Jayne stuck out his tongue. “It’s like you already know the story.”
“Yeah.” Caleb shrugged. “Some asshole put a chapter from way later in the book as the prologue—the one where the hero’s two Knights in Shining Armor step in and defend the hero from his ass-wipe ex. I figured from that alone that you shutting down on him wasn’t going to end well.”
“And you’d be right, because after I went silent, Bastian wasfurious.Out of nowhere, he started blowing up my phone with calls and text messages from what I can only assume were burner phones. As soon as I’d block one, he’d come at me with another. It got so bad that I had to change numbers.” Jayne paused to take another swig of whiskey. “I think it took him a week to figure out he wasn’t getting through to me anymore. I guess the number must have finally disconnected, or it was picked up by some poor person who somehow managed to convince him that it no longer belonged to me. Whatever happened, once he figured it out, he started to come around the apartment. Sometimes, he’d just bang on the doors and call me names or accuse me of having cheated on him, but other times, he’d threaten me and Parker bodily harm, and a couple times he told me if he got his hands on me, he’d kill me for doing ‘this’ to him. We called the police on him more than once, but by the time they arrived on the scene, he was always long gone. Our shittacular apartment doesn’t—” Jayne winced, “—didn’thave video surveillance in the common areas, so there was no proof at all that he’d even been there. The officers I spoke to both on the scene and at the station when I tried to file a report told me that unless he did something like break into my house or cause me physical harm, there wasn’t anything they could do. I didn’t have proof. My word wasn’t enough.”
Caleb had been reaching for the Collingwood, but stopped short. Anger exploded like shrapnel inside of him, simultaneously digging into his stomach and cutting his heart to pieces. “That can’t be right.”
“That’s what I was told.”
“That’s bullshit!” Caleb snatched the Collingwood and took a swig, but the gentle burn of whiskey down his throat did nothing to soothe his temper. He set the bottle down heavily, then turned his attention to Jayne. “He wasn’t just harassing you—he was uttering death threats. They should’ve thrown his ass in jail.”
“I know.” Jayne pinched his lips and glared at his pretzels. He picked off the salt spitefully. “I told them that it was serious, but there are ‘protocols’ and ‘procedures’ and ‘things I’m too pretty to understand.’”
Oh, hell no. The shrapnel inside Caleb cut deep, tearing his stomach to shreds and flaying his heart. “The police said that to you?”
“Well… I’m paraphrasing a little.” Jayne scowled. He rid himself of his newest palmful of salt. “But that was essentially what it boiled down to. It’s funny how when you put on a full face of makeup, people treat you differently. If I’d gone in there with two months’ worth of beard—not that Ieverwould—and some old, loose, worn jeans, and a graphic t-shirt, I wouldn’t have gotten the same response I did, but I refuse to let society pigeonhole me into a life I don’t want to live. Just because I wear makeup doesn’t mean I’m less of a man, and it definitely doesn’t mean that I don’t have a brain—I’m a doctor, for fuck’s sake. But no one even cares to ask.” Jayne abandoned his mission to rid the salt from his pretzels and picked up the Collingwood, downing another mouthful. When he set it down again, anger still tightened the corners of his lips, but otherwise he appeared to have moved on. “I can’t even imagine what it would have been like if I was a female Jayne. I’m privileged in so many ways, yet the injustices I facestillmake me want to tear my hair out. You want to know why people are dying from totally preventable domestic violence in this country?Thisis why.” He looked at Caleb both angrily and sheepishly. “But you didn’t come to listen to Jayne’s Soapbox Special, so I’ll get back to the point. The police weren’t helpful. In fact, trying to get them involved made things worse.”
Was there another bottle of Collingwood in the house? Caleb took another swig. If Jayne didn’t need it, Caleb certainly would.
“I don’t know if they ended up stopping by Bastian’s house, or if they called him, or if it was just a coincidence, but all of a sudden, shit escalated. Bastian started coming over early in the morning when he knew I’d be leaving for work in an attempt to corner me in the halls or barricade me inside the apartment, making me late. Then, one night after Parker was born, I woke up from a dead sleep to him crying. And before you go sassing me, I know that babies cry, but this… it was like…” Jayne shook his head. “It wasn’t normal. And then I heard it, too—god-awful banging on the window.”
“What floor were you on?” Caleb asked.
