Chapter Eleven
Cade is quiet the whole drive home. Which is good, because it lets me silently wrestle with my own torrent of overwhelming emotion for a little while. Once I made a quick call to Kris to give her a head’s up about what’s coming back to the trailer right now.
That was terrifying. I’ve seen Cade fight before. I’ve seen him get into it with his dad once, I’ve seen him argue with his mom a million times, and I remember all the scrappy teenage fistfights he used to get into back in school.
I’ve seen the way his temper can operate on a hairtrigger, easily snapped when he feels like someone’s being disrespectful to me, or homophobic toward us.
I know it’s important to him to make sure people know he’s not ashamed.
It seems to be for my benefit a lot of the time, but I’m not sure that’s all there is to it.
I know how he feels about me. I’ve seen it, as he’s gone to the mat for me bleeding time and time again.
I see it in all the little things he does to take care of me and love me the way no one else ever has.
People are always going to be assholes, and a lot of them are going to be homophobic assholes. Why should I care what they think about who Cade is or how he feels?
Cade cares a lot, apparently.
I’m pretty sure he still thinks this was all something that got out of hand, but that he was fundamentally justified, because he was protecting me from his dad and standing up for our relationship.
All I saw was him lashing out, over and over and over, with no thought of holding himself back. No restraint, no hesitation, just unbridled violence at some provocation that I still don’t totally understand.
Kyle had looked surprised, more than anything. I hate to defend that piece of shit, but it’s not like he was dropping f-slurs and threatening to disown Cade, or something. He seemed like a regular insensitive asshole, not a hateful one.
I have to talk to him about this. I have to make him see how it looks to everyone who isn’t him.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how.
He spends the drive silently staring out the window, occasionally looking down to pick the flakes of dried blood off of his nails, intermittently using his good hand to hold a wad of napkins to his forehead where the skin is split open and bleeding.
I keep glancing down, because I can see how swollen his hand is getting and it’s worrying me more every time I glance at it. It’s red, dark and getting darker by the minute, with scrapes over the knuckles like he was punching drywall instead of his father’s face.
It all happened so fast. It felt like an eternity that would never come to an end, but it was also too abrupt to really understand what was happening.
At one point, I was ready to jump in and attack Kyle myself, because seeing Cade under him, bloody and wide-eyed with fear, woke up something instinctive in me.
Plus, I just fucking hate Kyle. But once I got that urge under control, I realized just how out of hand the whole thing had gotten.
Thank god the guys were there to help break it up. If it had just been me, I couldn’t have managed it. And if the cops had come, we would have been fucked. Because despite what Cade probably thinks, he was the aggressor in any way anyone else would understand.
I hope they’re all okay. I saw the moment Cade’s elbow caught Tristan’s nose, and it looked bad. I also saw Tobias end up with a black eye somehow, and Gunnar and Ford both got scratched to hell by trying to contain Tornado Kyle, once his temper was flaring as uncontrollably as Cade’s.
Cade’s hands are shaking badly, and I can see how hard he’s trying to control it, holding them tightly in his lap.
I want to reach over and grab one. Normally, I wouldn’t hesitate. Even if we were in the middle of a fight. But right now, I feel too lost.
Tonight scared me deeply, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to claw my way out of that fear to give Cade what he needs so this can stop.
By the time we’re inside the house, he still hasn’t spoken and neither have I. He won’t even really look at me. The shaking in his hands has taken over his entire body, and if I had to guess, I’d say his physical pain and adrenaline crash and shame spiral are all coming down on him at once.
The thought makes me hurt for him so hard it feels like I might crumble, but I can’t. I need to focus. Time seems slow as I take a deep breath, tapping each fingertip against my thumb a few times, letting the repetitive sensation ground me in the moment and pull me out of my head.
After a long minute, I feel calmer. When I reach for Cade, gently grabbing his arms from behind, he jumps. But as soon as I pull him close, he relaxes into me. His back presses against my chest, letting me take some of his weight, as the shaking gets worse.
“Let’s get you cleaned up.”
