5

“Cal, come on?—”

Caleb cuts me off, leaning over to drop the pack of antiseptic wipes down on the table harder than necessary, his temper flaring again.

“It’ll be easy, ’cause she likes you better,” he says, pretending it’s a joke when I know it isn’t. “Even when we were together, she still trusted you more, which, you know, fair enough. It’s not like I gave her a lot of reasons to think I wasn’t a complete fuck up—out in the field and in our relationship.”

Not being able to see his face is frustrating, but I know if I turn around now, it’ll come off as confrontational, and Caleb will get defensive on another level. He’s braced to see any argument against him as a war cry, and I don’t feel like indulging that insecurity right now. But if I push back without looking at him, he might be more receptive to it. Maybe. Unlikely. But I’ll give it a go anyway.

“That’s bullshit, Cal,” I say, forcing myself not to sound as vehement about it as I want to, because there’s not a single part of me that thinks Mei doesn’t respect Caleb as a vigilante. “Mei has loved you since we were all six years old, and she trusts you to have her back in the field. She knows what sort of hero you are.”

“Yeah?” Caleb challenges, already hiked up to eleven and ready to swing. “How about what kind of man?”

“Caleb—” I try again, but he talks right over me.

“Because that’s the thing, ain’t it?” he demands, practically spitting fire at my back. “Maybe she does want me as a teammate, maybe I’m a hero she can depend on. But when it comes to being a boyfriend? I fucked that. I fucked it too many times for us to come back from it.”

There’s a pause where Caleb sits behind me, furious and breathing just a little too fast. It isn’t just anger, it’s panic too. Fear. Fear that he’s right, fear that he’s wrong, I don’t know. Possibly both, knowing the tangled spiral of headphone wire that is Caleb’s mind sometimes.

“Do you still want to?” The question comes out of my mouth on impulse, and I immediately want to swallow it back down again.

“What?” Caleb asks, quiet and clearly a bit stunned by the bluntness or possibly the implication behind it.

If I tried to walk it back, Caleb would let me. But I’m not a coward, so I push forward instead.

“Come back from it?”

Once Caleb seems to accept that yes, I am genuinely asking this, he takes a handful of seconds to think it over. I can feel the tension radiating off him in steady waves, like heat from the atmosphere.

“If you’d asked me that a few months ago, I would have said yes,” he says. “But now … after everything that went down with Rex and the mages? I don’t know what I want anymore. It’s all, like, a fucking … a fucking mess up here, yeah?” He raises his hand, and I imagine him tapping his temple with two fingers. “Or maybe it’s just me.” I can hear the defeat, the self-loathing he’s gotten so bad at hiding lately. “Maybe I’m just a fucking mess that can’t, like, ever clean itself up.”

That’s too much for me to take. I can’t stand to hear the horrible pain in his voice or the vile feelings Caleb has about himself.

I turn around so that I can look him in the eyes because I need him to see, to really understand, what I’m about to tell him. He lets me grasp one of his hands and thread my fingers through his, locking them tightly together. I use my free hand to grip the back of his neck and draw him in close, really digging my fingers in and squeezing hard.

“When I look at you, I don’t see a mess, Cal. I never have,” I tell him, and if there’s a harsh crack in my voice, we both have enough respect for each other to ignore it.

I expect Caleb to resist, to pull back, but he doesn’t. He just leans in closer, seeking reassurance and comfort from me even if he isn’t consciously aware that’s what he’s after.

“Yeah?” Caleb murmurs, biting down on the bottom lip of that mouth, the one I’ve stared at and dreamt about for so long it’s awful and embarrassing to admit. He releases his lip from between his teeth and wets it with a quick swipe of his tongue. There’s some spit left behind that I desperately want to lick off, to steal some part of him and absorb it into me.

He catches me noticing, and his eyes dart to my own mouth, which is slightly parted. There are bare inches of space between us, close enough that I can feel his hot little exhales on my face. It’s impossible to miss when the thought kiss him flickers through Caleb’s mind. I inhale sharply at the flare of want: from him, from me, ready to blaze a raging, searing course through both of us.

“Then what do you see?” he asks. I can’t tell if he means to sound so husky and vulnerable, but it hits several buttons inside me that I had no idea were there to press.

It’s a difficult question to answer at any rate, not because I don’t know, but because the answers are innumerable and complex.

What do I see when I look at Caleb Moon?

One of my closest friends. One of the bravest men I know. A genuine goddamn hero. My partner in crime, literally and figuratively. Family, in all the ways that matter. Trouble, the kind you get addicted to on purpose. The boy who I’ve been in love with for years, even when I didn’t know it, even when I didn’t know it was possible to love someone like this, to love them in every shade and on every level, to the point where it doesn’t seem real that one person could mean so much.

Caleb Moon is a man worth more than he will ever believe.

But since we don’t say that kind of shit to each other, because it would be too exposing, too soft for the relationship we’ve built over the last fourteen years, there’s only one answer I can give, one that encompasses all those things.

I dig my nails into his neck like I’m trying to leave permanent marks behind because maybe I am, because maybe that’s what I’m always trying to do, to give him something he can touch and feel and hold onto. Something he can use to keep him steady when his mind shatters and quakes.

“The best thing, Cal,” I tell him. “Just the very best thing.”