Hate Me Like You Love Me (Serena and Caleb) novel Chapter 89

Caleb’s POV

Serena sits cross-legged on my bed with her back against the headboard, still in the clothes she wore to campus today, and I pace the length of my room because sitting still means letting the attorney's question catch up with me.

‘Are you willing to testify about what your father did to you as a child?’ The words have been circling my skull for hours, wearing a groove so deep I can feel it in my teeth.

"Tell me what you're afraid of," Serena says quietly. "Not the legal version. The real one."

I stop at the window. My reflection stares back at me in the glass—jaw tight, shoulders locked with tension I can't shake loose.

"I've never said it out loud. Not in front of strangers, not on a record." My voice comes out rougher than I intend. "The scar, the nights he came home wrecked and looking for a target, the way he used to stand in my doorway and just watch me like he was deciding whether I was worth the effort of hitting—all of that has only ever existed between me and my mother. Saying it in a courtroom makes it public in a way I can't take back."

"It was already real, Caleb."

"I know that." I press my forehead against the cool glass.

"But real and public are two different kinds of weight. Right now, the abuse is mine. It belongs to me. The second I testify, it belongs to everyone—the judge, the attorneys, the court reporter typing every word into a transcript anyone can read."

I touch the scar near my ear without thinking, the ridge of raised skin that has lived on my body longer than most of my memories.

"They'll want dates. Timelines. They'll ask my mother to confirm it, and she'll have to sit in that room and listen to her son describe things she spent years trying to protect him from."

Serena pulls her knees to her chest. "Can I tell you what the Title IX interview felt like?"

I turn from the window. "Yeah."

"Walking in was the most terrifying thing I've ever done voluntarily. My hands were shaking so hard I sat on them so the interviewer wouldn't notice. Every instinct told me to minimize, to soften the edges, to make it palatable."

She pauses, her fingers tracing a loose thread on my comforter. "But once I started talking, once I heard my own voice laying out the truth without apology, it felt like setting down a weight I'd been dragging uphill for months. The fear didn't vanish. But there was this clarity underneath it, like I could finally see the shape of what happened because I'd given it real words in front of a real person."

"Terrifying and liberating at the same time," I say.

"Both things in the same breath." She meets my eyes. "I'm not going to tell you it won't hurt, because it will. And I'm not going to pretend that saying the worst things about your father to a room full of strangers won't change you."

I cross the room and sit on the edge of the bed. "So what are you telling me?"

"That I can't make this choice for you. This is your story. Your pain. Your father. Nobody gets to decide what you do with that except you."

"And if I decide I can't do it?"

"Then I'll be right here, same as I am now." She rests her hand on my knee, her thumb drawing a slow line across the denim. "And if you decide you can, I'll be right there too. Front row. Not flinching."

The tightness in my chest loosens just enough to let me breathe. I cover her hand with mine, feeling her warmth seep through the fabric.

"I think that's what they're praying it is." I face her fully. "Because the alternative—that this is real, that it lasts, that their kids are in love and there's no version of their family that doesn't include that fact—requires a position. Accepting us and dealing with the world, or rejecting us and losing one or both of us. There's no comfortable middle ground, so they've built one out of silence."

Serena studies me with the expression she wears when I've said the thing she was thinking but hadn't found the language for. "We can't stay in the in-between forever, Caleb. Eventually the limbo becomes its own kind of answer."

"I know."

"So what do we do?"

"We keep showing up. We keep being honest. And when they're ready, we don't hide from it."

I reach for her, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "But tonight, I need to figure out whether I can sit in front of a judge and tell the truth about my father without destroying my mother in the process."

Serena catches my wrist before I pull away. She presses her lips to the inside of it, right over the pulse, and holds them there long enough for me to feel my own heartbeat against her mouth.

"You won't destroy her," she whispers against my skin. "She's stronger than you think. And so are you."

The knock comes sharp and sudden—three firm raps that make both of us go still.

Then William's voice, measured and deliberate, carrying the weight of a decision already made.

"Caleb. Serena." A pause. "It's time we had that conversation."