Page 100 of Worth the Wait

“Kitten,” he said, sliding an arm around Callum’s waist.

“I’m fine,” Callum repeated the mantra. “Just tired.”

Callum flipped the lights on in the bedroom and blinked vacantly at the dandelion duvet they’d bought, when…only days ago? He sat on the bed, then reclined against the pillows and closed his eyes.

“I just want to lay down,” he told Jack, even though he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to lay down. He didn’t think he wanted to be alone, but he wasn’t sure about being around Jack either. It was like the comfort he’d just relished at the hospital and in the car had vanished once reality clicked into place.

“I’ll set something up with your friends. Rest all you want,” Jack assured him, turning the lights off.

“Don’t,” Callum stopped him. “The lights, please. Just…leave them on.”

Jack moved the switch and the lights came back on.

“Do you want to be alone, Callum?” Jack asked, a little mournfully.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, blinking away his confusion and tears. He felt scrambled, unable to understand, let alone articulate what he needed.

“I’ll go talk to your friends and come back,” Jack assured him, stepping out of the room.

Callum listened to Jack talk to Samantha and Mark. There was coordination and a few quiet laughs. The news turned off and Callum listened to the jerky sounds of Jack flipping through the channels, settling on a music station.

Classical, Callum recognized. The sound of strings and piano drifting through the house like air. Jack appeared in the doorway, sort of hovering half in and half out of the room, waiting for Callum to make a decision about where he wanted him to be.

And, fuck, he wanted to decide, but he didn’t trust himself to do it, and he didn’t understand why. How could so much have changed in the last twelve hours? He’d gone from feeling so sure and certain about everything to not even knowing which way was up.

Callum lifted his hand and patted around his swollen eye, the skin sensitive and puffy. He could open it a little now, but it was pretty useless. He felt around his face, the cut on his lip, the bruise on his cheekbone. A tear slipped off the tip of his finger and ran down his hand, then another and another.

“What do you need, kitten?” Jack asked quietly, still in the doorway.

Callum rubbed his feet together over the sheets, no longer trying to hide the tears that slid down his face.

“I don’t know. Everything feels wrong in my head.”

He closed his eyes and tried to find something to ground him in reality. A feeling that was reliable, and true, and worth something. He grew frustrated, unable to even scrunch his eyebrows together in thought without hurting himself. He cried more, harder, alone on the bed.

He fisted the sheets while he mentally tried to grasp at anythingright, his memory narrowing quickly to the way his heart felt the first time Jack had kissed him, to the night Jack had taken him to the observatory then jumping frenetically from every kiss since then to the delicate way Jack had kissed around his bruises in the hospital.

Everything snapped into place. A rare moment of clarity that shattered the haze of pain and medication and confusion he’d been drowning in since the early morning. He opened his eyes, his vision blurry and murky with tears.

“I need my Daddy,” he whimpered.

Jack was on the bed, beside him, around him, on him, touching him without hurting him or maybe not really touching him at all even though Callum felt him on every part of himself. And he felt safe, then, in the light, with Jack by his side.

V

August

28

Jack

“Good morning, Holly,”Jack spoke into the speaker of his phone, which was sitting on his desk in his brand new office.

Justin and the staff at the hospital had been more than gracious about his need to delay his start date at Cedars, so he found himself having his actual first day of work two weeks after Callum’s assault.

“Jack! Is that you? I thought there was an earthquake and California must have sucked you into the ocean or something.” His friend Holly, the receptionist from Paws and Claws, laughed into the phone. “Also, it’s nearly lunch time.”

“For you.”