“Love bombed?” Caleb asked.
“Oh, right.” Jayne pushed his lips to the side. How could he put into words the destruction a narcissist could cause? “It’s… bear with me, okay? I’m going to try to work my way through it without sounding insane.”
“I’ll be patient,” Caleb promised.
Jayne smiled. It was funny how the littlest things could mean so much. “Love bombing is when someone who is especially manipulative overwhelms you with affection. I feel like it’s hard to understand exactly how far it goes unless you’ve been targeted by it before. Imagine… I don’t know.” Jayne raked his hands down his face. Getting his point across was proving harder than he’d anticipated. “Imagine someone you just met messages you all the time and always has something nice to say. They bring you gifts whenever you see them, and they make it a point to compliment you every chance they get. So then, when the pattern has been established and you’re hooked on their praise, they can make you do almost anything by withholding affection. If, all of a sudden, they go cold on you, you wonder what you did to deserve to be treated that way. You stay up at night agonizing over if you said something wrong and how you can make it up to them so you can get that love back.”
“I think I understand.” Caleb frowned. “So I’m guessing that’s the next part of your story, right?”
Jayne snorted. “Yeah. It got so bad at one point that I’d have panic attacks when I’d see an unread text from him, because I had no idea whether it would be the man who showered me with adoration, or the bastard who made me feel like shit with his long stretches of no contact and abrupt, pissy responses when I’d dare to ask him if everything was okay. And all of it culminated last Valentine’s Day, when I went into heat while I was over at his place. He told me if I really loved him that I’d show him how committed I was by giving him my heat, and I did.”
“So Parker…”
“Is Bastian’s son, yeah.” Jayne winced. “I was stupid. It was my fault. He had me so wrapped around his little finger that I would have done anything for him. I thought I was going insane. All the times he got angry at me for no reason, all the times he shut down on me and refused to talk things out like adults, all the times he twisted his words or motives to make himself seem innocent… I was one hundred percent convinced it was my fault, and that if I tried harder, he wouldn’t have to treat me that way. It probably sounds stupid if you weren’t there experiencing it, but I swear to god, it was like being in a cult.”
“How did you get out?”
Jayne laughed. “I didn’t. The bastard still has his claws in me, and I don’t know if that will ever change.”
24
Caleb
Alump rose in Caleb’s throat that he couldn’t swallow back down. Cold, creeping dread spread across the back of his neck, then wove down his spine like ivy, sinking its roots deep. “What do you mean, ‘he’s got his claws in you’?”
“Not like that,” Jayne said softly. “I don’t mean that I’m still in love with him. I’m not always dumb, you know.” Jayne stuck out his tongue, but the light in his eyes was dim, and his energy was lacking. He ran a hand through his hair, pushing it back from his face, and seemed to pull himself together. “I’m not interested in getting back together with him. The thought fills me with so much dread that sometimes it makes me literally sick. But… that’s a problem, isn’t it? That he still has so much power over me? I want to rip every trace of him out of my universe, but there he is, and no matter what I do, I can’t seem to escape him.”
Jayne wilted onto the couch and covered his face with his hands. Caleb, unsure of what to do or say, simply watched. The more he learned, the worse he felt, and the less certain he became about how he could help. The kind of abuse Jayne had been through—because it was abuse, and he didn’t mistake it even if Jayne did—wasn’t like anything Caleb had dealt with before. It left Caleb feeling inadequate. How was he supposed to help when he’d never experienced anything half as bad? But, no matter how he felt, doing nothing wasn’t an option. Even if he didn’t have the right words to say, he couldn’t let Jayne think he was alone.
“Hey.” Caleb’s hand was still on Jayne’s calf. He squeezed again, then adjusted his position on the couch so he could reach out and take one of Jayne’s hands away from his face. Jayne opened his eye and looked at Caleb glumly. He didn’t speak, so Caleb picked up from where he’d left off. “It’s okay to feel that way. Some people take months to get over relationships, and that’s with zero contact. You’re being constantly harassed by this guy—of course you’re not going to be able to forget him.”
“But it’s not just that.” Caleb took Jayne’s hand in his and led it to rest between their bodies. Jayne’s other hand fell away from his face. He looked hollow, his gaze set on a place not here in the moment, but somewhere in the past. “It’s the little things, too. How, when I drive by certain parts of town, my stomach clenches and my blood runs cold thinking he might find me there. How every morning I wake up wondering if today will be the day he manages to corner me, or my brother. I may be ‘free’ of him now, but he’s always on my mind.”
