Chapter Eleven #2
When I’ve done as much as I can, I turn off the water and step out, getting a towel ready before pulling him after me.
It’s hard to get him dry without being too rough, so I do my best but focus on getting him out of the bathroom and into bed.
I throw the towel on the dresser, too wrung out to care about the mess right now, and then peel back the covers so he can climb under.
He lies down obligingly, but looks tense again, instead of relaxed. After a second of leaning against the headboard, he arches his back awkwardly, an expression of pain crossing his face as he holds up his trembling hand between us.
“I, uh,” he coughs, his voice even rougher now than it was before, making guilt bubble through me for a second as I think of how roughly I fucked his throat right before his dad ended up fucking hitting him in it. “I think I broke my hand.”
The words make something inside me clench abruptly, my eyes filling with stupid, pointless tears and my stomach swooping like I might throw up. I have to swallow hard before I can speak.
“Should we go to the hospital after all? Get an x-ray?”
Cade looks at me with wide eyes, then shakes his head and slumps down into the bed.
“No. Please.” His sentences are getting more and more fragmented as he succumbs to the exhaustion of the night. “Tomorrow, maybe.”
I know it’s wrong. I know we should go sooner rather than later, if he’s really hurt himself, but I can’t bring myself to force him. And the thought of doing all this under harsh, fluorescent lights, surrounded by people asking questions about what happened makes it so much worse.
I don’t want to go, either. It makes me a shitty boyfriend, but it’s true.
He needs to rest. We both need to breathe. We can be better in the morning.
Fuck, I’m supposed to pick the girls up in the afternoon. I’ll have to call their aunt and tell her… something. It’s not like she won’t hear about it from Kris eventually, I guess.
All I can do is focus on right now. I’m still naked and dripping from the shower, the carpet wet under my feet, so I grab the towel I used on Cade and quickly dry myself off.
I slip on some sweats and a t-shirt before running to the kitchen to get an ice pack out of the freezer.
I convince Cade to rest it on his hand, and then hold still as I slap a bandaid on that cut on his eyebrow before it starts bleeding everywhere again.
It looks nasty, swollen and gaping open more than I’d like.
As soon as I crawl under the covers next to him, he turns into me and presses his face against my chest. It must hurt, because there’s so much swelling, but he does it anyway.
His good hand rucks up my shirt and grasps my stomach.
It makes me twinge immediately, desperate for him to not feel the softness there, but then I feel guilty for being so superficial even when Cade’s all fucked up and looking for comfort.
Instead, I lie there, stroking up and down his back as softly as I can and trying not to let myself tense up too much as he grabs at me.
At least there’s no chance of me falling asleep anytime soon. Tristan said to watch for his throat swelling suddenly, which is a terrifying concept, so I’ll be watching him sleep for at least the next few hours.
He doesn’t fall asleep, though. He takes one long, shuddering breath after another, his eyes open and vacant and his fingers continuing to anxiously grip at my stomach. I stroke my fingers through his hair in an attempt to soothe him, but he stays stiff.
“Go to sleep, Cade,” I say after over an hour of this. “I’ll watch you and make sure you’re still okay. I’m right here.”
Cade shifts, looking up at me from an awkward angle, our faces too close to see each other properly but not close enough to kiss.
“I can’t sleep,” he says, his voice hollow.
“Do you want to go to the hospital after all? We can still go.”
My fingers dig into his scalp a little harder as I pet him, my own anxieties mounting at the thought of dealing with the ER.
“Can you fuck me?”
He says it so quietly, and it seems so out of left field, that at first I don’t register what he said. When I don’t immediately respond, he shifts himself a little farther up my body, obviously holding back a groan at the effort.
Once his face is level with mine, he presses a soft kiss against my lips. I kiss him back, because I’ll always kiss him back. But I’m gentle, because his lip is swollen and it has to hurt.
Cade shifts until his body is blanketing mine, and there isn’t even a hint of hardness pressed into me—exactly like I’d expect at a time like this—but he’s rolling his hips against mine a little as he clings to my side with his good hand and kisses me again.
“Cade—what?”
I’m stuttering, but I’m so confused right now.
“Fuck me,” he whispers. I think he’s trying to be seductive, but I can hear how raw his voice is, even through the quiet words.
He kisses me again, parting his lips this time and trying to push his tongue into my mouth. At the same time, he puts his hand between us to palm my also-soft cock, and the weird sensation makes me jump.
“Cade,” I say, pulling back as far as I can despite the headboard behind me. “No. What? We can’t—you’re hurt.”
“I’m always a mess. It’s just a couple bruises. Come on, I was an asshole tonight. Don’t you want to punish me? Show me what you think of me?”
My mouth is literally hanging open at this point. Cade comes out with a lot of random shit, but I don’t think he’s ever said anything that’s thrown me sideways quite as much as this.
The sex we had was never vanilla. We started out weird, and got weirder from there.
And recently he’s been pushing the degradation stuff more.
I noticed, but I just thought he was finding himself, or something.
I have a weakness for dirty talk anyway, so what does it matter if I’m calling him a little bitch, as long as that’s what he’s into?
I did a little googling, this is all stuff that healthy people in good relationships can do.
A part of me worried a little that it was coming from a bad place, but I’m a worrier. It didn’t seem right to judge what he wanted.
I am now officially judging. This feels wrong. This feels deeply, deeply fucked up.
