Page 130 of Beautiful When He Breaks

He didn’t hit me. Sometimes I think people expect that because it’s easier to understand violence when it leaves bruises. He just went cold—my father could make a room freeze without raising his voice. He told me I was confused, that America had put ideas in my head, that my mother would be ashamed if she were alive to see what I’d become.

That one landed so fucking deep, and he knew it would. I think he regretted it later, but not enough to take it back when it mattered.

Eli found me that night sitting under the bleachers after practice. I didn’t tell him everything at first. I told him my father and I fought. I told him it was nothing. I told him to fuck off because he wouldn’t stop looking at me. He sat beside me anyway, shoulder to shoulder like we were thirteen at a funeral again.

Eventually I said it. Not dramatically or as some brave confession. I just stared at the empty field and said, “I don’t just… like girls.”

Eli was quiet for so long that I almost threw up. Then he said, “Okay.”

I laughed in his face because I thought he didn’t understand. He got pissed because Eli Matthews has never handled being accused of stupidity gracefully, and he told me, “I know what pansexual means, asshole. I said okay because you’re still you.” I told him my father didn’t think so.

Eli went quiet again then, but this time it wasn’t confusion; it was anger. He didn’t know what to do with the kind of anger that comes from loving someone and being too young to protect them from the people with legal rights to hurt them.

So, he did what Eli does—he stayed. He brought food to school for two weeks when I couldn’t eat at home without my father’s silence making everything taste sour. He picked fights with anyone who said something even near homophobic around me, often with very little strategy and too much volume. He never asked if I was sure. He never asked if I could just not talk about it. He never looked at me like I had become less.

I loved him then.

I didn’t say it. I barely let myself think it in full. But something in me chose him so completely that every year afterward felt like learning how to survive beside a locked door I’d built myself. He dated girls, and I dated no one seriously enough to count until I started making bad choices for worse reasons.

He found Celeste, and I lost pieces of him before I understood I was losing myself too. I watched him drift under her hand and called it jealousy because jealousy was easier than fear. I warned him badly, and he heard it badly. We hurt each other in the particular way people do when the real conversation is too dangerous for either of them to name.

Then Mila arrived on the doorstep.

Everything broke, and somehow, through all the wreckage, here we are.

Eli shifts in his sleep, drawing me out of the past so suddenly I have to blink the room back into focus. His brow furrows slightly, and one hand moves over the sheet until his fingers brush my wrist. Even asleep, he settles when he finds me. That does something to me I’m not prepared for, and another tear slips free before I can stop it.

He is here.

The man I’ve loved since before I understood the shape of that love, is lying beside me after trusting me with the one thing that could have terrified him most. Last night wasn’t perfect in some polished, fictional way. We laughed at terrible jokes. He blushed so hard I thought he might combust. I guided him, and he listened, and then he found his confidence in these devastating flashes that nearly killed me.

I love him so much it hurts.

Not the old, starving kind of hurt, or not only that. This is different. This ache has warmth in it. Terror too, because having something means being able to lose it, and I know too damn much about loss to pretend otherwise. But warmth lives there now. Gratitude. Awe. A kind of disbelief that feels almost religious, and I don’t even know who I’d pray to anymore.

Mila makes a tiny snuffling sound from her cot, kicks once under her blanket, and settles again. Eli stirs at the noise because fatherhood has given him the world’s most specific alarm system. His lashes flutter, his fingers tighten lightly around my wrist, and then his eyes open.

For one second, he looks soft and sleep-drunk and peaceful—then he sees my face.

The change is immediate. His eyes sharpen, body jerking more awake, panic cutting through him before I can even wipe the tears away.

“Jules?” he asks, voice rough with sleep and fear as he pushes up on one elbow. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” I say quickly, which is useless because my voice sounds wet and my face is obviously not cooperating.

His panic gets worse, and he sits up too fast, sheet sliding down around his waist, hair wrecked, eyes flying over me. “Bullshit. Why are you crying?”

I sit up too, wiping at my face with the heel of my hand, embarrassed now because this was supposed to be a quiet private collapse and not an early-morning emergency. “I’m okay.”

“Julian.”

The way he says my name would’ve stopped me even if I wanted to lie better. It’s sharp and scared and so full of immediate care that my throat threatens to close again. He reaches for me before he seems to think about it, one hand cupping the side of my face, thumb catching a tear I failed to erase.

His own face is pale now, the sleep softness gone, replaced by the look he gets when someone he loves is hurt and he’s about three seconds from setting fire to the nearest object until the problem explains itself.

“I’m okay,” I say again, covering his hand with mine. “I swear. Nothing bad happened.”

His eyes search mine, still not fully believing me. “Then why are you crying?”