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Chapter1
“It’s not personal.But it’s a good time to tell you that I think we should break up.”
Caleb blinked, then shook his head like maybe he was just high on coffee fumes or something and wasn’t understanding his boyfriend correctly.
But no. No,apparently, he was.
Cameron stood there with that little smirk on his face Caleb always fucking hated, his hands hanging kind of loose in the air like he couldn’t be bothered to sign with more than the bare minimum effort.
Caleb told himself the tremble in his fingers was from the caffeine and not from the adrenaline rushing through his system as he was apparently getting dumped, “I saw you on Instagram kissing some guy, and you’re dumping me, and telling me it’s notpersonal?”
Cameron wasalsodumping him in front of an audience, Caleb suddenly noticed.
He zeroed in on the expression Cameron wore, and the way his pupils were dilated, and he immediately knew his now-ex had not onlyplannedthis, but he was enjoying it. Cameron was the kind of guy who liked to laugh at people who tripped and fell on the street, so it was no surprise he was getting pleasure out of hurting Caleb in front of a crowd.
He didn’t know why he expected better, but he had assumed Cameron would have allowed him to retain some of his privacy in a moment like this. They’d been together for three years, for fuck’s sake. Caleb sort of assumed he’d earned some kind of respect.
Or, at the very least,dignity.
Cameron’s whole chest moved with his sigh. “Okay fine. Itispersonal, but shit happens, C.” C. Like he couldn’t be bothered to use Caleb’s actual sign name, which was hardly any more effort than the letter. “And evenyouhave to know that things between us haven’t been great. I mean, why do you think Javier and I started sleeping together.”
Well, no. Hehadn’tknown things were so bad his boyfriend started cheating, thank you very fucking much.
He knew that over the last two years he’d been busier than he’d ever been in his life because owning and running a café was the hardest thing he’d ever done. He was fighting people who wanted to turn his all-Deaf café into a gimmick instead of taking him seriously as an actual business.
Andhe was learning a whole new skill set because he definitely did not have the kind of mind for marketing or numbers.
So maybe he wasn’t as present as he’d been when they first got together, but he thought Cameron had understood that sometimes people had to make sacrifices for their dreams. God knows he’d done that enough for Cameron over the years.
But apparently, he was wrong about that too. And now he couldn’t get the gorgeous, dark-haired guy out of his head. Javier—who lived in town and had a German Shephard that looked too much like the one Caleb’s brother owned. Javier, who had a smile like the sun, who apparently had no problem posting photos of him kissing a man who had a boyfriend to his public Instagram for the world to see.
“You never said anything,” he signed, his wrists feeling weak. “If you were this miserable, why didn’t you tell me before you cheated?”
Cameron made that face he did whenever he thought Caleb was being too sensitive. “I didn’t think I needed to. When was the last time we couldn’t keep our hands off each other, C? When was the last time we just tore at each other’s clothes and went at it for hours?”
Caleb blinked at him, not quite sure how to answer that considering they’d been together for damn near a decade and he wasn’t sure it was supposed to be the honeymoon phase after that long. But fuck, was that the problem? Washethe problem? His cheeks started to burn with both humiliation and panic.
Had theyeverbeen that hot and heavy? Maybe in the beginning, but it was new then. They were younger. And they weren’t even exclusively dating. Caleb had been working as a maintenance guy for some fortune five hundred company, and Cameron had been finishing up the last year of his MBA and doing his internship in accounting.
They’d started sneaking around during their shifts, and it had been fun, but it wasn’t meant to be serious. But two years after their fooling around, Cameron asked him on a date, and that was that.
Caleb hadn’t expected them to keep up that kind of fire forever. He hadn’t expected to stay perpetually horny for his boyfriend after they moved in together. He assumed they were doing the right thing—settling down when they started talking about marriage and a future.
He wasn’t exactly a relationship expert or anything, but for fuck’s sake, he didn’t know anyone who could live up to Cameron’s demands.
The fairytales always stopped at the first kiss, but an entire lifetime existed beyond them, and they weren’t all midnight rendezvous and ballroom dancing and rescuing damsels from their locked towers.
“Say something,” Cameron urged. “Say anything. Give me a reason to keep standing here.”
Caleb felt both furious and sick as he glanced out of his periphery to see at least four people trying to look casual as they held cell phones pointed at them. His face started to go hot again, and slightly numb, and his mind went a little foggy. It was a new sensation.
He lifted his hands to form some kind of reply, but what the fuck was he meant to say? And did he really need to say it in front of people who were recording him?
Jesus, someone was going to post it online and talk about how fucking beautiful ASL was, all while Caleb’s life was being turned upside down.
Shit, he was going to be sick.
“Do you want me to beg for you to stay?” he finally asked.
