Shattered (The Protectors 11)

Caleb dropped his eyes and picked at his food.

“Ron?” I queried.

Color stained Caleb’s cheeks and I chuckled. “You did not go as Hermione Granger,” I said.

“Shut up, Martha-Stewart-lover.”

“Hermione?” I asked. “Really?”

“What? She was the smartest of the three of them!” Caleb declared. I smiled as he began spouting off all of Hermione’s many attributes.

I waited until he was finished to say, “Not buying it.”

Caleb frowned, then deflated. “Fine,” he bit out. “My brother used to go as Ron Weasley and his friend, Pete, went as Harry.”

I smiled and said, “Someone was crushing hard on Pete, huh?” I sent Caleb a wink and he immediately threw one of the leftover dinner rolls at me. “Shut up. I was eight!” He paused and then smiled. “Fine. Pete was the one who suggested it because he thought Hermione was awesome and we’d look cool as the trio. But I do think Hermione was the smartest,” he added with a waggle of his finger.

“My mother loved Martha Stewart. We used to watch her show all the time and we constantly tried out her recipes and crafty shit. My sister wasn’t into that stuff. But even though I sucked at most of it, I really liked spending time with my mom. She idolized Martha and modeled the lodge after Martha’s designs. After my parents died, I still found myself watching the show and reading the magazine. I have a subscription.”

Caleb stared at me for the longest time. “You couldn’t have just said you have a freakishly weird obsession with her?” he groused. “You had to go and say something sweet like that while I’m admitting to dressing up as a girl for five years straight because I was perving on my brother’s friend.”

I smiled and grabbed the roll he’d tossed at me. I started picking at it, but stopped when I replayed his words. “Wait, five years straight? Weren’t your brother and his friend older than you? Wouldn’t they have stopped trick-or-treating a couple of years before you?”

“Shut up,” was all Caleb said.

I laughed, but refrained from poking the bear by pointing out that Caleb had been free to dress as something besides Hermione Granger for a couple of years.

“Favorite hobby?” I said as I searched out the butter.

Caleb was silent for a long time. His gaze drifted to the small window on the opposite side of the small kitchen. “That’s a hard one,” he murmured.

“Why?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Because I’m not sure if you want the before answer or the after one.”

“I know it’s hard to see it right now, Caleb. But you’re still one person. What happened to you is only a piece of you, but there are so many other pieces. I think you just need time to put some of those pieces together.”

“Can I get back to you on the hobby thing?” he asked.

I didn’t like how quiet he’d gone. Something had changed between us after that first day on the boat. We’d found this comfortable rhythm with one another and had started engaging in conversations much like the one we’d just had. It’d been Caleb who’d decided to keep our mutual question thing going. I knew it was his way of sharing things about himself that were easy. As badly as I’d wanted to push him to talk to me about the Jennings encounter, I’d made too much progress with him to blow it by pressuring him. I still had two weeks before I had to get him back to Seattle for the pre-trial hearing. I needed to make use of every minute I had with him. I wanted him to tell me the truth about Jennings, but I wanted him to start to feel like himself even more.

I’d somehow managed to limit how much physical contact I was having with him, despite my growing attraction to him. It wasn’t easy, though, because my mind was no longer seeing him as that scared, vulnerable teenager and that seemed to have given my body permission to react accordingly. I was almost always half-hard around him and it didn’t take much to have my dick standing at full attention. What was worse, though, was there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. With the close quarters we were sharing, I couldn’t even jack off in the small bathroom. Add in the fact that we were sleeping in the same bed each night and Caleb usually ended up sprawled half on top of me come morning time, and I was barely keeping it together. He was still very much off-limits, since nothing had changed. Even if I could get past his age, I couldn’t overlook the fact that what he needed in a lover was something I couldn’t offer him.

“Sure,” I said.

“What about you?” Caleb asked. “What’s your favorite hobby?”

“You mean besides reading Martha Stewart’s Living cover to cover the moment it arrives in my mailbox?”