“He was leavin’ when we got there,” I reminded her. “You would’ve been okay.”
“Maybe.” She was silent for a while. “I probably would’ve been trapped in that closet until my parents got there tomorrow. I wouldn’t have taken the chance to get out.”
“Yeah, you would’ve.”
“No,” she said, letting out a humorless laugh. “I wouldn’t have. I would have stayed in there like a scared little frozen rabbit, too afraid to move.”
The words were familiar, but it took me a minute to place where I’d heard them before. When I remembered, it felt like I’d been punched in the gut.
“Cec,” I said, straightening up to look at her.
“You know it’s true,” she said with a shrug.
“It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now,” I replied firmly. How many times had we had this conversation? A hundred? A thousand? How many times had I argued that she wasn’t a fucking coward for taking cover when she was being shot at? That she’d done exactly the right thing?
“Thank you,” she said again.
“Stop fuckin’ thankin’ me,” I snapped, the words sounding different after I knew where her head was at.
“None of this feels real,” she said after a moment. “I know at some point it’s going to hit me, but I don’t think it has yet.”
“That’s normal,” I replied, opening the back door so I could install the seat. “Shock’s a funny thing.”
“You think I’m in shock?” she asked.
“You’ve been through a lot tonight,” I said. Why the hell did they make these things so hard to fucking install? “Hopefully, that shit won’t sink in until you’ve got your people around you to carry some of the weight.”
“I haven’t seen them in a year, you know,” she said. “It never feels that long until I start counting the months. We talk about them visiting me here or me going up there, but then plans fall through and we put it off.”
“Bet Farrah isn’t happy about that.”
“No,” she replied. “My mom hates it. I think she was glad at first when I moved so far away, but she wants me home now.”
“Didn’t your dad get in a pretty bad car accident a while back?”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “That scared the shit out of me. I swear, I didn’t breathe until I saw him with my own eyes.”
“Makes sense they’d want you home. You got the distance you needed, but maybe it’s time for you to head back.”
“You know how it was for me up there,” she said softly. “I have no interest in going back to that.”
“Maybe it’d be different,” I replied as I yanked the seat from side to side. It barely budged an inch. Good.
“I’m different,” she said as she pulled the baby up to her shoulder and started patting her back. It sounded like she was thumping her pretty hard and I winced.
“You sure that’s how you’re supposed to do it?” I asked, shutting the back door.
“It’s how the nurses showed me,” she said with a huff. “It sounds bad, right? Like a drum.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“I’m different,” she repeated, pulling the conversation back around as she met my eyes. “But I might not be different up there.”
“You think you act like someone else down here?” I asked curiously.
“I know I do.”
“Huh.” I turned away and stuffed all the plastic back into the box and closed it before tossing it in the back of my truck.
“Huh, what?” Cecilia asked as she climbed out of her seat.
“You seem the same to me,” I said seriously.
“Gee, thanks,” she muttered.
I wasn’t sure how to explain that I hadn’t meant it as an insult.
* * *
Later, after we’d figured out how to buckle the baby into her seat, drove home while she cried because she didn’t want to be in it, dragged all of Cecilia’s supplies in the quiet house, and settled in for the night, I laid in bed wondering how in the fuck I was going to sleep.
My bedroom door was open in case Cecilia needed something, but there was no noise coming from the guestroom. She must’ve gotten the baby to sleep. I hoped that Cecilia was sleeping, too. She looked worn the fuck out by the time we got all of her stuff unpacked from the truck.
Without conscious thought, my mind drifted to the usual memories that helped calm my mind enough to sleep.
Groaning, I reached up and fisted my hand in the pale blonde hair at the base of her neck, pulling her mouth down to mine. Her hips rolled as her mouth opened for my tongue. God, she was incredible. She hadn’t been my first, far from it, but she was by far the best. There was something about the way she smelled, the feel of her skin under my fingertips, the way she moved, that outpaced every other partner by a mile. Or maybe, it was because I loved her—the knowledge of that making my skin prickle. Yeah, I loved her, I was more certain of that than I was of anything else in my life. I hadn’t imagined love would feel like that, a mixture of possession and protectiveness and tenderness all wrapped up into this weird package that made my tongue too big for my mouth and my chest feel like it was caving in. If I could’ve stopped it, I would’ve. I would’ve never fallen in love with anyone if I’d had the choice. I couldn’t help it, though, not with her. She was a force that hit with the strength of a freight train, but instead of running into me, it was like she flowed through me, the particles that made her mixing with the particles that made me. Inevitable. Necessary.
Her nails bit into the skin of my chest as she moaned against my mouth and I hissed, rolling sideways until she was under me.
“Like that?” I whispered into her ear as she gasped. “You want my cock?”
She answered me with a whimper. I hadn’t expected anything else. She rarely said anything when we fucked, just random murmurs of my name and the whispered conviction that I was hers. But, while I normally chose my words carefully before I spoke, whenever we were like this, naked and fitted together like puzzle pieces, I couldn’t stop the words from flowing out of my mouth. Filthy words that made her tremble and arch.
“Mine,” I said into her ear, jerking my hips forward. Blindly, I reached for her legs, pulling them up around my back. “All mine.”
She nodded, her breath catching. Within seconds, her hand had found the side of my face, cupping my cheek, and I leaned up slightly, knowing what the gesture meant. Shuddering, her body strung tight as a wire, she came in pulses around me.
I refused to follow behind her as she relaxed beneath me. Instead, as her eyes found mine, I grinned. “Again,” I ordered, rolling my hips forward.
A quiet sound came from down the hall and my ears reddened in shame, but it wasn’t enough for me to stop the memory flowing through my mind. Eventually, I must have crashed because I found myself in a familiar dream, one I hadn’t had for years. I was on my back, staring through tree branches at a powder blue sky dotted with clouds. I knew that I needed to get up, but I couldn’t. It was like I was encased in cement and the only part of my body that I had any control over was my eyes. I moaned as the sounds of chatter and laughter were drowned out by the sound of gunfire. I needed to get up. I had to help them. I jerked as the sky went blurry with tears. The sound of a baby crying made me panic and I tried to roll over onto my stomach, but none of my limbs would move. There wasn’t supposed to be a baby there.