Page 101 of Fearlessly Us

“No. Let me out. Please.”

It’s a plea spoken in an almost childlike tone, and dread curls in my stomach at the terror that laces the words. Sweat beads on Drew’s forehead, his breath coming in fast pants, and every muscle in his body is coiled tight, as if he’s bracing himself against whatever’s come for him in dreams.

Sitting up in bed, I lay a hand on his face and one on his chest, feeling the thunder of his heart under my palm. My thoughts run on a singular track.

Wake him up.

Keep him safe.

“Drew.” I keep my voice low, my thumb stroking over his cheek. His breath stutters out, his body going rigid and his eyes darting back and forth beneath his closed lids. “Wake up, Drew. I need you to wake up now.” It’s awful to watch him fight his way out of the nightmare. To exist in the spot between awake and asleep, his body reacting to my voice, but his eyes still screwed tightly shut, a single tear leaking out of the corner that cracks my heart in two.

“You’re safe, Drew,” I say, swinging a leg over his torso to straddle him, both my palms on his cheeks, holding his face firmly in my grasp. “I love you, Pretty Boy, and you’re safe here. Come back to me now.”

Drew sucks in a harsh breath, his eyes flying open and meeting mine, my chest aching as I look into those shattered depths.

“Catie.”

The single word comes out in a rasp, sad and broken and filled with a kind of devastating disbelief as if he can’t believe I’m real after whatever he saw in his dreams. I don’t know what it is that haunted him in the dark, and I can’t tell him it’s okay because I’m not at all sure it is, so I say the only thing I can tell him with absolute certainty. The thing that’s true now and will be true a hundred years from now, as long as my heart beats and there’s air in my lungs.

“I’m here.”

Drew gasps a little like he’s trying to hold himself together, and I feel his body shake with the force of the restraint it’s taking him to hold inside whatever it is that wants to surface. A sheen of tears covers his eyes, and his hands curl tightly in the sheets at his sides. “I want…I don’t…I can’t…” His eyes dart around the room, and he shakes his head like he’s trying to banish whatever thoughts and images have taken up residence in his brain.

Leaning down so we’re almost chest to chest, I kiss his forehead. His cheeks. Run my fingers through his damp hair. “Safe, remember?” I murmur. “Let it out, baby. You’re safe with me too.”

The second the words are out of my mouth, it’s Drew’s turn to break. The sob that tears from his chest reverberates around the room and arrows directly into my own. He sits straight up, face buried in my neck and arms banded around my torso like I’m his anchor in the storm, and what an immense privilege it is to be the one to hold him while he lets go. His back heaves and his shoulders shake and his cries are heartbreak and loss and a deep grief long buried in a place words can’t touch. His tears soak the old Renegades T-shirt he slipped onto me before bed, and I wrap my arms around his shoulders and hold on tight, rocking him lightly and bearing witness to his pain.

We stay like that for a long time, bodies fitted together and my knees pressing into the bed on either side of his hips. Drew’s tears falling and his body trembling against mine. Keeping one arm around him, I stroke his hair with the other hand, leaning my head against his and whispering words. Words like I’ve got you and You’re not alone and Let it out, Pretty Boy; there’s nothing to be afraid of here. Like I love you. I love you I love you I love you and you’re mine and I’m yours and your pain is my pain because we belong to each other now.

“I was locked in my room. He locked me in my room. My dad.” The whispered words are quiet, raw and gritty, like he’s forcing them through the memories locked deep in his chest. Drew presses himself more firmly against me, his arms tightening and his head tucked under my chin like he’s taking from me all the comfort he can find.

“In the dream,” he manages, voice breaking a little. “And also not. It happened for real. When he’d been drinking and I bounced a ball too loud or a Lego tower I was building crashed or I made too much noise in the kitchen or sometimes for no reason at all. He put me in my room and locked the door and wouldn’t let me out, sometimes for hours. Sometimes a whole day. The bulb in the overhead light had been burned out for years and sometimes he took the lamp too so at night it was dark. It was so, so dark.”

I don’t…like the dark.

My chest constricts as I remember those words, spoken so long ago. Glancing over to the far wall, I see the night-light plugged in there. Not an adorable quirk of a professional athlete, but the antidote to a long-standing fear that goes right to the core of him. Letting go of him briefly, I reach over to the nightstand and flick on the lamp there, feeling his entire body relax as the soft glow fills the room with additional light.

