“I know, sweetheart. You’re okay. We’ll get through this,” I said softly in her ear.
Maybe it was fatigue or my soothing, but she was able to nestle closer to me and fall back to sleep. Just before drifting off, she quietly mumbled. “We’ll get through this.” It became a mantra as she fell asleep in my embrace.
I couldn’t say the next few days weren’t excruciatingly hard. I canceled all my meetings, citing a family emergency, and stayed by Caitlyn’s side while she waded through the horrors of life. She handled it like a trouper. Only I knew the plague that taunted her in her sleep. We made love every night and every morning, and I made sure she knew I was her sanctuary. We came to understand each other’s bodies and explored our wants and desires, and yet the cloud of death hung around us. It wasn’t just her grandmother’s passing that haunted our subconscious minds.
I didn’t tell Caitlyn, but Wenton’s doctor had actually given me a ballpark time frame, defining his end. Six months…at the most. Every time Caitlyn cried out in grief I dreaded the moment I would do the same.
In any crisis I’d lived through in the past, I used sex to escape. I fucked hard, fast, and furious to erase any feeling that might derail my ability to remain numb and unaffected. With Caitlyn, I was learning to use my body for love and my mind for sifting through feelings I never had the courage to face.
Tammy and Jamal, and Ricky and his husband had become frequent nightly visitors. A whole new level of anxiety to face — friends. I only had a few for a reason. Caitlyn had many, and the stories the crew told very clearly painted her active social life. We were both making concessions for each other. She had to give me a wide berth to get used to things, and I had to be open to the idea of getting used to them. I couldn’t afford many friends. While I had populations of peripheral people who thought they knew me, I only had a small number of friends. People always wanted too much from me. She understood that and never pressed me to introduce her to my friends or go out socially.
After a week, I had to return to New York. I had enormous amounts of work to do, and Caitlyn was ready to soldier up and let me go on about my life. We had, in the grand scheme of things, only known each other for a month, a ridiculously short amount of time. I had to try and see things her way. She had a life before me and would most likely have a life after me. While she had once thought I considered all women disposable, she didn’t know, and I may not have impressed it upon her well enough to understand, that she had changed my DNA. My whole existence had shifted, because of her. So no, I wasn’t going to New York and forget her. In fact, it would be just as hard for me to leave her as it would be for her to let me go.
Luckily for us, the day I was set to return to New York, she received word that she’d been accepted into Parsons: Fashion, Art, and Design School. In New York! When I learned of her news, I probably was happier than she was. I was actually explosively happy. I may have even frightened her.
“I can help you sell the house, and we can get you a wonderful apartment in Manhattan. I have a great realtor. I’ll pay for everything so don’t worry about the cost. Or, I’d love to have you live with me…” Shit, I needed to backpedal. “Unless that’s too early. Is that weird?” I was electrified with excitement.
And then the Prince Slayer shut me down.
“I’m not ready to sell Gran’s house. Her spirit is here and all of my memories, so I’ll probably move into the dorm during the week and commute back here on the weekends.” The little minx smiled a big broad smile because she knew that refusing me really monumentally pissed me off.
“No! I won’t have you living in a dorm.”
She frowned. “It’s college, I have to experience dorm life. You know… meet people, drink cheap wine, barf in the halls.” She sure was ballsy playing that game with me.
The very idea of her barfing in the halls with anyone made me want to rip their throats out. She was perfection, and I wouldn’t allow her to waltz into a place where men, and probably women, would have a chance to woo her. She would inevitably find some free-spirited I-don’t-give-a-fuck-about-money-so-let’s-go-paint-ourselves-green person who would whisk her away from me.
Wow. Hello unreasonable jealousy. Okay, I had to be cool. I had to let her go and reel her in, I told myself. Agree, KP, just agree.
“Okay.” It fell like a ton of bricks at her feet. That one single word was said with such bitterness, how could she not hear the anger in it?
She gave me the side eye. I deserved it.
“I can always visit you.”
She was torture.
“Are you serious, you’ll visit? Caitlyn, you need to get your realness on because I’m about to…” I cleared my throat. “I’ve been trying really hard to…” Oh, choke it out, man.
She reached across the table and touched my hand. “I’d love to spend the weekends with you when you’re free, but if you’re with a bunch of women, then… you have to understand, I just can’t. We’ve been living a dream these last few days, and I thank you so much. Thank you for letting me love you and be loved by you. It was… um, is so amazing. But I can’t watch you be with other people. It’ll crush me. It’s best I just stay away, it’s going to be too hard for me.”
Well, I asked for honesty… damn.
We were sitting at her kitchen table. My bags were packed, and I’d called Robert to come pick me up, so I knew I only had a couple of hours left with Caitlyn. How could she think that I would rush back to Manhattan and start screwing everyone on the planet?
“Remember, I’m practicing celibacy,” I calmly measured my words.
She nearly spit out her coffee. After she finished coughing, she raised a brow. “How well has that been working out for you?”
We’d just made love a half hour ago, and I was almost ready to go again, but it would have been a frustration fuck, and neither of us needed that. I felt angry and agitated, probably because I was shit at dealing with my emotions. The old me would have just fucked right through them, but now, trying to be present and three-dimensional was killing me.
“Okay. Bear with me, this is hard. Not because it’s you but because it’s hard for me,” I prefaced.
“Okay.” I could tell she was worried, maybe even scared. Her eyes were like saucers.
I pressed the heel of my hand into my eye. “I’m struggling with the idea of you going off to art school. I know it’s good for you, amazing actually. Since it’s what you want, I should want that too, if I was being a good friend. But I’m a recovering control freak, and I’ve always gotten what I wanted. I’m spoiled, and I’m trying to not be like that right now.”