His body soon grows heavy, and his breathing slows down. I close my eyes, enjoying him holding me as he sleeps. This is nice. This is one of my favorite parts after sex.
It doesn’t take me long to fall right asleep, perfectly satiated.
Chapter 27
Calvin
Thebuzzingofmyphone wakes me up. I blink my eyes open and grab it to see that the time is right after five in the morning. Way too early.
I look at the caller ID to see it’sMemorial Hermann Hospitalin Houston. Oh shit. The only thing I can think of is that it’s my mother. She probably got hurt or something.
I ease out of bed, careful not to wake Seth. He rolls over, and I pad out of my bedroom before shutting the door behind me.
“Hello?” I whisper and head down to my kitchen to make some coffee.
“Is this Calvin Abernathy?”
“It is. What’s happened?”
“This is Dr. Dwayne Summers. We have you listed as an emergency contact and next of kin. Your mother came into the hospital by ambulance. She’d dialed 9-1-1 for blurred vision, vomiting, and a sudden and severe headache. By the time she got checked in, she passed. I’m very sorry.”
My legs give out from under me, and I slide to the kitchen floor. I lean against the cabinetry and scrunch my eyes closed. “She’s… dead?”
“Yes, I’m truly sorry,” he says again. “We tried everything to resuscitate her, but the damage was too great. The brain aneurysm ruptured. She had a hemorrhagic stroke. Most likely, it had been leaking blood on the brain for several days, resulting in a worse aneurysm, which explains why she died on the way to the hospital.”
I run a hand through my wrecked hair and rest my head against the cabinet. “Jesus.”
“We’ll have her in the morgue if you want to come by and view her. Then you can make funeral arrangements.”
“Thank you,” I say before hanging up on him.
I don’t know how I feel about this. I’d told Seth last night that I planned to talk to her about everything and maybe cut off contact, but fate had other plans. Part of me is sad. The other part… doesn’t care. It shows the level of love I feel for her, which is clearly not a lot. Still, she’s the only family that I know, and now she’s gone.
I slam my fist on the floor so hard it hurts my hand. “Fuck!” I shake out my hand as it dawns on me why I’m so angry.
Closure.
I didn’t get any closure. My mother will never know how she made me feel growing up. She’ll never know the hell she put me through. She ruined me for relationships with a skewed sense of love. Fuck, I wouldn’t put it past her to die intentionally to spite me. Yes, it’s a ridiculous thought, but it intrudes into my mind anyway.
Whenever she upset me, I’d just fuck the hell out of Grant—before I knew he was cheating. After I dumped his ass, I would find other men to fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I became a damn whore to shut her the hell up, to get her out of my damn head.
Then Seth came along and changed everything. For the first time in years, I established a friendship without fucking him first. I had someone to lean on without demands and expectations. He gave me pure kindness and patience.
“Cal?” says a sleepy Seth, seeing me on the floor.
He squats in front of me with eyes full of concern, and I rush to gather him in my arms. I need to hold him. There aren’t any tears. I have nothing to give my mother, but I still need his presence and strength.
“Hey, what’s going on?”
“My mother just died.”
Seth freezes, grabs my arms, and eases me back. “What?!”
“I got a call from the hospital in Houston. Aneurysm. A bad one.”
“Jesus, are you okay?”
“Yes… No. I… don’t know. I’m fucking conflicted.”