“No.”
“No?” Jayne arched an eyebrow. “I’m pretty sure what you mean is, ‘yes.’”
“I meant no,” Caleb insisted. He wove their fingers together, offering what little support he could. “Thethreatof him is always on your mind. Bastian himself isn’t.”
The distinction seemed to strike Jayne. He fell silent and turned his head to the side, overly fascinated with the stitching along the side of the couch. Caleb hoped that it was because he was taking what Caleb had said to heart instead of looking for ways to refute it.
“The pain he put you through isn’t going to be something you get over thanks to a good night’s sleep and some distance.” Caleb ran his fingers over the back of Jayne’s hand. His skin was smooth and warm, and his touch sparked delight inside Caleb that ran all the way up his arm and into his chest. “It’ll take time.”
“But even if I’m only fixated on the threat of him, isn’t that enough?” Jayne asked. Worry dragged on his lips. “If the thought of him and the things he’s done to me gives me such a visceral reaction, then who’s to say he can’t wiggle his way back in?” Jayne took his hand from Caleb’s and raked his fingers through his hair. While he kept his voice steady, a note of underlying terror lit up his words from behind. “I shouldn’t feel anything for him at all—I should benumbto all of this—and yet here I am still obsessing over him, worrying about the future, terrified of what might happen if he manages to get to us.”
“Numb?” Caleb smiled a broken smile. “I think numb is a mask people use to pretend that they’re not affected by something, like a placeholder for when you’ve got too many emotions, and you don’t know how to describe them… or because you’ve been forced by society not to divulge what you’re feeling because doing so wouldn’t be ‘polite.’ I think, beneath that stupor, a lot of people who claim that they’re numb actually have a lot of feelings. Rage, resentment, bitterness, jealousy, distress, spite…”
“I don’t agree with you.” Jayne dropped his hands from his hair and spun a dislodged strand of it between his fingers. “There gets to be a point where nothing affects you anymore—where it’s just another shitty drop added into an ocean of total shittery. You don’t notice, and you don’t care.”
“Then we’ll agree to disagree.” Caleb studied Jayne carefully, then pressed on. “So, what happened after he took your heat? Something had to have happened, or else you wouldn’t be sitting here telling me about all the bullshit he put you through.”
Jayne hummed. He spun the strand of hair between his fingers until it started to twist around itself. “Something snapped when I told him that I was pregnant. I don’t know what it was, or why it happened. Until then, I’d been convinced that he’d wanted me to get pregnant, you know? You don’t get to tell your omega boyfriend not to take his birth control, fuck him raw all night long through his heat, then get pissed when he comes to tell you he’s pregnant. But that’s what happened. He flew off the handle and accused me of being a filthy, cheating slut who’d spread my legs for any man who looked my way. It was a ridiculous claim, because I’d literally spent every moment of my heat that I wasn’t at work with him, but I guess you can’t explain crazy. My best guess is that the times I went home after work instead of going right to his place and the nights I spent in my own bed were too much for him. In his eyes, if I wasn’t at work or at his place, it was because I was in some other man’s bed getting dicked down. So he told me he didn’t want anything to do with me and my whorish ways, and he kicked me to the curb.”
Caleb frowned. “That’s a shitty thing to think of someone you’re supposed to love.”
“Right?” Jayne laughed, but the sound of it was flat and tired. “Of course, I didn’t see it that way at first. He’d cut me off from the adoration and love I needed, and I went crazy trying to get back in his good graces. I texted him like a lunatic, I called him at all hours of the night, I’d show up randomly at his apartment to beg him to take me back… at the time, I thought us breaking up would be the end of the world. He had me addicted to his praise, and he’d whittled my self-worth down until it was virtually nonexistent. It felt like if I didn’t have him, I was nothing—that no one would ever love me again, and that I’d spend the rest of my life alone.” Jayne rolled his eyes. “Looking back, I’m sure it was a manipulation tactic. He’d make me grovel and beg so I’d realize that without him, I was nothing. Then, when I was totally broken, he’d take me back and do whatever the hell he wanted with me. If he’d have judged the situation better and ‘decided to give me a second chance’ earlier, I probably wouldn’t be here right now—but he didn’t. Then one day, while I was on my lunch break at work, I stopped midway through the text I’d been writing to beg him to take me back and asked myself why I wanted him back in the first place.”
“Out of the blue?” Caleb asked.
