He’s a fellow traveler on the lonely path in life. I see that now.
Now he’s offering to walk beside me, but not as another taker.
He carefully steps in behind me, and the shower is suddenly smaller and warmer and full of the solid fact that is Caleb. His big hands land on my shoulders and start to massage.
I make an involuntary sound.
“You’ve been holding this since yesterday,” he says quietly. His thumbs find a knot at the base of my neck and work it with patient, deliberate pressure. My head drops forward.
“Where did you learn to do this…” I say, not really a question, just something to fill the air with because his hands feel like a physical argument against every tense thing in my body.
“One of the subs at the club was a yoga instructor. She taught me a few things.”
I pull back and turn to look at him over my shoulder, arching an eyebrow. “I bet.”
He smirks and shakes his head, the expression on his face clearly sayingI know how this sounds and I’m prepared to be accountable for it.
I turn back around. “How many yoga instructors have there been over the years?”
“I was no monk,” he says. His hands start moving again, and the indignation in my chest doesn’t survive his thumbs finding that knot a second time. “But I’m only yours now. Just yours. If you want me.”
The words land differently in a shower at five in the morning than they would anywhere else. Quieter. With more weight to them, like he’s not performing a declaration but just reporting a fact.
I turn and slowly trace his bottom lip with one finger. His pupils go dark.
“You wanted to talk last night, but if you want the truth, I don’t know what this is,” I say honestly. “I don’t know what any of this is yet. Or what I’m ready for.”
“I figured.” There’s no pressure behind the words. Just acceptance, the way he always accepts me, and there’s this—this specific quality in him that Z never had. Like a patience that isn’t strategic.
It doesn’t feel like he’s preparing the next countermove in his head to manipulate me slowly toward compliance. I think that’s the difference between them that I was never able to quite put my finger on. Well, I guess there’s so many differences, now that the rug’s been pulled back.
Caleb’s arms come around my waist and he pulls me back against his chest, skin against skin, as the warm shower spray rains down around us both.
Me and Bruiser’s father, our family as it might have been.
As itoughtto have been.
I’ve been telling myself I was waiting for the right moment to tell him because I needed to be sure before I said it. Z’s years of deliberate sabotage have made it feel like I can’t even trust my own judgment anymore.
But standing in this shower, with Caleb’s arms around me and his chin resting on the top of my head, Bruiser asleep in the next room with Caleb’s DNA and his mathematical brain and his particular stubborn certainty about the things he loves—I know there neverwasa better moment.
The truth is, I’ve been a coward, trying to hold on to some version of this warm uncomplicated thing between us for one more hour.
But it never was uncomplicated between us, was it? Not from the very beginning.
Caleb’s lips brush the crown of my head, slow and unhurried, like there’s nowhere in the world he’d rather be than here.
I’ve never felt so safe as this. Not in my whole life. Even when I’d climbed in Z’s windows on the night Darlene’s trailer felt unsafe, there was always the threat of Frank bursting in and catching me there. My entire childhood, it was never truly safe to let down my guard.
Maybe that’s why when I open my mouth, what comes out isn’t the careful speech I’ve been composing and discarding for days.
Instead, “You’re Bruiser’s father,” just bursts out.
The words hit the steam and hang there.
Caleb’s arms stay around me. He doesn’t move for one full breath. And then another. And then I think maybe I said it too quietly, and the shower swallowed the sound, maybe?—
But Caleb has gone completely still.