I don’t know why he stresses ‘our’ like that, but my brain isn’t really firing on all cylinders right now.
“You good?” Tristan asks Silas, his eyeline already sliding over to Ford and the others, probably anxious to make sure they’re alright. Silas makes a noise of confirmation and nods.
Most of the crowd has dispersed, either leaving to avoid the drama or heading back inside. But Ford is watching Kyle, presumably to make sure he stays gone, and Gunnar is standing there with his arms around Tobias. And is that… Shit, does Tobias have a black eye?
Guilt cripples me, hard and fast, as I wonder if it was me or Dad that accidentally clipped him while we were too wrapped up in trying to get to each other.
It doesn’t matter, I guess. It’s still my fault.
Fuck.
“I’m sorry,” I say to Tristan one more time as he starts walking away, but he only shakes his head.
“Go home, Cade.”
It’s all he says. It feels like a gut punch.
Silas reaches for my shoulder, the air around us heavy, and turns me in the direction of where we’re parked. I let him. I’ll lethim do anything he wants, because I’m only here to fuck shit up, apparently.
Chapter Eleven
Cade is quiet the whole drive home. Which is good, because it lets me silently wrestle with my own torrent of overwhelming emotion for a little while. Once I made a quick call to Kris to give her a head’s up about what’s coming back to the trailer right now.
That was terrifying. I’ve seen Cade fight before. I’ve seen him get into it with his dad once, I’ve seen him argue with his mom a million times, and I remember all the scrappy teenage fistfights he used to get into back in school.
I’ve seen the way his temper can operate on a hairtrigger, easily snapped when he feels like someone’s being disrespectful to me, or homophobic toward us.
I know it’s important to him to make sure people know he’s not ashamed. It seems to be for my benefit a lot of the time, but I’m not sure that’s all there is to it. I know how he feels about me. I’ve seen it, as he’s gone to the mat for me bleeding time and time again. I see it in all the little things he does to take care of me and love me the way no one else ever has.
People are always going to be assholes, and a lot of them are going to be homophobic assholes. Why should I care what they think about who Cade is or how he feels?
Cade cares a lot, apparently.
I’m pretty sure he still thinks this was all something that got out of hand, but that he was fundamentally justified, because he was protecting me from his dad and standing up for our relationship.
All I saw was him lashing out, over and over and over, with no thought of holding himself back. No restraint, no hesitation, just unbridled violence at some provocation that I still don’t totally understand.
Kyle had looked surprised, more than anything. I hate to defend that piece of shit, but it’s not like he was dropping f-slurs and threatening to disown Cade, or something. He seemed like a regular insensitive asshole, not a hateful one.
I have to talk to him about this. I have to make him see how it looks to everyone who isn’t him.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how.
He spends the drive silently staring out the window, occasionally looking down to pick the flakes of dried blood off of his nails, intermittently using his good hand to hold a wad of napkins to his forehead where the skin is split open and bleeding.
I keep glancing down, because I can see how swollen his hand is getting and it’s worrying me more every time I glance at it. It’s red, dark and getting darker by the minute, with scrapes over the knuckles like he was punching drywall instead of his father’s face.
It all happened so fast. It felt like an eternity that would never come to an end, but it was also too abrupt to really understand what was happening. At one point, I was ready to jump in and attack Kyle myself, because seeing Cade under him, bloody andwide-eyed with fear, woke up something instinctive in me. Plus, I just fucking hate Kyle. But once I got that urge under control, I realized just how out of hand the whole thing had gotten.
Thank god the guys were there to help break it up. If it had just been me, I couldn’t have managed it. And if the cops had come, we would have been fucked. Because despite what Cade probably thinks, he was the aggressor in any way anyone else would understand.
I hope they’re all okay. I saw the moment Cade’s elbow caught Tristan’s nose, and it looked bad. I also saw Tobias end up with a black eye somehow, and Gunnar and Ford both got scratched to hell by trying to contain Tornado Kyle, once his temper was flaring as uncontrollably as Cade’s.
Cade’s hands are shaking badly, and I can see how hard he’s trying to control it, holding them tightly in his lap.
I want to reach over and grab one. Normally, I wouldn’t hesitate. Even if we were in the middle of a fight. But right now, I feel too lost.
Tonight scared me deeply, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to claw my way out of that fear to give Cade what he needs so this can stop.
