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Twenty minutes later, we were back in bed with bags of chips and bowls of macaroni and cheese. Cal reclined against the frame, the steaming bowl dwarfed in his big hands. I sat pressed against his side, my legs slung across his lap as I dug into my own meal.
“You grew up in Wisconsin, right?” I asked.
Cal nodded. “Near Green Bay.”
“How’d you end up in Michigan then? I mean, I know you went to GVSU, but…why?”
“Scholarship,” he said. “I applied to probably fifty colleges across the country, and was accepted to most of them, but Grand Valley offered me the most money.”
After that, the words poured from him, and I quietly ate while his own food grew cold as he talked. He told me about his parents, hippies who were nearly forty when he was born. Explained how they’d never planned on having children, and suddenly being responsible for one wasn’t their idea of a good time, this man and woman who had since been traipsing across the country, smoking weed, picking up odd jobs in exchange for necessities, and living in an old school Volkswagen van.
According to Cal, they’d decided to settle near Green Bay before he was born because a man they’d met in their travels had offered his dad, Clint, a job at his mechanic shop. Unable to turn down steady work with the knowledge they’d soon have another life to support, one who needed stability and community, Clint happily accepted.
“It was an adjustment for them,” he said. “Putting down roots after so many years going wherever the wind and their whims took them.”
“In what way?”
Cal dropped his head, going quiet as he presumably lost himself to the memories of his upbringing.
“I don’t think they knew what to do with me,” he said quietly. “I was…a bit of a loner.”
Difficult to imagine, considering how easily he managed to snag my attention the night we met—and never let it go.
A dam had broken now, and Cal spilled all his secrets at my feet. How his parents had been present in passing. They’d ask about his homework when he started school, try to get him to talk about books he was reading, ask about friends and after school activities. They’d made sure he got where he needed to go when he needed to be there, and bought him a little beater of a truck—an ancient Chevy S10 with nearly two hundred thousand miles—when he turned sixteen, effectively checking out of his life.
“I came and went when I wanted, didn’t have a curfew, and generally did what I pleased. They just…didn’t seem to care. I could’ve been into drugs and alcohol, having all the sex in the world, and I doubt they would’ve noticed. By the time I reached my senior year, my mom had opened her studio, and Dad had retired from the shop and begun woodworking.”
“And were you?” I asked, peering up into his face. “Were you doing drugs, drinking, and fucking your way through your pretty little classmates?”
I chose to ignore the hint of jealousy that laced my tone.
Cal did as well, simply placing a warm palm on my thigh and giving it a squeeze. Reminding me he was here with me and he wasn’t going anywhere.
“No,” he said with a chuckle, answering my question at last. “I’ve never done drugs, didn’t get drunk for the first time until my first week of college, and lost my virginity shortly after.”
I blinked, surprised.
“You’re even more of an enigma than I thought,” I said quietly. “But I’m not going to lie…I don’t think that boy would’ve been able to handle me.”
“You would’ve scared the shit out of eighteen-year-old Cal,” he agreed.
“And how does thirty-three-year-old Cal feel?”
“I feel…” He trailed off, and I braced myself. “I feel like you could ruin me—and I’d happily let you.”
“Same,” I said, swallowing hard. “You’re an amazing man. I hope you know that. Despite your upbringing, you’re…pretty perfect.”
“I just wish it hadn’t taken me moving nearly four hundred miles away to find the family I should’ve already had, you know? The kids at school growing up didn’t want anything to do with me. I was ‘weird’”—he put air quotes around the word—“because I preferred books to people and wore thrifted clothes, or my dad’s hand-me-downs when I got tall enough. I had glasses and was gangly. I didn’t go through puberty until I was a sophomore in college.”
A late bloomer, then. Not that I was complaining, because this version of Cal? Not only his body—which, admittedly, was a fucking dream and responsible for delivering me pleasure unlike anything I’d known before him—but his mind. His care and kindness. His loyalty. Every beautifully flawed and a little broken piece made him into the man before me. And for that, I would always be grateful.
“I spent my twenties searching for the relationships I never had growing up,” he said. “The close friendships, the romantic relationships, the family. At least I found one of those.”
“Two,” I corrected, and he cocked his head. “We’re in a romantic relationship, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” he breathed. “Yes we are.”
The look in his eyes had grown distant, lost somewhere in the past, and I would do anything to bring him back to me. I took his barely-touched bowl from his hand and set it next to mine on the nightstand behind me, tucking the bags of chips in beside them.
