“Silas. Don’t,” Cal warned gently.
My mind was in full spiral now. There was no returning. I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t want to instigate a fight, but my brain wasn’t coming off of this. I couldn’t even force it to.
“Did they top you?” I demanded, the question tearing out of my throat. “I’m sure you were probably more into them taking control, because they knew how to. Because they actually had done stuff with other guys and you didn’t have to guide them on what to do the entire time.”
“No,” Cal said sharply.
“Don’t lie to me!” I snapped, tears stinging my eyes. The jealousy twisted my gut into knots. I had no room to care. We were grown ass adults with pasts, and a huge part of that past was that I left. I made space for this to happen, for there to have been other people. “I’m sure—”
“Silas, look at me!” Cal cut me off, stepping into my space. He didn’t grab me aggressively; he caught my flailing hands and anchored them to his chest. “Stop. Breathe.”
I couldn’t breathe. I was hyperventilating. I was panicking. Jesus fuck, this shit was pathetic, and proving even more of my point.
“I hate it,” I choked out. “I hate thinking about it. I feel like… like I’m tainted because I only know you, and you have this whole… history that I wasn’t a part of because I did something fucking stupid that made us lose seven years together.”
Cal looked at me, seeing the spiral for what it was. It wasn’t anger; it was pure, agonizing insecurity.
He dragged me over to the bed and sat me down. He knelt on the floor between my knees, forcing me to look down at him. He held my hands tightly.
“Ask me the specific things that are eating you alive,” Cal commanded gently. “Get them out of your head so I can kill them. Don’t carry it alone, baby.”
I swallowed. My heart was pounding.
“Did they top you?” I whispered.
“No,” Cal answered instantly, holding my gaze with absolute conviction. “Never. Not once.”
I let out a shaky breath. “Why? You said you weren’t usually into it but—”
“Because I don’t surrender control, Si,” Cal said, his voice intense. “Not to a stranger. Not to a hookup. I don’t let people have that kind of power over me. That’s yours. That’salwaysbeen yours. You’re the only one who gets to see me vulnerable like that. Even if you’re underneath me, you’re the only one I trust enough to let go with.”
I searched his eyes. “Really?”
“Really,” Cal promised. “And I never kissed them. Not on the mouth. Kissing is intimate. That was for us.”
Relief washed over me, but the confusion remained.
“You think I had this life you created for me in your head,” Cal said, his voice dropping, raw with a pain I hadn’t realized he was carrying. “That I didn’t think of you, or feel anything after you left. I didn’t have a life, Silas. I had a waiting room.”
He squeezed my hands, his hazel eyes burning.
“You think I was out there moving on? Baby, every single person… I searched for you. I searched for you in people and I hated myself for it. I hated them for not being you. It didn’t matter how long it had been. I craved you, always.”
“Cal…” My breath hitched.
“No, listen,” he commanded, his voice shaking with the weight of seven years of silence. “There is no ‘them.’ There is no list. All there was were shadows. Shadows I used to try and keep myself warm while I froze to death waiting for a miracle that you’d come back.”
He reached out, cupping my face, his thumbs brushing away the tears I hadn’t realized were falling.
“You are the blueprint, Silas. You always have been. Every time I touched someone else, or even looked at someone else, I was just trying to find a piece of you to hold onto. But they were never you. They could never fucking be you. So don’t you dare sit here and be jealous and mentally compare yourself. You’re the only living thing I ever loved. Even when I was hell bent on hating you because it was a pipe dream to think you’d ever come back.”
He rested his forehead against mine.
“Fuck, baby, look what happened when you did come back. I crumbled. I tried so hard to keep away, but I couldn’t. I never could. Because all I wanted was you.”
“I was scared if I ever touched another man I would feel absolutely nothing,” I blurted out, the confession tearing out of me. “I was scared that it would confirm that I was ruined for anyone else. So I just didn’t look. I couldn’t risk it. And when I tried, with Amanda, it still happened. Because I still thought about you every day of my goddamn life.”
Cal looked devastated. He finally realized my distance from men, from relationships, from any form of romantic contact, wasn’t about prudeness. It was about trauma. It was about loyalty to him, even in years of disconnect.
