A/N: Thank you all for giving me your time by reading and reviewing. I truly appreciate the feedback! Your words give me the warm fuzzies.
I've never written Emily before, so I hope I captured her spirit here.
Both jenron and solveariddle hit on part of where we're heading: the one-night-stand issue, with Cal as the master of it. I fully agree that Cal would never cheat on Gill once they were together. Honestly, I don't think Gill would think he'd cheat on her, either. What she did think, though, was that Cal wasn't looking to "be together" with her in any sort of permanent sense but rather just in the way he and all the short-timers that sailed on and off the show were "together."
That is all.
Oh, wait! F-bomb warning!
Now, that is really all.
"I want you doesn't mean much without I love you, Cal. And both are pretty meaningless without I choose you."
It all appeared to have gone horribly wrong.
That was the only thought circling in an endless loop through Cal's buzzing mind as he drove away from the office. Horribly, horribly wrong. To say he felt confused would be a gross understatement of his current status. No, confused didn't even begin to touch the surface of what he felt. He was feeling a lot of things – an awful lot of things – some of which he had no names for but many that he could readily identify. Never in his life had he felt so very many things at once; feelings and the processing thereof (and, apparently, the demonstrating thereof) were not his forte. He was finding it all rather overwhelming, to be quite honest; and he really thought his brain might literally crawl right out of his skull and fling itself out the window of his moving car in a suicidal fit of pique.
He took a deep breath and began to take stock of the thousand threads of feeling as he tried to single them out from the tangled knot they had formed in his gut.
Rejection. Well, that one was easy enough to identify. Gillian had flat-out rejected him, which was a thing he had always feared. It was one of the primary reasons he hadn't acted on his feelings earlier. Now, wait. She hadn't flat-out rejected him, had she? No, she had seemed quite…receptive, at first. Receptive and deliciously responsive. Which only made her abrupt shift all the more—
Baffling. He was absolutely baffled by the whole thing. One moment, there he was in the middle of the most enjoyable thing he'd ever experienced. The next moment, it was, well…quite the opposite of enjoyable. The entire situation had gone pear-shaped so suddenly, and that left him feeling very—
Disappointed. He really had thought they were finally getting somewhere, that they were getting beyond The Line and beyond all their hang-ups and personal baggage. He'd thought they were on the brink of something wild and alive and meaningful. And he had been very excited about that progress. Very excited. Painfully so, really. Which made her rejection so incredibly—
Frustrating. Cor, but he was frustrated! That, also, painfully. And that thought caused him to squirm in the driver's seat in a vain effort to relieve some of the ache and pressure emanating from his terribly frustrated nether-region. He winced, absolutely certain that he had never, never experienced this level of…frustration…in his entire life, and he loudly and rather colourfully cursed the genetics that had provided him with balls in the first place. Maybe he'd get lucky and they'd follow his self-loathing brain in its suicidal plunge out the window. And good riddance to it all, because his head really fucking hurt.
Both of them.
Which led him to realize he was also feeling something rather acute, and that something's name was—
Pain. Not just physical pain and mental pain, which was all bad enough, thank you so very bloody much. Cal was experiencing emotional pain the likes of which he wouldn't wish on the lowest scum of the earth. Which, coincidentally, he just happened to also be feeling like at the moment…though he didn't understand exactly why except that he knew he had – somehow – caused Gillian a great deal of pain when what he really intended was to bring great happiness and even greater pleasure.
Pleasure was definitely not something he was feeling. And that little fact was a sodding shame, because he had no doubt whatsoever that being with Gillian would send him rocketing into new realms of pleasure beyond all mortal ken. It was a thought he had considered often and vigorously and vividly.
He winced again, knowing it would behoove him to avoid all association with the notions of "Gillian" and "pleasure" until he could get home to his sofa and a soothing bag of frozen peas. Frozen peas sounded brilliant at that moment. Frozen peas and a tumbler of good scotch.
