He kept his eyes closed when Ams finally climbed into bed with him, not wanting to talk, not wanting to upset her. He felt her fingers wrap gently around his arm and then her lips pressed against his cheek for the briefest of moments.
“I have to tell you something, but I need you to not be so sad when I do,” Ams whispered.
He opened his eyes, looking at her, and she was smiling at him, a small, almost timid smile. “All right.”
She reached over and took his hand, squeezed it hard, and then pressed it over her stomach, still looking at him, but not smiling anymore and it scared him, the way her face was.
He held his breath.
“You are going to be a father, Riley,” she whispered, watching him.
He froze, everything in him aching in a way he couldn’t explain, a tiny sliver of life he created that his hand was pressing against scaring him worse than anything.
He moved to turn away from her, only Ams grabbed him, holding his face, making him look at her, eyes serious and sad now. “I’ve never been more scared in my life, Riley, scared that I’ll screw it up somehow, but you… I always knew you’d be great at it, you know? The kid is going to love you,” she said in her old, soft way, and planted a gentle kiss on his lips, smiling again.
He pressed her close, holding her to him with everything he had. He had spent so long now thinking it wouldn’t happen for them that he never bothered to picture it if it had, but he never thought it would scare him like this.
He went to sleep with the image of Ams’ face getting softer, glowing in that way Laurel’s did now, a new roundness in her. He didn’t dare dream beyond that, didn’t dare picture this little life in her as something real, a boy or a girl who’d call out to him someday from a riverbank when he taught him or her to swim or run wildly through the woods and the streets….
And suddenly he could see it. Two little kids, his and Brody’s, running to some forbidden clearing, barefoot, armed with nothing but a pair of sticks and a fishing line, and laughing, the way he and Brody used to so many years ago…. Only these two kids wouldn’t be running out of fear or to escape some pain. They’d be running simply because they could. Because the river and the trees spoke to them in that mysterious way they spoke to carefree kids who weren’t afraid of anything or anybody. Kids who never needed to learn to be afraid.
About the Author
The ugly city where I did most of my growing up was a canvas of black and white and grey. Coal dust seeped into the wrinkles of people and stayed there. It stuck to every surface and object. It colored the purest of snows, turning a spectacular landscape into something sickly; diseased. It was a place everybody wanted to escape from but few ever did. But the wanting to made dreamers out of all of us…
I dreamed of vivid greens and people with unlined faces smiling at small, normal things: grasshoppers and the first ripe fruit of the season, enough food in their pantries, not dying too young to have seen their kids grow up.
I dreamed of a world scraped clean of the ugly, the back-breaking, the cruel.
Thank you!
Thank you so much for reading my words. I am currently working on a collection of short stories and a Fantasy novel (which may or may not turn into a series).
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If you want to reach out, shoot me an email at [email protected]. I do my best to respond to all my readers.
Alliance: The Complete Series (A Dystopian YA Box Set Books 1-5): Dystopian Sci Fi Thriller Page 91