Page 115 of Boiling Point
And I was curled in a strange bed, crying over a man who’d asked me to marry him that very morning…and walked out that night like I’d never mattered.
I don’t know how long I lay there—long enough that the sobs quieted to hiccups, and the hiccups faded to silence. Myhead throbbed, my throat burned, and my body ached from exhaustion.
I hated crying like this. Hated the mess of it. Hated that it always ended the same way—leaving me hollow, humiliated, alone.
A soft knock sounded at the door.
I stiffened, every nerve suddenly wide awake.
The door opened with the softest click. I didn’t move. I couldn’t.
“Gabrielle?”
A fresh wave of tears slid down my face and onto the pillow.
Cal’s voice came low and ragged, almost raw. “I’m shit at this.” He let the words sit, wrecked and breathless. “Not just relationships—all of it. I know I’ve made a mess of today. I made a mess of everything after lunch. I made a mess just now, and I don’t know how to…” The bed shuddered a little as he sat down—not too close, but not far.
He let the silence spool out, the pause trembling with whatever it cost him to speak.
“James and I had a row. It shouldn’t matter, but it does. It dredged up…so much old rot. All the things I thought I’d finally left behind.” He let out a sound halfway between a laugh and a sigh. “And then there’s Father. He’s dying, Gabrielle. Lung cancer. Maybe six months left, but that’s optimistic. Apparently, everyone knew except me, and today he just…” Cal trailed off, voice thin and stunned.
I rolled to face him. He was sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to me. “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for.”
I sat up. “No, I’m sorry your father is ill.” I folded my legs under me and dashed away the tears with the back of my hand. “I know better than most what that’s like.”
He hesitated, hands knotted tight in his lap. His voice, when it came, was smaller than I’d ever heard it, shorn of every armor. “I know you do.” He turned to me, and when his eyes met mine, his face fell. I’m sure I looked a wreck—eyes bloodshot, face blotchy.
Cal recoiled as if he’d been struck, his mouth folding into something raw and wordless. The next instant, he gathered me, careful but urgent, as though I were a glass cracked at the base but not yet fully shattered. My cheek found the warmth between his chest and shoulder, and he cradled me there, his palm cupping the crown of my head, thumb combing gentle paths in my hair.
“Don’t,” he murmured, the word a plea and a command and an apology all wound together. “Oh, love, don’t ever let me do this to you.”
I shook my head, but more tears leaked out, hotter for the embarrassment of them. He caught each one, stroking them away as if he could erase the evidence along with the wound.
“I never want to be the reason you cry,” he said, voice low but hard-edged with self-loathing. He traced the curve of my jaw, the lines beneath my eyes. “Please, Gabrielle—don’t let the rot of my family touch you. Not like this.” His movements were desperate, almost frantic, as though he could paste me back together with sheer proximity.
“It’s the jet lag,” I blurted, forcing a laugh that faltered on the catch in my throat. “And the stress. And the end of the semester. It’s a miracle I made it through customs without ugly-crying at some poor border agent.” I sniffed, trying to find levity in the mess, but my voice sounded soft and pathetic, even to me.
Cal didn’t take the out. He kept stroking my hair, sweeping slow arcs from my temple to the nape of my neck. He tightened his hold and pulled me fully onto his lap, the dressing gownsoft against my skin. Dark stubble dotted his jaw, and fine lines gathered at the corners of his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, and this time he winced, shutting his eyes as if the words themselves hurt. “I thought your family convinced you I wasn’t good enough,” I said. I heard the acid in it, the raw scrape of pride. “That I was a phase, or an embarrassment, or something you’d regret later. I thought you’d finally seen how stupid our relationship looks from the outside.” I forced the words, because if I didn’t, I would shatter again. “If you want out, I won’t stop you.”
Cal drew a long, stuttering breath, his chest pushing into mine. His voice, when it surfaced, was crisp as a starched shirt but shaded with disbelief. “You are a prodigiously brilliant woman, and yet somehow you’ve arrived at the most daft conclusion imaginable. Truly staggering work.” He said it like he’d stepped straight out of the House of Lords—vowels pure cut glass, diction so precise it could have been ironed. But beneath the theatrical scorn was something else entirely—devotion, worn thin by fear.
The laugh that burst out of me started as a hiccup, then a tumble I was too spent to restrain. It felt new and fragile, trembling there in the hush. “Wow,” I managed, letting my head fall back. “You went fullDownton Abbeyon me.”
He rested his forehead against mine, eyes closed, a rueful smile curving at the edge of his mouth. “You really think my family could change my mind about you?” He scoffed, and the warmth of him, the utter shock of his confession, was enough to start the tears again—except this time they tasted like relief. “And, if you must know, they’ve never tried to dissuade me. Even if they had, it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference.” Cal tightened his arm around my ribs, as if he needed the resistance to anchor the words. “Because, truthfully, it’s the other wayaround. I’m not good enough for you. I still don’t know why you bother with me.”
I angled back, just enough to see his face—pale in the dim bedroom light. He was smiling, but it was a smile folded in on itself, paper-thin and crushed at the edges. I touched my fingertips to his jaw, let them follow the subtle graze of stubble to the hollow beneath his ear. “Now who’s being daft?”
He huffed a laugh, but the sound was more a shudder than anything, equal parts relief and defeat.
I nestled my cheek against his shoulder, letting the silence yawn between us until my pulse evened out and my breathing fell back into a slow, measured rhythm. “Thank you,” I said, so quiet it might have been a thought. “For coming back.”
“I never should have left,” he murmured, his voice vibrating beneath my ear.
I pressed my palm to the warmth of his chest, his muscles shifting restlessly, breath uneven beneath my hand, and I steadied myself against the uncertainty of what came next. “If you want to talk about your dad, I’m listening.”
