“What’s going on between you and him?” Caleb asked. He didn’t pull away as Jayne stretched out a little farther and caressed Caleb’s side with the smooth skin of his ankle. “I don’t know what you remember about last night, but the bastard fucking attacked us when Everett and I stood up for you. We tried to talk him down, but he wasn’t interested in listening.”
“Yeah, that sounds like Bastian.” Jayne stole a sinful glance at the sliver of exposed skin at Caleb’s side, then lifted his gaze slowly to meet Caleb’s eyes. “As for what’s going on between us? I wish I could give you an answer that doesn’t sound crazy, but I’ve come to learn that ‘sanity’ and ‘Bastian’ aren’t words that can ever be associated with each other.”
“Try me.” Caleb hunkered down on the couch, following Jayne’s lead. His foot brushed along Jayne’s thigh, then wedged itself behind Jayne’s back while Caleb’s ankle put gentle pressure on the strip of exposed skin between the bottom of Jayne’s shirt and the top of his pants. “If you need to start at the beginning, it’s no big deal. Unless you’re ready to go to bed, we’ve got all the time in the world.”
“Nope.” The idea of trying to sleep filled Jayne with dread. Alone in the dark, surrounded by silence, his thoughts would eat him alive. Talking about the batshit insanity that was Bastian and their brief but disastrous relationship was better than facing reality. “You might want to get a drink or something—alcoholic, preferably. Take a shot every time Bastian does something insane—you’ll have to pour yourself off the couch by the time I’m through.”
Caleb looked longingly at the liquor cabinet, which wasn’t within arm’s reach of the couch. “Too comfy.”
“Then brace yourself,” Jayne said. “We’re going in dry.”
* * *
“Once upon a time—”
“Nope. Start over.” Caleb shook his head. “Fairytales have happily ever afters. It’s the rule.”
Jayne glared at him. “Bitch, just because I haven’t found my happily ever after yet doesn’t mean I never will. Besides, some fairytales are dark. Have you ever read the ones by Grimm?”
“Those are fables.”
“They’re…” Jayne paused. Google would tell him who was right, but if they duked it out over terminology, he’d never get to the end of his story. For now, he’d let Caleb win. “Fine. We’ll go with that. I’ll start over. Our story starts two years ago next month, when our stunning protagonist—me—hit the town intending to drown his sorrows in cock.” Jayne shot Caleb a look—he’d been about to snicker. “Before you go judging my life choices, I’ll have you know that there is nothing wrong with being promiscuous.”
“Oh, I know.” Caleb reached out and squeezed his calf reassuringly. “I guess you really don’t remember anything from last night, do you?”
Jayne narrowed his eyes. “No?”
“Never mind.” Caleb waved a hand dismissively. “Safe to say, I stand by your right to do with your body what you want. Please, go on.”
Jayne let a beat pass, then picked up from where he’d left off. “It wasn’t the first time that I’d gone out with the intention of going home with someone else, and I’d imagined that it’d go like every other time had—with me hitting up a random club, bagging a hot guy, forgetting about the world for a while, then heading home that same night. It… didn’t end up going quite the way I’d planned. I met Bastian on the dance floor, and while he was a little odd, he was handsome enough, and fuck, did he know how to touch me.” Jayne snorted. It all seemed so ridiculous in retrospect. “He was the one who came on to me, and as soon as he saw that I was into it, he started to get possessive as fuck. No one else was allowed to get near me, and he made it known by the way he squeezed my ass and ground up against me that I was his. Me from two years ago was a moron, so of course, it didn’t raise any red flags. I thought it was hot that he’d turned into a total caveman. It made me feel like I was wanted, which, really, was the whole point of me going out in the first place.”
Absentmindedly, Jayne slid his hand over Caleb’s and squeezed it in return.
“What happened to make you feel that way?” Caleb asked.
