I’ll never know what cramps feel like, but I’m guessing they’re the equivalent of having someone wring out your intestines like a wet sponge. Consistently. Over a seven-day period.
Pretty soon after I got Cali to bed, she passed out, which is probably a good thing considering she was crushing the bones in my neck when she was holding on to me.
When Aeris told me that Cali was sick, she didn’t really go into specifics. She said it could be one of two things. One: it could be a common cold that comes with the changing weather, but none of the students in her class were sick, so she thought that seemed unlikely. Or two: she was on her period. And then Aeris, as usual, overshared some very traumatizing memories about her period which I definitely didn’t need to know.
So I did the wise thing and stocked up for both with the usual soup, tissues, cough medicine, cough drops, thermometer, and Gatorade. And the usual pads, tampons, tissues (again), chocolates, heating pad, bath bomb, herbal tea, and candle. Oh, and a vanilla milkshake from Been There, Bun That.
I know next to nothing about periods. The only walking pamphlet of information I was afforded was the random middle-aged woman at the store staring at me while I was in the feminine product aisle.
I wanted to do something for Cali to make her feel better, so I enlisted Teague to help me spruce up her room for when she wakes. And he so
generously offered to lend me some of Cali’s favorite movies, which—a surprise to no one—are all very graphic horror movies. Not a chick flick or Disney movie in sight. There’s even one in black-and-white because the color version had been banned in several countries.
Even though the rest of Cali’s apartment is decorated for Halloween, there were no decorations in her own room. So I took the liberty of finding a few twinkle lights and hanging them around. I then laid out everything I got her at the foot of her bed, ready to sprint to the bathroom in case she needs me to draw her a relaxing bubble bath. I heard heat helps with cramps. I also have trusty dusty Tylenol in case none of my efforts seem to work, but here’s to hoping they do. I have a tendency to fuck shit up a lot of times—mostly from carelessness, sometimes from overconfidence. I don’t want this to be one of those times. I don’t want there to be a time at all when it comes to Cali.
I know I should be watching practice right now, but there’s no way in hell I’m leaving her in the state she’s in. And honestly? There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.
While she’s curled on her side, snoring quietly, I relegate myself to the other side of her bed and keep a respectable distance between us. I don’t want to overstep any boundaries here. Like she said, we’re not… we’re not together. Just friends. But sometimes it feels like we’re more. It’s all really confusing, but she’s not ready yet. And I’ll be ready for when she is.
I know the future isn’t set in stone, but I think about it all the time.
Specifically with Cali. I wonder if she’ll still be teaching when she’s in her fifties. I imagine myself swinging by Been There, Bun That and getting a milkshake to bring her after class. I’ll stand by the front desk and watch her dance, all as the condensation from her milkshake drips into my now-freezing hand, and she’ll keep dancing like nobody’s watching. But I’ll always watch her. Until my old heart stops beating.
I’m tearing up just thinking about it. Thinking about if we decide to have children. Thinking about us bantering like the old married couple we might eventually be. (Preferably) not thinking about having old person sex as our bones clank together like plastic skeleton Halloween decorations.
Thinking about how grown-up Teague will be, and how he’ll probably be the one to put us in a retirement home after he gets fed up with our shit.
Thinking about —
“Are you crying?”
I get whiplash when I spin my head around, staring bug-eyed at a very sleepy Cali sitting up next to me, her curls even more fluffed up from her short-lived nap.
“What? No,” I grumble, wiping my (only slightly) watery eyes with the back of my hand. “I have allergies.”
She reaches out to touch my arm, like one would comfort a crying child.
“Men are allowed to cry, Gage. It’s okay.”
My heart begins to rev at an off-road kind of speed, and that cinnamon scent synonymous with her embraces me, as fresh as the aroma of oven-baked cinnamon rolls. Like I’ve said a million times before—she’s perfect.
From her head of fire to her black-painted toes. She insists she looks unattractive right now, but I don’t see it. Not one bit.
“You know, I’m regretting saving you from the bathroom,” I mutter.
“If you regret it so much, then why does it look like a cloud threw up in my room?” she asks, gesturing to the white string of lights and the very girly products strewn over her quilted bedspread.
“It’s my charity for the day.”
She makes this little huffing noise that’s still scratchy with sleep, and I know this is the last thing I should be thinking about, but it sends a direct line of arousal straight to my dick.
Dude, read the room.
“Considering I almost died today, I think you should be a lot nicer to me,” she declares, turning her nose up with a fake—yet entirely irresistible
—pout.
