Page 33 of Hook, Line, and Tentacle
Once all my clothes are gone, he lifts me again, opens the shower door, and steps inside with me. He’s still fully clothed. There’s a tentacle draped over my shoulder, curving against the line of my jaw, and I tilt my head down, leaning into the touch. The shower water hits like a whisper at first. It’s below room temperature, and although I’m still shaking from the chill of the ocean, it makes me gasp.
“Cal.” I shiver, curling my head against his chest. “Please, that’s cold.”
“I know,” he whispers, pressing his lips to my temple. “I know, love. But I can’t risk shocking your system. We have to warm you up slowly, okay? Please. Let me.”
He lowers me gently to the shower tray and holds me upright on unsteady legs. I’m sure if he let go, I’d drop like a puppet with its strings cut.
The glass cubicle walls fog around us as he ticks the temperature up, one slow degree at a time. Steam curls into the air. His hoodie clings to his chest, plastered with rain and seawater.
At some point, my arms rise of their own accord, covering my face. I think that’s when I start crying again, breath shuddering. It isn’t until he shifts to lean over me and turn the water off that I realize he’s still drenched and ice-cold. He hasn’t stepped under the spray at all, like he’s afraid of using up too much of it and making me go without. My hands circle his waist, sliding over the soaked fabric.
The tremble in his limbs borders on violent. “Love, don’t—”
“You need to get warm too,” I whisper.
“No,” he murmurs. “You’re what matters. I just—”
“Cal.” I touch his face, and he goes still. My touch slides over the stubble at the line of his jaw, and his eyes close. “Please, baby. I need you to be warm too.”
The word hangs between us, something soft electric. His breath catches at it.Baby.
He blinks, lashes spiked with water, and something cracks open behind his eyes. He plants a hand on my back and lowers me carefully to the tiled bench inside the shower and strips off his sodden clothes in silence. When he cranks the water back on and steps under the spray, it’s warmer now. I watch him press his face into his hands for a moment, just letting the water rush over his body.
Then he sinks to his knees in front of me quite abruptly, wraps his arms around my waist, and buries his face against my stomach. I thread my fingers into his soaked curls. One of his tentacles wraps loosely around my ankle. Another rests at the dip of my hip, right at the top of my thigh. I stroke his hair for what feels like a long time.
When we emerge from the bathroom, dripping and silent, the apartment is warm and quiet. The only sounds are him moving around to gather supplies, and the electrical hum of his refrigerator in the kitchen. He moves on instinct to grab every blanket and towel he can find. His hoodie drapes over my shoulders—my favorite one, with the dark blue trim that’s soft on the inside—and he swaddles me until I’m cocooned and dry, then tucks me onto the sofa in a veritable nest.
He’s still shaking, but I don’t think it’s from the cold anymore. His shoulders twitch once. Then again, harder. Like something in him is short-circuiting.
I reach out and tug on his wrist. “Come here.”
He shakes his head—barely—but doesn’t resist when I take his hand and guide him into the blanket fort he built for me. The moment I pull him into my arms, he folds like a cheap suit. No resistance, no pride, just total undoing.
He curls around me, and I feel the shudders tearing through him. His breath hitches high and sharp in his throat, but stifled like he’s trying to quell it. His body vibrates.
“Cal.” I dip my chin, resting it in the crook of his neck and shoulder.
He draws in a shallow breath, but his voice breaks on the first word. “I—”
I thread my fingers into his hair again. His chest stutters like he’s swallowing down sobs, but they come anyway. Silent at first, then not.
“I thought—fuck, Neviah, I thought I lost you—” He chokes on the words. I press a kiss to his throat, where his pulse is a frantic shiver under his warm skin. “Ifeltit. God, love, I felt it like a knife in my ribs, and I couldn’t—”
He snaps his mouth shut and his huge shoulders heave with an unproductive, airless breath.
My hand strokes up and down his back as he fists the edge of the hoodie I’m wearing. “Breathe.” I dot a kiss to his jaw, then another, and another. “Breathe first, then talk, baby.”
His exhale is just as frantic as the rain lashing the windows, but as I continue to draw a silent path up and down the curve of his spine, his breaths even.
When a tentacle lifts from the blanket nest tangle of all of our limbs, reaching toward my face, I lean in and drop a kiss to it as it curls over my collarbone. Cal chuffs a little sound that could be a laugh or the end of a sob, I’m not sure.
“It wasn’t just—” He breaks off, turning his head against my chest to inhale deeply. “It wasn’t just the water or the cold or the storm. It was me. I left you. I pushed you away, and that’s why you went down there, and I—fuck,fuck, I should’ve known—”
“Cal.”
“I left you,” he gasps. “I said it was amistake, and I knew it wasn’t true, and Ihurtyou. You went into the water, and I wasn’t there. It was my fault.Idid this, I did all of it, I don’t deserve you, and Ihatemyself for—”
“Cal,” I say, firmer this time. I cup his face, but his eyes are wild and wet and unfocused, like he can’t stop the helpless little spiralhe’s slipped into. I lean in and press my lips to his, like I can breathe something into him that will make this stop.
