Page 37 of The Call of Azure (Unexpected Love #3)

I should absolutely never spend the night with someone else.

I know what happens to me at night. Even more importantly, I shouldn’t spend the night with Gabriel specifically.

He’s already seen me have a panic attack.

He’s already had to climb onto my lap and pet me and talk me down like I’m a wild animal.

Even though it was only once, once was enough.

I’ve tried my best to avoid wondering what he must think of me, how seeing me that way must have colored his opinion of me, but it’s hard not to let myself ruminate over the whole episode.

He hasn’t treated me any differently since that day, so if he does think less of me, at least he’s kind enough to hide it.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter anyway.

I know he’s not interested in anything romantic with me.

Hell, I’m not even sure he’s interested in staying friends after our performances are over.

I hope he is. I feel like we’ve been getting along, and he’s slowly starting to let me into his life just a bit.

God knows the evening we spent together with his ropes was the most intimate thing I’ve ever experienced.

Most of the time, though, he’s a pretty closed book, and he even flat-out said that he has rope partners who are nothing more than professional collaborators of sorts.

If I spend the night and he has to deal with me waking up all panicked and sweating and trying to escape my memories, then I’ll have ruined all the friendship progress I hope I’ve made by taking care of him tonight.

He’ll end up having to take care of me again instead.

Yet, when he extricates himself from his blanket nest, tucks pills and drinks and tissues under his arms, and heads toward his bedroom, I follow like a moth to a flame.

I’ll just stay awake all night so that I’m here if he needs me.

Yep. That sounds like a good solution. Gabriel won’t have to feel alone while he’s sick, and I won’t have to risk him seeing me as nothing more than a vulnerable mess again.

I stand at the edge of his bed as he sets his armful of cold supplies on the nightstand, flops down into his pile of pillows, and shuffles around until he’s nothing but a lump under way too many blankets with a disembodied head sticking out of the top, facing the place he expects me to lie.

Cupcake bolts up the set of tiny dog stairs at the foot of the bed and curls up against his belly, and all I can do as I watch their intimate nightly routine is wonder what it would be like to be a regular part of it.

One mussed-up eyebrow lifts in my direction when he realizes I’m frozen in place and staring. “Come on. I promise I only bite when asked.”

There’s no way to respond that won’t end with the conversation heading down a path that leaves me turned on while crawling into bed with a sick Gabriel, so I settle for rolling my eyes and slipping under the covers fully dressed.

The smile he offers in response is soft and sleepy and almost grateful, and my heart wants me to slide close and pull him into my arms until my body molds around his and he’s warm and safe and can sleep without worry.

The rest of me wants him just as much as my stupid heart does.

My lips want to brush along the back of his neck, and my fingers want to reach over and smooth his ruffled hair just to know if it feels as silken as it looks.

I can’t do those things, of course; all I can do is tuck my hands tightly against my chest and remind myself once again that he’s not meant to be mine.

I watch silently as his eyes close, waiting for his breathing to slow and settle into the smooth rhythm of sleep, but it never does. Instead, he tosses and turns and sniffles and coughs until he growls out loud, actually growls, sits up, adjusts his pillows, and flops back down on his back.

“Okay, I know you have to get up in a couple of hours, and I’m sure the last thing you want to do is lie here with a sick guy and have a two a.m. chat, but…can we talk for a while?”

I huff out a laugh. “Sure, we can. What do you want to talk about?” While I’m not going to tell him that chatting sounds amazing because I’ll get to spend more time with him while simultaneously avoiding accidentally falling asleep and potentially scaring the bejesus out of him, I’m secretly grateful that he’s not able to sleep either.

“How did you end up owning the bakery?”

“The long version or the short?”

He chuckles a sad, scratchy sound. “The long for sure.”

“Mmmm…the really, really long version?”

He sniffles loudly and reaches a hand over to weakly slap at my shoulder. “Of course, the really, really long version. You’re distracting me from death, remember?”

“Right. Death by sniffles. How did I almost forget?” I like teasing Gabriel. Even when he’s sick, he laughs so easily. I could spend the rest of my life making him laugh.

