All Chapters of ALL YOURS, DADDY: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

Cade and LilyI woke up slowly.Not the jarring, disoriented kind of waking that happened in my dorm room when my alarm dragged me out of sleep at seven AM. This was different — gradual and soft, like surfacing from warm water. The kind of waking that happens when your body feels safe enough to take its time.For a moment I just lay there, blinking at the ceiling, cataloguing sensations before my brain fully caught up. The sheets were soft and smelled like him — clean, faintly woodsy, something underneath that was just *Cade.* The arm around my waist was heavy and warm. The light coming through the tall industrial windows was pale and grey, the particular quality of winter morning light that made everything look like a photograph.His apartment.Sunday.I had to leave today.The thought arrived like a stone dropping into still water, and I felt the ripples of it move through my chest before I could stop them. I made myself breathe through it. Made myself focus on right now instead of t

She'd been gone four hours when I finally admitted the apartment felt wrong.Not wrong like something was broken or missing. Wrong like a frequency shift — everything exactly where it had always been, and yet the whole space slightly off, the way a song sounds when it's been transposed into the wrong key. Same notes. Different feeling entirely.I stood in my kitchen and drank the last of the coffee she hadn't finished and told myself this was fine. Normal. She was a college girl going back to college. I was a twenty-seven year old man with a job and a life and a best friend who trusted me completely.Everything was fine.The mug she'd used was still in the sink. I washed it and put it away and didn't think about the way she'd looked drinking from it, swallowed in my henley, her legs pulled up underneath her on the couch.I didn't think about it at all.---The week passed the way bad weeks do — slowly and with too much space for thinking.Work helped. I was on a big commercial renovat

I didn't say anything for a moment.Neither did he."Hi," he said finally.I grabbed the front of his jacket and pulled him inside.He stumbled slightly through the doorway, laughing, and I got my arms around him and pressed my face into his neck and just — stopped. Just held on.He held back immediately, arms coming around me, one hand in my hair, his bag dropping to the floor. He was solid and warm and smelled exactly like I remembered — that clean woodsy smell underneath his jacket, cold air still clinging to him from outside — and I felt something in my chest that had been held at tension for three weeks finally, quietly release."Hey," he said softly, against my hair. "Hey. I've got you.""You're here," I said, which was not the most articulate thing I'd ever said."I'm here.""You didn't tell me.""I wanted to surprise you."I pulled back and looked at his face — the dark eyes, the slight smile, the satisfaction of someone who had calculated a risk and watched it pay off. "You'r

LilyComing home felt different now.Not the house itself — that was exactly the same. The smell of it hit me the moment I walked through the door, that specific combination of my mom's candles and old wood and something that had no name but was just *home*, and for a second I stood in the hallway with my bag and felt nineteen again. Uncomplicated. Before everything.Then Tyler appeared from the kitchen and hugged me and said *you look good, what's going on with you* and I understood that the uncomplicated feeling wasn't going to last very long."Nothing's going on," I said, extracting myself from the hug. "I'm just not exhausted for once. End of semester stress is over."He looked at me with the particular attention of someone who had known me my entire life. Tyler was twenty-four and occasionally annoying and one of my favorite people in the world, which made the lying significantly worse than it might otherwise have been."You seem different," he said."Good different or bad differ

I noticed it on a Tuesday.The texts got shorter. Not dramatically — not in a way I could point to and say there, that's where it changed. Just incrementally. Responses that had been paragraphs became sentences. The calls that had been happening every few nights stopped being initiated by him. When I called, he picked up, and he was warm and present and said the right things, but underneath it was something careful. Something managed.I knew that quality of careful. I'd felt it from other people before. It was the specific texture of someone deciding how much of themselves to give.I told myself I was imagining it.I told myself this on Wednesday and Thursday and by Friday I had constructed an elaborate internal argument for why everything was completely fine that was so detailed and thorough it could only mean one thing.It was not fine.---The spiral happened the way spirals do — privately, persistently, in the margins of everything else. I sat in lectures and took notes and the pe