I caughtmyself lingering on him again.
Cal was fixing the cabinet door in my apartment, the one that had been sticking since I moved in. I'd mentioned it once, offhand, when we'd stopped by yesterday to grab more of my clothes. Hadn't even really complained about it, just said something about how the landlord never fixed anything and I'd learned to live with the quirks. Cal hadn't responded, just looked at the cabinet with that quiet assessment he did, like he was filing the information away for later.
Now here he was. Tools spread out on my kitchen counter, a level propped against the wall, completely focused on a problem I hadn't even asked him to solve.
"You don't have to do this," I'd tried to tell him when he showed up with his toolbox.
"I know," his answer was direct. So was his next move: he started working anyway.
That was Cal. He didn't ask permission. Didn't wait to be needed. He just saw something that was broken and fixed it.
I decided to sit at the kitchen table, picking up a book just to pretend. I hadn’t turned a page in twenty minutes. I preferred to watch him work. He'd taken off his jacket, rolled his sleeves up to his elbows. I could see the muscles in his forearms shift as he adjusted the hinge, tested the swing, made small corrections until the door moved exactly the way it was supposed to.
His hands. I couldn't stop looking at his hands.
They told a story, calloused, scarred, knuckles split and healed more than once. The kind shaped by pulling people out of burning buildings, by gripping hoses, swinging axes, doing a hundred things I couldn’t imagine.
But I'd seen them do other things, too. Gentle things. The way he poured my coffee in the morning, steady, unhurried, always getting it exactly right. The way he'd handed me a blanket that first night without being asked, his fingers brushing mine so carefully.
I wondered how they’d feel if they touched me somewhere other than my shoulder, my back—the safe places that didn’t mean anything. If they cupped my face. If they tangled in my hair. If they?—
I caught myself and looked away before he could see me staring.
Heat rushed to my face, my pulse kicking up in away it had no business doing. I knew that feeling. Knew where it led
This was dangerous.
This noticing, this cataloging, this growing awareness of him that I couldn't seem to stop, no matter how hard I tried. It had crept up on me slowly, day by day, meal by meal, until suddenly I couldn't walk into a room without knowing exactly where he was. Couldn't hear his voice without something in my chest responding to it.
The way his voice dropped lower when he answered the phone, all command, all authority. And then the way it softened when he talked to me, like I was something that required careful handling.
The way he moved through space like he was ready for anything. Coiled and calm at the same time, always aware of his surroundings, always positioned between me and the door without seeming to think about it.
The way he filled a room just by being in it. Not demanding attention, just... present. Solid. The kind of presence you could lean against and know it wouldn't give way.
He made me feel safe.
And that was the problem, because safety was a lie I’d believed before, and one I couldn’t bring myself to trust again.
I'd felt safe with Mateo. We'd built a life together, planned a future, talked about the house we'd buy and the kids we'd have and the years stretching outahead of us like a road with no end. I'd felt so certain. So secure. And then a warehouse collapsed and took him with it, and I learned that safety was just a story we told ourselves to make the uncertainty bearable.
I'd felt safe with my mother. She was the one constant in my life, the person who'd always been there, who'd held me together through Mateo's death even as her own body was failing. I'd believed, somehow, that she'd beat it. That she was too strong to lose. And then I'd watched cancer eat her alive, watched her shrink and fade and slip away, and I learned that love didn't protect you from anything at all.
Everyone I loved left me. That was the lesson. Everyone I let close eventually disappeared, taken by fire or disease or just the random cruelty of a universe that didn't care how much you needed someone to stay.
I was so tired of surviving loss. So tired of rebuilding myself from rubble, of learning to breathe around the holes in my chest, of waking up every morning and choosing to keep going even when I didn't want to.
So I'd stopped. Stopped letting myself feel. Stopped letting anyone get close enough to matter. Built walls so high and so thick that nothing could get through, and called it survival, and told myself it was enough.
Until Cal.
Until breakfast in his kitchen, sitting across fromhim in the early morning light, watching him flip eggs like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Until late-night conversations on his couch, talking about everything and nothing, learning the sound of his laugh and the way his face changed when he smiled.
Until the way he looked at me sometimes, when he thought I wasn't paying attention. Like I was something worth seeing. Like I mattered, not because of what I could do or who I'd been or what I'd lost, but just because I was me.
I couldn’t do this. Wanting it would ruin me. Again.