“When I was fifteen, I found a part-time job washing dishes for this little café near the group home I was in at the time. There was this eccentric old…oh my god, not like actually old. If you ever meet my Aunt Mar, do NOT tell her I called her old.”

Gabriel’s laugh turns into another fit of coughing, but once it’s passed, that doesn’t stop him from turning back onto his side and offering me a pathetic little smile and nodding for me to continue.

“Okay, so this eccentric artist lady used to come in every afternoon and pick up pastries for her breakfast the next morning. She had a small bit of property and grew berries and had bees and shit, and she’d bring in honey and jam and beeswax candles and just all kinds of hippie things.

She talked to me during my very first shift, nothing big or important, mind you.

She just told me she hoped I’d be happy with the job and that the owners were good people. ”

“She sounds nice,” Gabriel mumbles around the emergency tissue he’s holding close to his face.

“She is. She’s the nicest person I’ve ever known.

But at the time, it was just weird. I’d spent my whole life not being noticed, especially by adults, and it set me on edge a bit, wondering what ulterior motives she had for chatting with me.

I only worked four days a week, but the next time I was in, she chatted with me again, and the day after that and the day after that.

After a few weeks, I actually yelled at her and called her an old creep and asked what she wanted from me.

She just smiled and told me she wanted my friendship.

Which of course made her even odder in my head because she was old and I was a kid, and no one had ever wanted that before, not even other kids my age.

It turned out she knew all about my situation, and well - long story semi-shortened because even though you want the long bakery story, if I tell you about all of my teenage angst, we’ll be here for a week - she really just wanted to help.

She kept talking at me every time she came in until she eventually wore me down and I started talking back.

We ended up connecting in a strange “hippie and angsty teen become friends” made-for-TV-special kind of way.

Just before I turned sixteen, Mar signed up to be a foster parent, and eventually I moved in with her.

She was my last foster home, and before I even realized what had happened, she’d become my family. ”

I clear my throat, trying to contain the emotion that still rolls through me when I think about how grateful I am she took an interest in me that first day, and shift the conversation back to safer, bakery-related topics.

“Anyway, I stayed with the café for a couple of years and moved up from washing dishes to helping their baker, which, it turned out, I really loved.”

“Oh my god, that’s so sweet. One day, you’ll have to tell me all the parts you’re skipping though, okay? I feel like teenage you was probably a bit more dramatic than you want to let on.”

I’ve never seen Gabriel quite like this.

I don’t know if he’s high on cold pills or just so sick that he doesn’t feel like being his normal perky and playful self, but he seems so soft and vulnerable, lying here with me in the nearly dark room.

A strip of light from the slightly cracked bathroom door falls across the bed just behind him, and pale silver moonlight shines in through the open curtains, casting nearly white highlights across his dark-brown hair.

His normally clean-shaven jawline is covered in stubble, and he looks like some kind of faerie or elf out of a Tolkien novel.

If elves had the sniffles and tiny dogs curled up against their chests.

“One day.”

“Good.” He smiles and sniffs once more. “Okay, so you live with this hippie and are an apprentice baker at a little café. And then…”

“Well, then I turned eighteen, and it was time to look at colleges and careers. I spent a long time - a couple of years actually, studying all the options and possibilities, and it was just all so overwhelming because how was I supposed to know what I wanted to do with my entire life? I’d had no one in school to talk to me about things like that, and Mar just wanted me to do whatever would make me happy, but I didn’t really know what would make me happy.

Even if I settled on a career, then I’d have to pick the best school and send in applications and settle on a minor and then pick courses and electives, and it was just too much.

What if I picked something and hated it?

What if I picked something I liked and failed?

What if I never managed to pick at all? So I joined the Marines. ”

“That’s…umm…that’s one way to handle things, I guess. You really just enlisted because you couldn’t decide on anything else?” His dumbfounded tone feels about right. Telling the story now, more than a decade later, it sounds as absurd a choice as it actually was at the time.