“Uh, you okay?” Jayne gestured at the pretzel dangling in front of Caleb’s lips. “You’re all spaced out.”
“You look…”
“Oh.” Jayne snorted and shook his head. “I took my makeup off when I was in the bathroom. You guys did an okay job last night when you were getting me cleaned up, but you really need to use an oil-based remover to get it all off. Shit’ll get in your pores and make you wrinkle prematurely if you don’t get it off your face.”
“Uh, sorry?” In an effort to act natural, Caleb stuffed a pretzel into his mouth. “M’not an expert on makeup.”
With his face painted, Jayne was flawless—high, dramatic cheekbones, a complexion that only photoshop could rival, and just the right amount of color to bring his eyes and lips to the forefront of everyone’s attention. The look was subtle, barring the glitter in his eyeliner, but it suited him beautifully. Caleb couldn’t pretend to know what kind of product and skill went into a look like that, but what he knew now was that Jayne didn’t need any of it to look stunning. Pale, barely there freckles speckled his cheeks and ran over the bridge of his nose. His cheeks were naturally pink, and while the angles on them weren’t as sharp without cosmetics, they were still gorgeous. His lips were a pale, pretty pink, and were slightly less plump than Caleb remembered them being, but his eyes still enchanted like nothing else.
They were hazel, Caleb noted. Brown one second, green the next, and sometimes, both at once. And tonight, even if it were only for that one moment, they were focused on him. The thought made Caleb’s heart skip a beat, and he found himself wishing that Everett hadn’t had to go into work so they could share this moment together.
Jayne really was something special.
“Neither is Everett, from what I can tell. That’s okay. You’ll learn.” Jayne took his spot on the couch and picked up the bottle of whiskey. “You sure you don’t mind my lips on it?”
Caleb shook his head. “Even if you had the worst case of cooties in all of North America, I’m pretty sure I’d be first in line to let you infect me.”
Jayne snorted and lifted the bottle in a toast. “Well then, cheers.” He tilted the spout to his lips. When he set it back down, a noticeable level of whiskey was gone. “God, that’s smooth.”
“What can I say?” Caleb toyed with a pretzel, then looked at Jayne from beneath his lashes and said, “I have good taste.”
Jayne snorted again. “Alright, Romeo, if you keep flirting with me, we’re never going to get to the end of the insanity that is my life. Are you ready for me to keep going?”
Caleb nodded, too invested to tell Jayne to stop despite the way the story was spiking his blood pressure. Now that they’d started, there was no going back—he needed to know more.
“Just remember that you asked for it,” Jayne warned.
Then he began.
* * *
“So,when we last left off, everyone’s least favorite scumbag had kicked me to the curb after I told him I was pregnant. Class act right there, let me tell you.” Jayne grabbed a handful of pretzels and started to pick the salt off each one. It seemed that their intermission had given him a chance to cool down and get back in the proper head space. “But our fierce, fabulous, and hormonally charged hero had also made a discovery—the asshole who’d made his life hell had been abusing him, and getting out was the best thing that could have happened to him.”
“The best,” Caleb confirmed. “I remember. Where does the story go from here?”
“Ah.” Jayne finished picking the salt off one of the pretzels and popped it in his mouth, then chewed thoughtfully. “That’s a good question. After I realized what he’d done to me, Simon and Shep helped me see every other nasty, slimy, underhanded thing he’d put me through. There were tons. Let’s just say that if you can think it, Bastian probably did it.” Jayne, whose palm was full of salt and pretzels in varying states of nudity, shifted the deconstructed snacks to his other palm and dumped the salt back in the bowl. “Isolating me from my friends and family? Check. Destroying my self-esteem? Check. Coercing me into sex? Check. To be fair, he didn’t lay a hand on me when we were together, but I’m pretty sure that when I wasn’t looking, he was participating in some kind of underground puppy-kicking ring to make up for it.”
Caleb almost choked on his mouthful of pretzel.
“Sorry.” Jayne grinned. “I’m feeling a little better about myself. Getting up and moving around helped. Sometimes, when I talk about what happened, I get trapped in my head, and it’s hard to remember that it’s all in the past.”
“You’re fine. I mean, it’s not like your whole life fell apart this afternoon, or anything.” Caleb shrugged.
Jayne rolled his eyes and poked Caleb’s hip with his toes. “Asshole.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Anyway,” Jayne pressed, playfully annoyed. “I started to read a little more about narcissists and sociopaths, and it was scary how much of it I could apply to my situation. It was almost like someone was writing anonymous articles about my experience. I found a couple online forums for victims of narcissistic abuse, and the more stories I read, the more certain I became that I’d made the right decision. With the help of articles and people blogging about their personal experiences, I saw what Bastian really wanted—to make me suffer. Every time I came around, begging him to take me back, I was giving him power. Hewantedto see me grovel. Can you imagine that? How evil does someone have to be to take pleasure from seeing the one they’re supposed to love in pain? And then to do it over and over again?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Caleb fired back with a reply anyway. “Underground puppy-kicking ring levels evil.”
“Right?” Jayne grinned and picked a few more salt crystals from his next pretzel. “So, like I said before, I cut contact cold turkey. I blocked his number and deleted all our pictures together and got rid of my social media—not that I’d used it since I met him, anyway. He made me shut it down because he thought that every single man in Aurora was interested in my glittery ass.”
“It’s a very fine glittery ass,” Caleb said. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“You’re trouble.” Jayne wagged his finger. “But I’ll take the compliment, thank you very much. Let’s just say that the interest I was getting didn’t warrant shutting down my social media, but it happened anyway, and in the end, it was good, because it was one less thing I had to worry about while cutting contact with him. And you’d think, after everything I did, that it would be enough, and the bastard would leave me the hell alone. Spoiler—”
“He didn’t.”
