Profile

Caleb Aaron McDaniel was raised most of his life by a single dad, when his mother died when Caleb was only 3. He has no real memories of her, only a collection of photos that his dad saved for him along the way, and while his dad did genuinely love and care about his son, his grief meant that it was very difficult for him to parent, and he eventually withdrew almost entirely from Caleb. He was all but raised by his Granny, who looked after him, but it never helped him recover from feeling like he needed to do something to make his dad happy.

For years, it was playing sports. He was a linebacker on the high school football team, and made decent, if not excellent, grades in most of his classes. Still, his dad just didn't know how to connect to him, and Caleb ended up learning a lot of things on his own that he shouldn't have. He lost his virginity at 14 to the 20 year old woman who directed the choir at his grandmother's church, and began drinking and smoking even before that, mooching off his dad's liquor cabinet and cigarettes.

It was the intervention of his PE teacher at school, an amazing woman he still sees as a mother figure, that got Caleb to give up booze and focus harder on his school work, and it wasn't long before he met Jenna Greene, with whom he would fall head over heels in love very quickly. They were absolutely nothing alike, what with Jenna the daughter of a well-to-do family, and Caleb the bad boy with the rough background who couldn't quite kick his smoking habit. But they still fell very hard for each other, and what followed was a relationship that was far from easy, but for the longest time, seemed very much worth it to both of them.

Not only was his relationship something special to him, but it also brought him his best friend in the form of Brodie Bradford, who was the boyfriend of Jenna's best friend, Asher Rose. Brodie and Caleb developed a chalk-and-cheese relationship, which stuck with them through high school, even after both of them were left behind by their first loves, who both went to New York. Nothing was the same again, and after graduation, instead of following Asher and Jenna to New York, Brodie and Caleb made for the West Coast, where Caleb took up working as a bouncer, a job that he still continues with to this day in New York City, where he and Brodie moved when the news of Asher's apparent death rocked their entire world.