Since I’d self-exiled myself to my own side of the bed, I scoot a little closer, still very much aware of the invisible delineation that exists between us. “Actually, since I saved your life, you should be a lot nicer to me.”
When she glowers at me, butterflies tight-fist my gut, and a smile blusters over my face. But it’s not a deliberate smile—I mean, it is. It’s involuntary. As natural to me as breathing. Maybe I’m just permanently smiling whenever I’m with Cali.
“This is me being nice to you,” she snaps in her “nice” voice, rearing her arm back to hit me somewhere on my body—it’s a surprise every time
—but she winces and groans before she can do any real damage. She leans her head back against the headboard, gripping her lower belly and performing some weird breathing technique to get through the pain.
I hate seeing her in pain. I’d do anything in the world to make her pain go away.
I quickly lean over and grab the Tylenol on her nightstand, along with a glass of cold water I brought in for her while she was sleeping. “Please take some Tylenol for me. You’ll feel better once you do.”
I pop off the lid of the pill bottle and dump three small tablets into my palm, then hand them off to her. She throws them into her mouth without any protest—which I’m thankful for—chasing the dry capsules down with a hearty gulp of ice water.
She mumbles out a quiet thanks, seeming the slightest bit relieved that the healing process has begun, and her fingers continue to rub the crux of the pain just below her navel.
Since I’m not putting all my trust in the Tylenol, I grab the rolled-up heating pad and hand it to her. “I know you probably already have one, but I got this for you.”
She takes it and looks up at me, and I can’t tell if the tears in her eyes are from the gift or the cramps. “You got me a heating pad?” she exclaims in disbelief.
“Of course I did.”
Cali’s eyes scan all the gifts on her bed. When her gaze connects with the half-melted milkshake sitting in a bowl I scavenged from the cupboard, a gasp rises in her chest, stuck somewhere between her throat and her mouth. “You remembered.”
I remember everything about you.
“Vanilla’s an easy flavor to remember,” I say casually, brushing it off as I tuck my arms behind my head and lean back against the headboard.
“Thank you,” she whispers, and I don’t know what it is about this particular smile, but this is the one that knocks the breath out of my lungs.
It’s not big enough to show teeth, but it does make her nose scrunch up, and there’s no gloss or ostentatious color to tarnish the natural beauty of her lips.
I want her to smile at me like that all the time.
The blood rushing in my ears sounds like the ocean, there’s sweat breaking out on my hairline, and my stomach keeps doing nauseating handsprings whenever she glances my way.
All I have the brain power to say is “Mm-hm.” Definitely not calm, cool, or collected anymore. More like panicking, panicking, PANICKING.
Cali opens her mouth to say something, but she’s interrupted when she crunches over again in pain, this time clenching her teeth together and emitting a tiny whimper.
My back snaps straight, and I immediately reach for the heating pad in her hand. “You need to turn it on,” I say, but as I go to grab it from her, she swats my hand away.
“I’m fine. It’s not that bad,” she lies.
“It’s not fine. You were on the fucking bathroom floor when I found you.”
“Gage, I don’t nee —”
I reposition myself on the bed, plastering my back to her headboard and spreading my legs apart so that there’s room in front of me. “Come here,” I demand, brooking no room for argument as I pat the comforter.
I can tell Cali wants to protest with the way she glares at the spot like it’s been contaminated with some kind of biowarfare poison.
“I think I’m okay over here.”
“Cali, get your sweet little ass over here,” I growl, whacking the mattress again for good measure, though I’m not above grabbing her and planting her right between my thighs. Which, in hindsight, probably won’t turn out well for me.
She gives up the heating pad like a dog stubbornly relinquishing a chew toy. Rolling her eyes, she crawls over to me—which shouldn’t look as sexy as it does—and then squeezes herself between my legs, moving her butt around until it’s perfectly snug against my cock.
She turns to look over her shoulder, her eyes like spearpoints aimed directly at me. “Why am I sitting here?”
“If you’d just relax, I’m going to massage the cramps out.”
“Pfft, there’s no way that’s going to work.”
“It is going to work, and you’re not going to fight me on this because I picked your lifeless body off the floor less than thirty minutes ago.”
Cali grumbles to herself but slowly melts into my chest, sheathing her claws and fangs enough for me to wrap my arms around her torso, placing my hands over her bare, rounded belly. The hard fly of her pants digs into my forearms, but it doesn’t bother me.
She flinches. “Your hands…”
My hands flinch alongside her. “What?”
“They’re warm,” she observes, eventually settling into the mold of my palms and letting me feel her stomach balloon with a deep breath.
