“Should we go to the hospital after all? Get an x-ray?”
Cade looks at me with wide eyes, then shakes his head and slumps down into the bed.
“No. Please.” His sentences are getting more and more fragmented as he succumbs to the exhaustion of the night. “Tomorrow, maybe.”
I know it’s wrong. I know we should go sooner rather than later, if he’s really hurt himself, but I can’t bring myself to force him. And the thought of doing all this under harsh, fluorescent lights, surrounded by people asking questions about what happened makes it so much worse.
I don’t want to go, either. It makes me a shitty boyfriend, but it’s true.
He needs to rest. We both need to breathe. We can be better in the morning.
Fuck, I’m supposed to pick the girls up in the afternoon. I’ll have to call their aunt and tell her… something. It’s not like she won’t hear about it from Kris eventually, I guess.
All I can do is focus on right now. I’m still naked and dripping from the shower, the carpet wet under my feet, so I grab the towel I used on Cade and quickly dry myself off. I slip on some sweats and a t-shirt before running to the kitchen to get an ice pack out of the freezer. I convince Cade to rest it on his hand, and then hold still as I slap a bandaid on that cut on his eyebrow before it starts bleeding everywhere again. It looks nasty, swollen and gaping open more than I’d like.
As soon as I crawl under the covers next to him, he turns into me and presses his face against my chest. It must hurt, because there’s so much swelling, but he does it anyway. His good hand rucks up my shirt and grasps my stomach. It makes me twinge immediately, desperate for him to not feel the softness there, but then I feel guilty for being so superficial even when Cade’s all fucked up and looking for comfort.
Instead, I lie there, stroking up and down his back as softly as I can and trying not to let myself tense up too much as he grabs at me.
At least there’s no chance of me falling asleep anytime soon. Tristan said to watch for his throat swelling suddenly, which is a terrifying concept, so I’ll be watching him sleep for at least the next few hours.
He doesn’t fall asleep, though. He takes one long, shuddering breath after another, his eyes open and vacant and his fingers continuing to anxiously grip at my stomach. I stroke my fingers through his hair in an attempt to soothe him, but he stays stiff.
“Go to sleep, Cade,” I say after over an hour of this. “I’ll watch you and make sure you’re still okay. I’m right here.”
Cade shifts, looking up at me from an awkward angle, our faces too close to see each other properly but not close enough to kiss.
“I can’t sleep,” he says, his voice hollow.
“Do you want to go to the hospital after all? We can still go.”
My fingers dig into his scalp a little harder as I pet him, my own anxieties mounting at the thought of dealing with the ER.
“Can you fuck me?”
He says it so quietly, and it seems so out of left field, that at first I don’t register what he said. When I don’t immediately respond, he shifts himself a little farther up my body, obviously holding back a groan at the effort.
Once his face is level with mine, he presses a soft kiss against my lips. I kiss him back, because I’ll always kiss him back. But I’m gentle, because his lip is swollen and it has to hurt.
Cade shifts until his body is blanketing mine, and there isn’t even a hint of hardness pressed into me—exactly like I’d expect at a time like this—but he’s rolling his hips against mine a little as he clings to my side with his good hand and kisses me again.
“Cade—what?”
I’m stuttering, but I’m so confused right now.
“Fuck me,” he whispers. I think he’s trying to be seductive, but I can hear how raw his voice is, even through the quiet words.
He kisses me again, parting his lips this time and trying to push his tongue into my mouth. At the same time, he puts his hand between us to palm my also-soft cock, and the weird sensation makes me jump.
“Cade,” I say, pulling back as far as I can despite the headboard behind me. “No. What? We can’t—you’re hurt.”
“I’m always a mess. It’s just a couple bruises. Come on, I was an asshole tonight. Don’t you want to punish me? Show me what you think of me?”
My mouth is literally hanging open at this point. Cade comes out with a lot of random shit, but I don’t think he’s ever said anything that’s thrown me sideways quite as much as this.
The sex we had was never vanilla. We started out weird, and got weirder from there. And recently he’s been pushing the degradation stuff more. I noticed, but I just thought he was finding himself, or something. I have a weakness for dirty talk anyway, so what does it matter if I’m calling him a little bitch, as long as that’s what he’s into? I did a little googling, this is all stuff that healthy people in good relationships can do.
A part of me worried a little that it was coming from a bad place, but I’m a worrier. It didn’t seem right to judge what he wanted.