“Cade, I’m not doing that right now. Are you kidding? It’s fucked up. Even the thought of having sex right now seems so wild, and even worse to do… that.”
“What? You were into it before. This is just how we fuck. Come on, I know you’re pissed at me. Let it out. I fucking deserve it, right?”
I sit up, all my internal alarms ringing at the line this conversation is taking.
“I’m not pissed at you. I’m fucking worried.
You scared me. And even if I was pissed at you, I wouldn’t literally want to take it out on you through sex.
That’s not right. I thought we were just doing that because it was hot.
You know I don’t actually mean that shit when I say it, right?
The degradation shit? It just seemed like it turned you on, so I went with it. ”
“It does turn me on. I like seeing it all come out of you. And then after you’re always so sweet when you take care of me after you fuck me up.”
A feeling of horror sinks into me before I can fully process what he’s saying.
In my mind, we were doing something kinky.
Something fictional but fun, and then I made sure to take really good care of him, because I know that shit can be hard on your hormones and your body.
I learned enough about BDSM and kink to understand that, because I wanted to know what I was doing, and that just makes sense.
He’s describing the exact same thing, but not in a way that sounds like kink and aftercare.
He makes it sound… gross. Manipulative.
My gut clenches and I wrench myself into a seated position, accidentally jostling him enough that he winces in the process.
“It’s supposed to be a game, Cade. I’m not actually angry with you when we do it. I’m not getting out some secret, pushed down anger that I hold for you. I don’t… I don’t hold any anger for you. Where the fuck is this coming from? How long have you secretly thought I was hate-fucking you?”
Cade looks up at me, wide-eyed and clearly confused.
“Silas, I—”
He trails off, and the whole thing continues to sink deeper and deeper into my consciousness.
“Oh, god,” I whisper to no one in particular, looking around in desperation like there’s an answer on one of the bedroom walls. “This is so fucked up.”
“Why are you upset? What’s happening?”
Words cannot express all the things I feel at this question. I’m not good at articulating my feelings at the best of times. Therapy has helped a lot with that, but still. And this is the most unhinged conversation I’ve ever had with my boyfriend who I now know thinks I, what? Secretly hate him?
I was always so impressed with how well Cade came out of his fucked-up childhood.
He was barely raised, he was abused—even if he won’t call it that—he watched his mother trapped in an endless cycle of domestic violence, and he held it all together to do a damn good job of taking care of his sisters.
He downplays how bad it was a lot, but I thought he was just trying to not make a big deal about it.
Now I think that maybe he never really accepted how bad it was, and absorbed more of his parents’ shitty dynamic than I realized.
I scrub one hand down my face while Cade continues to stare at me, confused as ever. He looks so tired. I don’t like that we’ve started this conversation when he’s all beat up and dazed, but I can’t exactly drop it now.
I sink to my knees at the side of the bed, because I hate towering over him like this, but I can’t bring myself to crawl back under the covers with him yet.
Leaning forward on the mattress, I take hold of Cade’s non-swollen hand, making his eyes widen even more.
“Cade, I need you to understand that that’s fucked up.
I only ever want to hurt you during sex or call you names or anything else because you want it.
Because it turns you on. Not because I have some kind of negative feelings toward you that I need to work through.
That’s abuse. Hurting you because I’m angry at you would be abuse, even if it comes with an orgasm. That’s the difference.”
Cade shakes his head. “I don’t understand. Everybody gets angry sometimes. It’s intense when we fuck, because we love each other so much. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“But I’m not angry with you. Do you get that?
And I’m sweet to you after because you deserve it, because I love you.
Not because you earned it by what you took.
You don’t have to… bribe me with sex to get fucking cuddled as reward.
I always want to take care of you, you just won’t let me the rest of the time. ”
Cade’s face scrunches up like he’s glitching.
“Please tell me you understand,” I say. “Tell me you know I’ll never fuck you to punish you for something I’m genuinely angry about.”
There’s a long pause, where I don’t feel like it’s really sinking in. But he nods, eventually.
“Okay, robot boy. I understand. I’m sorry, I’m being weird.”
The nickname makes me unclench a little. It makes Cade sound more like himself.
I blow out a breath, willing all the tension to flee the room so he can finally rest. I still feel very on edge in a way I can’t really articulate, but at least I said what I needed to out loud.
“Can we please sleep?” I ask. “You need to rest. And in the morning, we’re going to the fucking hospital, because your hand looks worse and worse.”
Cade sighs and flops backward on the bed. His left hand lies on the mattress in front of me, even darker and more swollen than an hour ago.
“I don’t think I can sleep. It’s like I can feel my whole pulse in it, and it hurts every time I take a breath.”
I shake my head, frustration brewing in me.
“And you thought I should be fucking you like that.”
“It was a stupid thing to say, okay!” Cade’s words come out angry all of a sudden, and he throws his other hand over his eyes. “I was being stupid. I do that a lot. Can we please drop it?”
I can see his chest moving with deep, pain-tense breaths, and I make up my mind.
“Fuck this, we’re not waiting.”
“What?” he looks at me, his eyes shadowed black by his hand over them, expression difficult to make out in the soft moonlight.
“Get up. We’re going to the hospital.” Cade doesn’t move, so I stand up and hold out my hand. “Now.”
I know how much he must be hurting when he doesn’t argue with me, but starts to move.