She’s gone boneless against me, resting her head against my chest, and I begin to knead her lower abdomen, exerting pressure as my fingers rub meticulous circles into her flesh. The steadiness of her voice dips into a raspy moan, dialing my hunger for her to a ravenous ten, and the fact that her ass is swallowing my dick doesn’t do much to satiate my soaring libido.
I locate a tight muscle and coax the tension out, determined to fend the cramps off for as long as possible. Is massaging the best preventive measure? Probably not, but I’ll give anything to be skin to skin with her for even a second.
“Oh, God…” She lurches forward as far as our position allows, too slow to quiet her cry before it pierces the air, just bordering on being loud enough to warrant a visit from a curious eight-year-old.
“Quiet, Spitfire. Teague’s still in the house, remember?” I nip at the stretch of neck below her earlobe, feeling her pounding pulse bash against my lips, tasting the salt from the traces of sweat still lingering on her skin.
“But it feels so good,” she whines.
You have no idea.
I continue to massage the swell of her belly, listening to the concoction of heated breaths and muffled whimpers in the otherwise silent space. I wish I could see how lax her face is—the dopey smile sewn onto her mouth, the struggle to keep her eyes open.
Sexual bodily desires aside, I focus on just being here with her in the present, committing to memory the feel of her body in my arms. I don’t allow myself to mourn her absence yet, even if I fear the self-imposed distance that follows. Whenever I’m away from her, all I can think about is running straight back to her. Running home.
“Are you feeling any better?” I ask, allowing my fingers to rest below her navel.
I’m not expecting much aside from a “yes,” but Cali turns around to face me, looking a thousand times more relaxed than she did a few minutes ago. No tight cinching of her brow, no concerning flush on her face, no misty eyes rife with fever.
A big, blush-inducing smile rewards me for my efforts, something strange and foreign swirling around in those stormy eyes. “Thank you, Gage.”
“You don’t have to thank me. If you got your period every day, I’d give you a massage every day until you felt better.” I’m probably as red as a beet, but I don’t feel the need to hide it anymore. If my body wants to make a fool out of me and broadcast my emotions for her to see, then so be it.
“Of course you would say something like that,” she chuckles.
“Because it’s true.”
Cali grabs my hand—which is still buzzing with the warmth from her skin—and interlocks our fingers together, not caring that my palms are a little clammy or that my blush deepens and slopes down my collarbone.
“Because you’re you,” she corrects.
Maybe I’m love-drunk or dehydrated or extremely sleep-deprived, but I swear that the anomaly forming in her now-gray irises resembles something close to… love.
I squeeze her hand as my gaze carves a languid path from the striking beauty of her eyes to the ample tenderness of her lips. Two things in great contrast to one another that somehow work on the same canvas—two things that would never work on anyone else except her. “I’ll always be me, but I’m yours above it all.”
There is no preparatory cheek-holding or prolonged eye contact. It’s a rush of her mouth on mine with a breakneck urgency that I’ve never known possible, and she kisses me like she’ll die if she doesn’t.
I’ll die, too, if she ever stops.
But eventually she does, and I whine to have her lips back on mine.
“I have to apologize,” Cali says embarrassedly, ears red-tipped and fingers playing with the forefront curl of my hair.
Maybe it’s because her hands feel so good tugging at my scalp, but I have no idea what she’s talking about. “What?” I ask dumbly, coming down from a post-kiss high that’s rendered me slightly speechless and a whole lot brainless.
“I have to apologize. About hitting your car the first time we met,” she elaborates. “I was in the wrong from the beginning, but I was too proud to admit it. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken your parking spot in the first place. And I definitely shouldn’t have damaged your car.”
The lights turn back on in my head, and laughter fizzes up in my chest like carbonation in a sugary drink. My hand comes up to gently caress hers
—which is still laboriously curling my hair—and I calm her aimless fidgeting. “You don’t need to apologize, Cali. I’m the one who’s sorry. I
shouldn’t have boxed you in. And I was a ginormous dick for not moving my car when you asked me.”
“No, Gage. I still —”
“Hey. It’s okay. The damages barely cost anything. Money was never an issue,” I assure her, moving my hand to cup her cheek instead, and she’s generous enough to lean into my touch. “Plus, it was about time someone knocked me on my ass.”
THERE’S BEAUTY IN THE BROKEN
GAGE
“A re you sure you’re okay with watching a horror movie?” Cali asks in a small voice, snuggling into my side when I open my arm up to her.
Her cramps seem to have subsided for the time being, which is good, because I don’t know how long I’d be able to sit here while she’s squirming in pain.
“Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?” Though I’m nowhere near prepared for whatever proverbial roller coaster I’m about to be strapped into, I’m determined to give Cali the day she deserves, and if that includes three painstakingly long hours of over-the-top gore, then so be it.
“I just know you aren’t the biggest fan of horror.”
I make a sputtering noise, bracing my hand against my chest in faux offense. “I’m not not a fan of horror. Plus, I want to watch whatever you want to watch.”
Cali grazes her teeth over her bottom lip before chewing on the middle, glancing unsurely between me and the television that projects the title card
— My Ex-Therapist Is a Hatchet-Wielding Psycho—complete with a half-naked woman drenched in a fountain of blood, aforementioned hatchet raised above her head and cherry-red lips frozen in a scream.
“If you get scared, we can turn it off,” she promises.
“Cali, I don’t get scared,” I scoff. Ironically, at the same time, apprehension begins to soak into my bones like rot, and a sinkhole opens in
my stomach where regret—and only regret—dares to wade across a sea of popping acid.
I’m going to have nightmares. It’s not an assumption. I will have nightmares. If I thought a few store-bought, plastic organs on Halloween were terrifying, the realistic-looking ones are going to make me weep like a goddamn baby. I don’t do well with horror, much like the majority of the levelheaded and rational population. And I especially don’t do well with gore. It’s not normal for a person’s insides to be outside, okay?
But I know Cali loves horror movies, so I’m going to force myself to love them too, even at the expense of a good night’s sleep. I’d do anything to spend time with Cali.
So as the movie begins, with her head resting soundly on my chest, the opening scene hardly acts as a soft, predictable gateway into the spine-chilling terror I’m about to endure for the rest of the night. I try to keep my focus divided between the screen and the excitement flitting across my girl’s face, and I’m pretty sure that if the volume wasn’t so deafeningly loud, she’d be able to hear every cry for help from my poor, overstimulated heart.
I jump. I flinch. I twitch. I shut one eye and try to keep the other open.
My blood pressure shoots through the roof like Superman on speed.
Meanwhile, Cali’s smiling and chuckling like the last victim’s stomach didn’t get hacked all the way open.
I thought I’d soldiered through the worst of it when the antihero ends up curb-stomping a dude’s head in with her stiletto heel, and I bury my head in Cali’s shoulder while I swallow down a gag that sounds seconds away from being productive.
She pauses the movie—thank God—and sighs sympathetically, stroking the back of my head with her hand. “You really are a big baby when it comes to horror, aren’t you?”
“’M not,” I muffle against her shoulder, disregarding the fact that I’m barnacled to her side and clinging to her like I’m weathering a California-grown earthquake. I can feel sweat seep past the waistband of my pants, I bet my complexion is sickeningly white, and I can’t get the hyperrealistic squelching noises out of my head.
“Oh, really?” Cali muses.
I lift my head up slightly, hand still curled in the fabric of her shirt. “Uh-huh. I just wanted to…snuggle.”
Not fully a lie, alright? Cali smells nice, her body is soft, and she gives hugs so good they blow old people hugs out of the water.
“Gage Arlington, golden boy of one of the scariest hockey teams in the league, wanted to snuggle?”
“Why is that so hard to believe?”
Cali snorts a few times until her laughter devolves into giggles, and she fails to hide the larger-than-life smile overtaking her face—one that shoves all my blood to my cheeks and gives me a permanent just-fucked look.
I was fucked. Figuratively. This girl plays with my emotions like a cat plays with its food. Never in a million years would I picture me voluntarily scaring the living shit out of myself to impress a girl.
“You’re just…I don’t know. You’re not the same guy I met at the rink months ago,” she admits demurely, brushing the back of her knuckles over my shameless blush, all while adoration shimmers on the ocean-blue surface of her eyes.
I’m not, I think to myself. You’ve made me a better person.
“Are you going to make me beg for a snuggle?” I groan, dramatically splaying myself over Cali’s body and pretending like I’ll see death’s doorstep unless she showers me in affection. “Because I will. I’ll even admit it, Spitfire. I’m scared. I’m scared, and the only solution is for us to snuggle…for the foreseeable future.”
Cali rolls her eyes. “The foreseeable future?”
“I think I’m already getting flashbacks.”
“Ugh. Fine. Shut up and come here.”
Considering I’m already all over her, I plunk my head right over her heart, wrapping my arms around her midsection and nuzzling my nose into the dip of her sweet-smelling neck. She’s like a cinnamon scratch-and-sniff sticker.
Cali doesn’t turn the movie back on, which is probably for the best.
