Page 71 of Beautiful Ruins
If I talked about internships, he’d laugh and call them “corporate traps.”
If I saved money, he’d find a reason we needed it now.
I thought that was love.
I thought love meant carrying someone when they couldn’t carry themselves.
What I didn’t understand was that he wasn’t trying to stand.
He was comfortable being held.
And I don’t know why it took me so long to see it.
Maybe because admitting it meant admitting I had chosen wrong.Or maybe because I was scared that without someone to save, I’d have to focus on saving myself.
He’d let me build a future in my head while he was building something else entirely behind my back.Something dirty.Something intoxicating.Something that could have dragged me down with him without me even realising it.
And that’s when it hit me.
He hadn’t just been dependent.
He’d been anchoring me to the bottom.
All those times I felt exhausted wasn’t because art school was too hard.It was because I was carrying a grown man who didn’t want to grow.
And those times I doubted myself?It wasn’t because I wasn’t capable.It was because he benefited from me staying small.
In hindsight, the stars had always been there.I just couldn’t see them through the smoke.
And then I met Raze Cavalho, quite by accident.I didn’t know what to do with a man like him.
He wasn’t a boy pretending to be a man.He walked into a room and the room adjusted.
That was the first thing I noticed.
The air changed around him.People rearranged themselves without realising the change.Voices lowered.Space opened.
He was what you’d call a man’s man.Not because he was loud or crude or trying to dominate the world with noise.But because he carried something steady inside him.Something unbearable.
He was strong in a way that wasn’t just muscle—though God help me, there was plenty of that.
His forearms.I noticed them before I noticed anything else.Thick and corded with muscle, veins running just beneath the skin like dark rivers.When he rolled his sleeves up, the fabric stretching over his biceps, it was almost unfair.Those forearms looked like they’d been carved out of something solid.The kind of arms that could lift you without effort.Forearms that could pin you to a wall and make you thank him for it.
And his hands.Big.Calloused.Capable.
When he wrapped one around my wrist for the first time—just enough to feel the weight of him—I forgot how to breathe.
The boys I’d dated before had been all sharp edges and insecurity.They’d needed reassurance.Needed ego stroking.Needed to feel bigger than me to feel whole.
Raze didn’t need anything.He knew exactly who he was.
And in bed—wow.
The difference between a boy and a man was never clearer.
He moved with intention.Knew how to take his time.Knew how to watch my face and adjust without me saying a word.He wasn’t clumsy or rushed or selfish.He was deliberate.Like everything he did had weight behind it.
With the others, sex had been something we did.