“My parents died.” Jayne distracted himself from the tears welling in his eyes by running his fingertips along Caleb’s knuckles. “It was sudden—their car spun out after hitting a patch of black ice, and that was it. Here one minute, gone the next. I’d been living away from home at the time, finishing up my MD, and when I got the news, I had to drop everything and come back home. Shep was a kid, and Simon was barely legal. I banded together with him and fought for custody of Shep, but there were complications with our inheritance, and it turned into this… nightmare.” If Jayne didn’t laugh, he’d cry, so he let loose with a dry, desiccated chuckle devoid of humor. “My mom and my biological dad had been married, but he was a Bastian-grade asshole, and he left her and dropped off the face of the earth. She was too scared to hunt him down and serve him divorce papers or ask for child support, worried about what he might do to her, or to me, so she moved on with her life and found love with my stepfather, the man I consider to be my real dad. They never got married, since it would have been bigamy, but they had two children together, and we were a family. Apparently in the eyes of the law, that isn’t enough to overrule the intestacy. Since she was still married to my bio dad, after she died, he inherited everything.Everything.We got what we could prove belonged to our dad, but the house, the money, all of her belongings…”
The memory jogged loose feelings Jayne couldn’t override with laughter. The few things they’d been able to salvage before the state had seized their mother’s estate had been in the apartment. The mirror with the peeling stickers in the bathroom, the old armchair in the living room that had smelled like home… gone. All of it gone. Jayne sniffled and brushed the tears from his eyes. It made him feel dumb to have such a sentimental reaction to furniture, but knowing that it was gone and there was nothing he could have done to stop it made him feel as helpless as he had in front of the officer who’d offered his sincerest condolences and informed him his parents were dead.
“You don’t have to go on,” Caleb said softly. “I’m sorry for bringing it up.”
“No.” Jayne shook his head and blinked away the last of his tears. “I’m okay. Gotta get it out, right? I can’t keep it inside. After what happened today, it’s harder than it usually is, that’s all. I’m fine. I promise.”
Caleb didn’t look convinced, but that was his tough shit. Jayne wasn’t going to jump through hoops to make someone outside the situation feel better about himself. Whether he believed Jayne or not was his business, and no matter which of the two was reality, Jayne would continue his story regardless.
“Anyway, suffice it to say that we were left penniless and without a place to stay, and then had to fight for rights to keep our brother with us on top of that, so it was a nightmare. For the first year or so, Simon and I were pretty much zombies. We did what we had to do, which meant numbing ourselves to the world and fighting with everything we had. He dropped out of school so I could finish up and get a job, then worked from home so he could look after Shep while I was at work bringing home the lion’s share of our income. With my medical school debts, we were barely skirting by. I mean, that’s still the case, and will be for the next decade or so, but things have changed a little since then.” Jayne frowned and checked his phone again. There were no new messages. “So… there you have it. That’s why I was out in the club on weekend nights looking to be adored, and the circumstances that led me to ever give Bastian a chance in the first place.”
“Shit.”
“Yup.” Jayne gave Caleb a wry look. “I’m still damaged goods, by the way—smarter than I was before, but damaged. You sure you and Everett still want in?”
“Yes,” Caleb said without hesitation, the words so certain that Jayne was sure he’d started to blush. “What you’ve been through doesn’t change what we think of you. You’re still Jayne, no matter what hardship you’ve endured.”
That was a pretty way of putting it. Jayne did his best to remember those words. “Thank you.”
Caleb shrugged. “It’s the truth. Now, do you want to keep going, or do you want to take a break? I’m good with whatever.”
If Jayne stopped now, he’d never be able to start again. If Caleb wanted to know, he needed to tell him now. “I’ll keep going. I guess the rest of it I can kind of boil down into bullet points. I let Bastian take me home and he wore me out so much that I spent the night. In the morning, he seduced me again, and after round two, he told me that he didn’t want me to see anyone else—that I was his now, and he was going to be my everything. I wasn’t really big on the whole monogamy thing, but he was an animal in bed, and unlike the other guys I’d gone home with prior to meeting him, he really made me feel like I was special, so I agreed. At the beginning of our relationship, he love bombed me nonstop. I was happy. I brought him home to meet my brothers—who didn’t like him right away—and stopped going out so I could spend my limited time off with him instead.”