Instead, we lie together for what feels like forever, basking in the slight stirring of each other’s breaths, her fingers composing a soundless tune on my forearm. I’d planned to fall asleep on her, and I probably would have if it wasn’t for the grating sensation of her palms on my skin. But even in my sleepy state, I’ve never noticed her hands to be rough with callouses.
I gently guide her hand palm-up to reveal the scarred crescents stamped into her flesh, and the comfort that once coddled me slips through my fingers before I can grab it.
I know Cali hurts herself. I’ve known ever since the night her mother was hospitalized, but I didn’t want to upset her more by talking about it. But fuck, seeing the state her hands are still in, I wish I had.
The blood has congealed and darkened, contrasting starkly against the paleness of her palms. Eight deep wounds span the width of her hand, structured in a line that looks like a botched stitch job. And I don’t need to press into the half-moons to know the skin surrounding them is delicate.
“Why do you do this, Cali?” I ask quietly, brushing the pads of my fingers ever-so-gently over her lacerations.
She looks at me in confusion at first, but then her gaze drops to the conjoined caress of our hands, and a frown ghosts over her lips. She almost refuses to answer me. She strangles her words, shuffles the truth around like a deck of playing cards.
“I…”
My stomach turns—a repercussion of treading on unspoken territory.
Her eyes are beginning to gloss over, and her teeth tug at her cracked bottom lip.
“Calista…” Heartache cowers in my tone, and I feel like I’m breathing through shot lungs. This is killing me to see the evidence of a lifetime of self-blame and self-loathing etched into the life lines of her palms.
Her voice is reedy, on the verge of breaking into unintelligible cries and spit-obstructed garbles. “I do it to punish myself,” she confesses shamefully, focusing her gaze on the skin-deep marks, almost as if she’s remembering each time she mutilated herself.
Tears swell over my lower eyelids, and it takes twice the amount of power to rid my response of throat-clogging emotion. “Oh, baby.”
“I didn’t use to do it. It started when my mom got really sick. And each time I saw her suffer, I’d dig my nails into my palms. It was a way of punishing myself—a way to remind myself that I need to do better by her. A way to remind myself that I wasn’t doing enough.”
I wish Cali could see herself the way I see her. She’s made so many sacrifices for the well-being of her family. And she’s harbored just as many emotionally scarring consequences. People like Cali are rare. She has this selflessness about her that some people only have less than one percent of.
“I wish you didn’t do it,” I whisper pathetically.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she responds quickly, backed by a numbness that tells me, at one point, it did. It hurt, but it wasn’t strong enough to counteract the
“It hurts me.”
Cali freezes in shock, right before her whole frame collapses, and I can tell she’s trying to evade my eyes. She even tries to pull her hand away, but I don’t let her.
She swallows thickly. “I never wanted you to see them. God, they’re so ugly.”
I tip her a half-smile, shaking the corkscrews of hair that dangle against my temples. “They’re not ugly. They’re beautiful. They’re a part of you—
even if it’s a part you’re adamant about hiding from me. I adore you. Scars and all.”
Clocking the obvious disbelief rippling off her, I look around for something to show her just how truthful I’m being, and that’s when I catch sight of a purple, felt-tip marker sitting on her nightstand.
I grab the marker and uncap it with my teeth, then rest her hand against my belly. She squeaks in surprise, but she doesn’t dare say anything when I begin to trace over her scars with lavender ink. I connect the fractured puncture wounds with one continuous line, adding angles and miniature stars to make a constellation.
She watches raptly as I elongate each line, and when I finish my masterpiece, her lesions have transformed into a breathtaking work of art.
Her fingers twitch while she admires the hastily scribbled stars and inaccurately portrayed constellations, but she smiles all the same, and a barrage of moisture hinders her eyesight.
“See?” I say. “Beautiful.”
She titters. “That’s because you covered up the ugliness.”
For someone who’s a self-proclaimed baby when it comes to blood and gore, I don’t see any of that when I look at Cali’s hands.
“No, Cali. You’re a survivor, and I see the beauty in that. All I’ve done is accentuate it.”
“Gage—”
“I don’t want to see you hurt yourself anymore. But I know that’s easier said than done, so I’ll be here to help you heal. I’ll be here to hold your hand when you feel like you want to harm yourself. I’ll be here to love you and your scars on the days that you can’t.”
Cali, surprisingly, doesn’t fight me. She doesn’t tell me how wrong I am. Instead, with gratitude woven in her eyes, she leans in to kiss me,
wrapping me up in the heat of her lips. Our hands connect, palms flat against each other, and the still-wet ink from the hand-drawn constellations smear onto my own skin.
A transference of pain.