice were definitely not tempting me like this giant soft bed was, the clean sheets he’d pulled out of the dryer and put on the bed last night so when we got in they were stillwarm, and what kind of luxury wasthat?
I sighed and reached out, groping around on the table until I found my phone. I’d checked it every time I got up the nerve yesterday, waiting for something from my mom, but nothing had shown up. She was definitely back by now though, and there was definitely a chance there’d be some fucked up text screaming at me for something. Get your ass home, or never come home, or maybe some drunk rambling about how ungrateful I was just because. That would be normal enough even without anything Mike would have told her.
The sides of my throat burned and there was a cold, slimy feeling in my stomach when I thought about the way he’d looked me over before he left. Told me I was the kind of guy who deserved every bad thing that happened to him.
Maybe it was just him talking shit. But the guy wasn’t scared to put hands on me, and I could think of about a million different fucked up things that might have happened if Ihadn’tcome home with Caleb, and yeah, I’d blown my life up pretty hard trying to fix it.
I pulled back wincing and turned my phone on, bracing to feel like shit again, staring until the screen finally registered. But there wasn’t anything.
Not that Iexpectedit, not that I ever knew what to expect. Sometimes she didn’t check her phone for days. Or said she didn’t, anyway. Sometimes it got shut off. Plus there was the ever popular she didn’t give a shit option. Whatever. I might actually never hear from her again and that would be fine.
Be nice to stop feeling like I was looking over my shoulder every second, but since that was probably never going away anyway, nothing was a lot better than something as far as I was concerned. No news was good news and all that garbage.
I put my phone back on the table and flopped down onto the bed, rolling over onto my back and stretching out my limbs like a starfish in all the space. It was a lot of bed for one person, but he was a lot of person.
Sure was nice to have so much room, but it seemed like it was a better fit for two, honestly.
* * *
I felt weird as hell getting dressed, like everyone was going to look at me and know I was wearing new socks and underwear, wonder why my tshirt was so bright white under my sweatshirt. That one actually felt a little too real, and I swapped out a new white shirt for an old navy blue one just so no one would wonder why I one-upped over the weekend.