The whole situation was just so distressing and depressing. Under such circumstances, he would normally go to some unnamed establishment in the seedier parts of town and drink himself stupid. And that unwise activity was always – always – followed by a call to the cell phone of his very best friend. Whom he could not now call, having bollocksed things up with her to an unfathomably Olympic level. And he still wasn't even certain how.
So between his gonads trying to kill him and his best friend wanting to, he decided to forego the bar this round and go straight home to the peas.
Cal hobbled awkwardly toward the sofa, a bottle of scotch and a glass juggled in one hand and the precious bag of peas in the other. Dropping the bag onto the cushion, he set the glass on the table, unstoppered the bottle, and gave himself a generous pour. Gingerly, he eased himself down onto the cushion and adjusted the blissfully cold bag underneath him. He grabbed the glass from the table and gulped a sizeable swig. The radiating warmth of the scotch as it burned its way down his throat provided a pleasant counterpoint to his rapidly freezing crotch. Sighing, he fell back and allowed his eyes to sink closed. He was positively knackered. He really hoped to get well shit-faced and then escape this day in sleep. He lifted the glass to his lips and took another long pull. His brow furrowed as he tried to decide if the sound he heard was just the pounding of his head or if it was footsteps.
"Ummm, Dad? Why are you sitting on food?"
He cracked on eye reluctantly open and mumbled, "You don't wanna know, Em. Trust me on that."
"Fine," Emily replied, "but I hope you plan to throw it away when you're done, because I am not eating that." When he didn't so much as crack a smile, Emily studied him in puzzlement and concern.
"Stop reading me, Emily," Cal groused.
"Well, I wouldn't need to if you were more forthcoming about what's going on with you," came her glib reply. She plopped down heavily beside him, jostling him and eliciting a miserable groan. "Come on, Dad; spill. What sort of trouble have you gotten yourself into this time?"
"I resent the implication," Cal said.
"Stop deflecting. Start talking," she demanded lightly.
"Well, luv, as I didn't know what I was waiting for, I decided to stop waiting and let Gillian know how I felt about her. Suffice to say it could've gone better."
"Oh, geez, Dad. What did you say to her?!"
"Nothing!" he answered. "Well, nothing that should've caused it to go so badly. I mean, I just…I just told her how I felt, y'know? And I kissed her, and – that bit went really, bloody well if I do say so. I mean, really well, at first—"
"Ew, Dad. Seriously? Do you want me to throw up on you? Gloss over the sordid details, please, and just tell me the important parts like what you did wrong. So…you said you love her, and then you kissed her. And then?"
"Well, I may have kissed her first, before I said anything…"
"May have?"
"Ok, did. Did kiss her first. But, y'know, she seemed ok with it. I mean, really quite ok—"
"DAD!"
"Sorry, luv. No, but then next thing I know, right, she's shoving me across the elevator and—"
Emily wrinkled her face in dismay. "Wait, you accosted her in the elevator? Classy, Dad."
"—and," Cal continued, ignoring the dig, "then I told her how I felt, and she started crying and pushing me away again; and then she sent me packing."
Emily's eyes had gone wide. "You made Gillian cry? Why would you do that?"
"Well, it wasn't deliberate, was it?!" Cal shouted defensively. He immediately regretted raising his voice to his daughter, partly because she didn't deserve it but mostly because it caused his skull to fill with daggers of pain in a way that made even his teeth hurt. "Bloody hell," he exclaimed, pressing the heel of one palm against one closed eye and lifting the glass to his lips with the other hand. He drained the last of the amber liquid from the tumbler and let his arm fall to the cushion.
"So…I don't get it," Emily began.
"Nor do I, luv," Cal croaked.
"It just doesn't sound like Gillian. I mean, why would she react that way to you saying you love her? You must've left something out when you told me what happened," she concluded, shaking her head. "Let's go over this again. You kissed her," Emily said, ticking off one finger.