“The fourth.” Jayne ate another pretzel, his gaze distant and detached, like the memory was too terrible to even want to recall. “Bastian was outside the window. He’d scaled the building using the fire escape, which just so happened to be located outside my room. At this point, I hadn’t seen him except for very brief glances when he tried to corner me in the hall—I always managed to get back inside before he could force me into confrontation—but there was no getting away from him with his face staring in at us. The man I saw wasn’t the one I remembered. I don’t know if it was drugs, or what, but something changed. He looked… dead. His eyes were somehow both bulging and sunken at the same time, his skin was pale, and he looked crazed. I don’t know how else to describe it.”
Jayne didn’t need to—Caleb already knew.
“Then, as if seeing a face in my fourth-floor window wasn’t horrifying enough, Bastian started pounding on the glass like he was trying to break it. I’ve never gotten out of bed so fast. I grabbed Parker and bolted. I’m pretty sure I almost knocked down Simon and Shep’s doors trying to wake them up. We got the hell out of the apartment and drove halfway across town. While we were on the move, Simon called the police. When they got there, the window had been shattered, but there was no sign that anything had been stolen or otherwise damaged. The police took pictures and looked for things like scraps of material, blood, loose hairs, fingerprints… but that’s where it ended. I haven’t heard anything more about the case since then.”
“And you were still living there up until the fire?” Caleb set what remained of his pretzels on the table and took another deep drink from the bottle. The loose, floating feeling of being comfortably buzzed had started to set in, but it wasn’t going to be enough. Caleb’s head throbbed from trying to process everything he’d been told, but the pain radiating from within his skull was nothing compared to the profound sorrow in his heart. How could one person live through so much and still get up in the morning? How could Jayne joke and laugh and put himself out there when on the inside, he was suffering? “Why didn’t you move?”
“I wanted to. God, did I want to.” Jayne, seemingly in homage of himself earlier that morning, slid off the couch and sat on the floor. He drank from the Collingwood again, gasped in satisfaction when the glass parted from his lips, then tucked the bottle between his thighs. Caleb, not to be outdone, oozed onto the floor after him and pried the bottle back, matching Jayne’s last gulp.
By the looks of him, Jayne was more than a little buzzed.
Caleb wasn’t far behind.
“It just wasn’t feasible for us.” Jayne took one of Caleb’s pretzels from the table and started stripping it of salt. “First and last month’s rent, a security deposit, the cost of hiring a moving company—because, let’s face it, I’m not exactly the world’s strongest man, my brother, Simon, is even smaller and scrawnier than I am, and Shep’s just a kid—and then all the time Simon and I would have had to take off work to view listings, pack the house, actually move, and then unpack once the move was over made it unrealistic. We tried. Simon and I did all the math and set up a budget, but between caring for Shep and Parker, we were saving a hundred bucks or less a month. We would’ve needed to save up four thousand dollars to comfortably move. It would have taken us years.”
“It would’ve taken you years to save up four thousand dollars?” Caleb asked in a small voice.
Jayne frowned and looked away.
Money had never been an object to Caleb. His father had been the CEO of Synecta Pharmaceuticals before he’d been born, and as a result of his career and prudent financial decisions, Caleb had never lacked for anything. At eighteen, his first annual disbursement from his trust fund had granted him financial independence, and every year since then, he’d used his disbursement to live the kind of life he wanted. The condo, cars, nights at the club… Caleb had taken it all for granted. While his brother had lived a frugal, humble life by investing his money in his education and stock, Caleb had never seen the point.
Now he did.
Aaron, who’d been imagining a future with his lover, Gage, had done his best to safeguard against the future. If the worst happened and their inheritance dried up, he was in a position to keep his family fed, sheltered, and clothed.
Caleb didn’t have that cushion, and Jayne, who’d worked hard and yet still was made to suffer, had even less.
“Jayne… I’m sorry.” Caleb stared into the bottle. His hand trembled, disturbing the smooth surface of the amber liquid within.
“It’s not your fault.” Jayne squeezed Caleb’s knee, then sighed and slouched against him, resting his head on Caleb’s shoulder. “But, yeah. The saying that goes, ‘don’t stick your dick in crazy’? I can confirm that it’s one hundred percent accurate, and can also verify that you should never, ever let crazy stick its dick in you.”
“You’re too good for that asshole anyway,” Caleb muttered. Jayne pawed at the bottle, so he held it out and made sure Jayne had a good grip on it before letting go. “Everett and I? Everett and I are going to kick his fucking ass if he tries to come around here and start trouble. Everett doesn’t like to fight, but he’s strong asfuck,and when he hears about what happened to you, he’ll want to tear Bastian limb from limb.”
“I don’t want him dead,” Jayne said after another deep drink. Clumsily, he pushed the bottle against Caleb’s chest, his coordination already shot. “I mean, yeah, but not really. All I want is for him to leave me alone.”
