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He blinked his eyes back open, and god, every time,every timehe looked at me, my chest ached, my hands got sweaty, the whole world fell off a cliff.
“You fucked me to death,” I finally muttered, and he laughed.
“You deserved it.”
He sure loved telling me everything I deserved, and if you listened to him, I deserved the whole fucking world. Honestly, I didn’t knowhowto listen to him most of the time, even when I wanted to. Believing I deserved every bad thing that ever happened to me made a lot more sense. But damn, when he caught me in between consciousness, looking at me that way, it was a lot easier to believe shit.
I huffed a laugh to cover up whatever was really rushing through my blood and brushed his hair back when it fell again. I wanted to say something mean, get my footing back, but my instincts were gone or scrambled or something, and I couldn’t think of anything.
“Careful,” he warned me, speaking up for both of us, saying what needed to be said. “Almost feels like you’re being sweet again. Better knock that off before I get the wrong idea.”
Then he groaned a loud, lion kind of noise, stretching and getting out of bed, and I just stayed there, too tired to get up, watching him head to the shower, listening to him turn it on, wondering what the right idea was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“How was school?”Caleb asked me, opening up the fridge a while later, and I laughed.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean how was school? How were your classes? How was practice?”
“Seriously?”
He pulled a bunch of shit out of the fridge and piled it on the counter, looking back at me just standing there. “Yeah, seriously. Come here.” He pointed to the magnets on the front of the freezer door. “Write me out all the symbols you can think of while you tell me about your day and I make us a snack.”
I just stood there blinking like an idiot, waiting for my body to vomit up a laugh because that sounded like a joke. I was shockingly not good at identifying normal even when I saw it. Assuming this was normal.
“Is this Daddy shit?” I finally asked him, the only explanation I could come up with, and he turned around looking thoughtful.
“Does it feel like it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. A snack and tell me about your day? That seems like some kindergarten bullshit or something.”
He smiled but it looked a little sad. And okay, yeah, the fact that food and conversation only seemed to have a point if it was part of some kind of role play game? I guess that was kind of sad in a way.
Maybe it wasn’t Daddy shit I was feeling exactly, but it definitely felt… pretend. Like cameras were rolling or something. This wasn’t how real people acted. Unless it actually was and damn, how much worse would that be.
“Nobody cares about my day at school,” I told him, shrugging off whatever was on me. “I don’t even care. It’s fucking boring.”
“I care,” he told me, coming over and squeezing me on the shoulders, turning me toward the fridge and swatting me on the ass, knocking me right back into that role play feeling, but it felt a little less fake this time. Like probably he really did care. “Five elements, please. And one thing that happened at school that wasn’t boring.”
I was better with a to-do list, even a stupid one, and I pulled aside all the abbreviations that jumped out at me, the easy one-letter ones likeH, C, B, I, O, and then kept going, snagging ones that just happened to be paired together—Ar, Fe, Lu—listening to him chopping and opening jars, feeling my stomach rumble.
“Well, I tried to suck my tutor’s dick in the library, but he wasn’t into it.”
Caleb snorted. “Oh, he was into it. He just didn’t feel like dealing with any unexpected consequences. Not everyone is such a daredevil when it comes to taking their dick out at school. What else? How about something I wasn’t there for?”
“Got an A on my Spanish quiz,” I told him.
“Really? That’s amazing.” He turned around to look at me, excited like it really was amazing, embarrassing me so much I couldn’t even look at him. “What was the quiz on?”
I shrugged, plucking more letters out of the alphabet cloud on the fridge, sliding togetherAandU,BandR, realizing I was going to run out of letters before I ran out of abbreviations. “It’s not really a quiz. On Mondays you just have to write a paragraph about what you did over the weekend. So I wrote about how you spanked me and made me call you Daddy. Miss Moreno had me read it for the whole class.”
I heard him freeze behind me, and I grinned at the letters, plucking aCand then finally anLto go with it, mutteringchlorineunder my breath.
“Okay, but what if that was true though?” I asked him, grinning. “You’d be such a huge fucking stud. Your low profile would be gone forever.”
“So would yours,” he told me, coming up behind me and doing that boyfriend thing I liked so much, wrapping his arm around my waist and pulling me back into him, and I was caring less about my low profile every minute it seemed like. “Look at all those,” he said, reaching out and sweeping his fingers toward the freezer where I’d plucked an easy couple dozen symbols from the chaos.
