Bad Things

25. Safe Sanctuary

Just close your eyes
The sun is going down
You'll be alright
No one can hurt you now
Come morning light
You and I'll be safe and sound 

- Taylor Swift ft. The Civil Wars

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Vulnerability is the ultimate weakness, and weakness is the surest way to guarantee destruction. Real men do not allow vulnerability or weakness to taint them. We allow only strength, only confidence. Everything else is to be buried beneath and denied.

Shawn could hear his father's voice replaying that philosophy over and over inside his mind, as if his father were sitting right there in the booth. Shawn had made it a point as of late to effectively ignore each and every shitty piece of "logic" Roy Mendes had ever given him on the ways to be a man. But this one piece, this one lesson, would not let him go. And Shawn really wasn't sure he wanted it to. Especially considering he was sitting across from the one person in the entire world that he did not want to let see that side of him.

He needed to remain stoic, strong, calm. He didn't want to show any sign of what really lay beneath the exterior: a scared, sad, lonely little boy who would always crave, yet didn't want to want, the love of the man before him. So he straightened his back and tightened his jaw, holding—with every ounce of strength he had in him—all those broken pieces of himself inside.

Benedict Rayes rifled through his briefcase, pulling out several folders and a large hardback journal of sorts. Shawn fought with his own body to keep his face and movements neutral, but despite all his efforts to appear unaffected, his damn leg would not stop bobbing beneath the table.

"Okay," Benedict paused before his open briefcase for a moment, then closed it carefully, snapping the latch and pushing it aside, "this should be everything." His fingers tapped the top of the pile.

Shawn's gaze locked on the long digits, and he swallowed thickly at the familiarity of them, quickly dragging his own beneath the table. He spread his damp palms across his thighs and wiped them against his denim-clad legs. His grip tightened on his moving knee, willing it to stop.

No vulnerability. No weakness. Stop noticing your own features in him. Stop noticing him at all.

But his leg would not stop its incessant shaking.

Damn it, Shawn just wanted to go. No matter how cowardly it was, he wanted to take Camila and run away, leaving behind the smell of grease and cinnamon apples, and this whole damn situation. And he especially wanted to not be near his biological father. Just looking at him, being in the same room, breathing the same air as him, made Shawn remember all the things he'd wondered about since he was young enough to realize his real father was not there.

So many questions, so many hurts and doubts and feelings all coiled up inside of him and ready to burst.

Shawn couldn't take them all rolling around in his head. The questions he had he knew did not come attached to simple answers. How could they? He knew from his own experience that choosing whether or not to be a father to a child was possibly the hardest decision a teenage guy like himself could make. He couldn't imagine it being any different for anyone else—Benedict Rayes included. But maybe it was. Maybe Benedict didn't feel that sense of responsibility, that guilt that gnawed away at his soul every time he thought about his child and the woman he'd left to deal with all that shit alone. Maybe other guys really were huge assholes like they were depicted on television.