"Yes."
"And then she shoved you away." She ticked off another finger.
"Yes."
"And then you said you love her," she said as she ticked a third.
"Yes. Well. No. Not in those precise words, exactly, no. But, yeah, in essence, right, yeah. Yeah."
"Maybe you should tell me your precise, exact words," said Emily, gripping Cal's chin like that of a scolded child.
Cal slowly opened his eyes and looked at his daughter, with her lips drawn into a disapproving line and her eyebrows raised in expectation. Cal sighed and shifted to face her, only belatedly realizing what a mistake that was. He grimaced and readjusted his legumes while Emily looked away and pretended not to see anything.
"First off," he began with a strained voice. "First off, it is bloody awkward to be having this sort of conversation with my child."
"I'm not a child anymore, Dad," Emily said, rolling her eyes.
"Don't remind me. And thanks for that, by the way," he sulked. "Wonderful way to kick a man when he's down. Must get that from your mum."
"Stalling!" To Emily, Cal was often transparent as glass.
"Fine. Well, what I told her precisely was… I think my exact words were that I wanted her." He hesitated a second before adding, "and that I knew she wanted me, too. And, y'know…that we should…y'know…that we belonged together. Owed it to ourselves to, well…" His voice trailed off as Emily just stared at him. She blinked a few times then tilted her head (she looked so like him when she did that) and spoke.
"That was potentially the biggest bonehead move in the history of all boneheadery, Dad. Geez! What is wrong with you? You're the proverbial bull in a china shop! This is Gillian we're talking about. You- You- jump her in an elevator, essentially tell her you just wanna do her right there—"
"Oi! Watch your mouth, girl!"
"It's the truth, Dad. A hard truth is better for you than a soft lie; isn't that what you say? You really blew it. You basically treated her like one of your one-night stands."
"EM-I-LY!" he exclaimed forcefully, eyes wide. "Who taught you to talk like that?"
"I get it from you," she retorted. "Dad, seriously. What's wrong with, 'I love you, Gillian'? She isn't like them, you know," she finished gently, reaching out to stroke his hair back from his forehead in a comforting gesture.
Cal rolled his eyes back toward his daughter, looking morose and rather pitiful. "I know she isn't, darlin'. I know that. There is no one like her. I hadn't meant to imply- I really am shit at this stuff! Look, this is why I tend to avoid situation like this, that involve—"
"Talking to other humans?" Emily quipped with a cheeky smirk. So like her father, that girl.
Cal huffed a soft laugh through his nose and reached over to take his girl's tiny hand in his. "Yeah, somethin' like that," he said quietly. "How'd you get so wise when it comes to relationships, eh? Can't have been from watching your parents. Well, maybe what not to do." He paused, and Emily took the opportunity to move closer and hug him, snuggling her head against his chest.
"All kidding aside, I've learned a lot from you, Dad. I've always thought you and I have a great relationship. I mean, sure we have our ups and downs, but…way more 'ups' than 'downs', don't you think?"
Cal squeezed her tight, and pressed a tender kiss to the top of her dark curls. "Way more, yeah. Love ya, Em."
"I love you, too, Dad," she said, returning the squeeze. "See? You are capable of saying those words without bollocksing it up." Even though he couldn't see her face, Cal could hear the smile in his daughter's voice. But he could also hear the sincerity, and he loved her for it all the more. Emily always believed in him no matter how much he screwed up. Warts and all, she loved him. As though sensing his thoughts, Emily added, "She loves you, too, Dad. Trust me on that. And you definitely have some damage control to do, but I really believe that you and Gillian are meant for each other, So it'll all work out. You just need to re-think your approach. I know you like everything done your way, but you're going to have to do this on her terms. Ya know?"
They fell silent and eventually drifted off to sleep, Cal holding his not-so-little girl in his arms. At any given time, it was the best place for him to be in the whole of the world.