“He…hit me too. A lot. It was like something broke in him when my mom died, and he wanted to break me too. To make me hurt the way he was hurting. He hit me until I got big enough, strong enough to hit him back. He called me lazy and stupid and all kinds of names and told me a million times I should quit football because I’d never be good enough to make it for real. But I never quit. I never, ever quit because it was my life and my salvation and because making it meant he was wrong. It meant he didn’t know me. Didn’t know what I was capable of. That I wasn’t the way he saw me. That the words he hurled at me weren’t really mine. Football gave me freedom and it gave me family, and because of football I could leave and didn’t ever have to look back.”

But you did, I think, as all the pieces of this beautiful man slot cleanly into place. Every time he takes the field he looks back. Every time he pushes himself in practice and plays through pain and works out until he’s too exhausted for words. Every time he refuses to let himself think of what comes next even though his heart isn’t in the game anymore. Since he was a kid, football has been a way to prove himself. A big fuck you to the man who broke him down. A way to be the opposite of everything his father told him he was. Some of his hesitation to leave the game might be his friendship with Cam, but mostly it’s because he’s worried that if he leaves, he’s all the things his dad told him he was.

“It’s why I don’t talk to him,” Drew says, lifting his head so his tired eyes meet mine. “It’s why getting texts from him always messes me up. I don’t know why I don’t just block him so I never have to hear from him again, but I just…I can’t.”

“Because part of you wishes he wasn’t the way he was,” I say quietly, brushing his hair off his forehead and letting my hand linger on his cheek. “Because you wish things could have been different when you were younger. Part of you wonders if maybe you started talking to him again, things could be different now.”

Drew sighs, head tipping forward until his forehead meets mine. “It’s stupid,” he mumbles. “So fucking stupid. People like him don’t change. They can’t. I’m almost thirty-five years old. I should be able to shove my dad into the past where he belongs. To leave him there and move forward. To block his number and stop making my entire life about someone who never cared to make his life about me, even when he should have.” He shakes his head, and when he speaks again, his voice is gravely, exhausted, weighed down by years of trauma and grief unleashed. “But I don’t. I can’t. I read his texts and I wonder, and I keep showing up to play football season after season even though in my heart I know I’m done. And I dream about the dark. It’s why I don’t sleep. Ever. Because every time I close my eyes, I’m afraid I’ll end up back there. In that house. In that room. I went back there so many times in my dreams, until I started sleeping with you.” Drew presses a kiss to my lips, like he needs to remind himself that I’m still here. Still his. “The darkness doesn’t seem to find me when I’m with you.”

“Then I’ll always stay with you, and we’ll chase away the dark together,” I tell him, keeping our faces close, my lips grazing his as I speak. “I’ll always help you find the light. We can be fearless together. Fearlessly us.” My words are quietly fierce, and through them, my anger burns hot and fast for the boy who lost his mom and then lived in fear of the dad who should have loved him enough for both of them. For the man who lives every day haunted by the memories of a childhood that ended far too soon. And when I wrap my arms tighter around Drew, I’m holding onto them both. “Thank you for telling me,” I whisper into his ear as his arms come back around me too. “Thank you for sharing this with me.”

My analytical brain is whirring as I hold him close. Plans coming together and metaphorical spreadsheets and to-do lists writing themselves. An entire folder labeled Plans for Retirement and Dickhead Dad slotting itself into the file cabinet in my mind. I can’t help myself. I am who I am and all that. Except maybe with him, I’m someone just a little different because for the first time in as long as I can remember, I slam that file drawer shut to save for another day because now isn’t for fixing. Now is for revealing, for laying bare, for opening hearts and quieting souls and loving each other truly and honestly and in the best way we can. In this life. In this bed. Together.

It doesn’t feel real, I think, as I hold onto him, soak in the solid warmth of him against me. That two people can be almost strangers one day and eight months later be each other’s everything. It seems impossible. Improbable. And yet, here we are. Two people who by themselves are unfinished, a little bit broken, cracking themselves open to find their missing pieces with each other.

“Need you,” Drew mutters, his lips traveling a path over my shoulder, up my neck, as his hands move gently. Up and down my back, over my hips, down to my ass and back again. It soothes and heats in equal measure, and that seems improbable too, but somehow makes perfect sense. Everything about us makes the most perfect sense, and there’s a wild sort of joy in that.

Reaching down, I tug my T-shirt up and off, tossing it away and pressing against him so we’re skin to skin. “Have me,” I whisper, rocking my hips forward over his growing erection, feeling his body tighten against mine as he lets out a broken moan. “Have all of me. All of me is yours.”

“Mine,” he murmurs, his hands clamping down on my hips and helping me move, coating him in my own arousal as sparks of pleasure dance under my skin. “All fucking mine.”