My whisper sounds like a shout in the stillness of the empty house, but Cade nods anyway.
I walk him to the bathroom, taking over stripping him down when his swollen hand is useless and the other is shaking too hard to be helpful.
There’s eyeliner smeared over his face, mixed with the dark, dried blood, and his cheek and eye on the left are already swollen to hell.
I pull off his shirt with one hand while reaching in to turn on the shower with the other, making sure the water is as cool as it can be without freezing him.
Stepping into the tub is precarious. Cade is long: long limbs, long torso, muscular but rangy; and now that he’s so unsteady it makes him look like he could topple over at the slightest breeze.
I quickly shed my own clothes, also covered in blood and other fluids I don’t want to think about, so I can step into the shower with him and make sure he doesn’t fall.
I stand behind him, both of us facing the showerhead, so I can feel how he flinches when the water hits all his cuts and scrapes.
I loop one arm around his stomach and press him close to me, leaning the other hand against the wall in front of him for support.
He stiffens initially, like he’s trying to hold himself upright, then seems to wilt all at once.
His good hand splays over the tile next to mine, and that hand combined with my entire body pressed up against his from behind seems like the only reason he’s still upright.
I can see how hard his muscles twitch and tremble, and he bows his head low, letting the water run down the back of his neck and looking like he’s trying to crumble to the ground.
“Shh,” I whisper in his ear, because I can’t think of anything else to say. I spread my fingers wide over his abs and dig them into his flesh, reminding him that I’m here. I press my lips to the warm skin behind his ear, trying to project some sort of calm directly into his brain. “It’ll be okay.”
I didn’t want to say that it is okay, because we both know it’s far from it.
His eyebrow is bleeding again now that it’s wet, running thin rivulets of red down the side of his neck that he doesn’t seem to notice.
His knees bend suddenly like they gave out, and together we stumble forward until we’re closer to the wall.
Cade’s forehead hits the tile and the shaking gets worse, feeling more like how you move when you’re sobbing, except no sound is coming out of him, just harsh, ragged breaths.
Oh, Cade.
Tears fill my eyes abruptly as I can practically feel the anxious pain running off of him.
I don’t know what to do.
I need… I need help.
But there’s no one here but us.
A stray tear spills out of me—not for the first time tonight—and I settle for squeezing him tightly, burying my face in the back of his neck and holding him as close to me as possible.
I press shapeless kisses into his skin, trying to pour all my unspoken love into him to help hold him up while he shudders and threatens to collapse. He’s breathing more and more heavily, like a panic attack is attempting to open up inside him, but he’s fighting it.
Sliding my hand up to sit over his heart, I take a deep breath, making his body move with mine.
It’s something he’s done for me countless times before, and it’s the only thing I can think of to help.
I take a deep, slow breath, waiting for him to join me.
Eventually, his body shudders and his chest moves beneath my hand.
We do it again and again, with Cade gradually feeling steadier beneath me, even though the shaking continues.
Eventually, I lean back. The water is cold and we’ve been in here too long. I need him to lie down before he collapses.
“Let me wash you up, baby,” I say softly in his ear.
Out of the two of us, he’s the one into using pet names.
I always feel awkward about it, like I’m doing it wrong.
But it feels natural right now. Cade doesn’t stiffen when I move him, staying soft beneath my hands until I’ve got him facing me, leaning backward against the tile.
He’s out of the stream of water now, with most of it hitting me inconveniently close to my face, but I think he needs the support.
I focus on washing him up quickly, squirting soap into my hands and then moving over him with quick, gentle strokes. I wash the sweat and dirt from his chest, then his arms, skipping his swollen hand that I’ll need to do something about in a minute.
I wash his legs and his groin, his cock soft and vulnerable in my hand.
When I move up to his face, he winces again, but it needs to be done.
The soap obviously stings, making him hiss and turn his face to the side.
I sweep my thumbs over his cheeks a few times as gently as I can before I call it good.
His eyes are still dark with makeup I’m not going to scrub off right now, but the worst of the blood and smudging is off his skin, revealing the true color of the bruising below.