by Ciara Shayee
Another tremor rippling through Indie’s body rocked her into Laker’s knees. He shoved away the questions bubbling on the tip of his tongue, reaching for her on instinct like he used to when she was little and fell over. Torn apart by the nightmare lingering in her head, Indie didn’t fight him at all as he turned, tucking her securely beneath his chin in his lap. She wound up pressed against his solid chest which was covered only by a thin, light blue ribbed vest and an unzipped grey marl hoodie. Her legs rested over his, her head over his heart. It thumped evenly beneath her ear. The steady beat was soothing—she relaxed some of her tightly coiled muscles and tried to suck the warmth from his body into hers.
Smells, sounds, and sights assaulted Indie as she began to calm down. Everywhere she looked, Garrett Smith lurked. Grace slept soundly upstairs, Marley curled up beneath the covers with Mr. Bunny, as usual.
Today, they received the news that in three days they’d have to go to the police station to begin giving their formal statements.
The FBI and police were working together on the case, both of them desperate to nail Garrett Smith for all of his nefarious crimes. It was the thought of reliving every day on the ranch that had Indie dreaming of tumbling from a great height, only, as she got closer, the ground exploded and she found herself falling faster and faster towards a rising ball of flames.
She was terrified of what the agents, officers, her family, and Laker would think of the things they’d hear—petrified they’d hate her for making Grace stay, and for not leaving with Marley as soon as physically possible.
She was desperately trying to stop herself from thinking about when she’d have to talk about her current pregnancy and the other person responsible for the baby growing in her womb.
Indie had woken from her nightmare just as the first lick of flames touched her skin and stumbled down the stairs so Grace and Marley wouldn’t be woken by the resulting panic attack. She’d become adept at recognising when she was on the cusp of an attack.
The feel of Laker’s hand tracing shapes on her back was soothing instead of frightening; it calmed her racing heart while smothering the fright attempting to claw her into its icy grip. A long, shuddering exhale left her.
“You feeling better?”
Beneath her ear, Indie felt the rumble of his voice, the rough but warm cadence of his Italian accent, more than she actually heard it. Hating being so close to him, to anybody, during a panic attack, but craving his warmth, Indie pushed through the walls she’d carefully constructed in an effort to feel heat in her bones, even if only for a short time.
Not completely content, but more so than she had been in a long time, Indie hummed into the soft material of Laker’s hoodie, the tears on her cheeks soaking into the fabric along with the sound. He grinned down at her. Overwhelming relief filled him with the more relaxed sound coming from Indie; remembering her cries would always be painful. This was so much better.
A few minutes later, he could tell she’d fallen asleep. Her breathing evened out as her fists unclenched, but they rested loosely against his chest. The frown that had been pulling her forehead taut had dissipated, leaving the exhausted face of a troubled girl free of pain. Indie, slumped over Laker’s lap, had unconsciously sought the comfort he couldn’t help but offer. The comfort she couldn’t bring herself to ask for when she was awake.
Reagan appeared in the doorway just as Laker began to look around, wondering if he should move her to a more comfortable place to sleep.
“Laker? What’s going on?”
“Nightmare, I think. I came down for a smoke, but she wasn’t here then. She must’ve woken up and come down while I was outside. She seems okay now. Calmer at least.”
Reagan chuckled ruefully without mirth, his eyes sad as he gazed upon his daughter. It had been obvious from the moment Riley showed up that nobody would like the news he’d brought with him. Garrett Smith hadn’t been seen in days; the girls needed to start giving their statements.
Smiles had been scarce and Indie and Grace had spent most of the day in quiet contemplation. Marley was easily entertained with the arrival of Uncle Archie, Carl-Roman, and Chase late in the morning, but even she had noticed something was going on, patting Laker on the cheek and pointing to her silent mother and auntie to ask what was wrong. Laker placated her by saying that they were just tired, but it wouldn’t fly for long. Marley may be virtually mute, but stupid she was not.
Resisting the strange urge to press a kiss to Indie’s head, Laker carefully set her down on Reagan’s bed once he’d managed to get up without jostling her awake. He was careful not to disturb Marley. He’d passed Grace on the stairs on the way up and she’d warned him to mind the Marley-shaped lump beneath the covers. He brushed a lock of hair away from Indie’s cheek, smiling when she leaned towards the contact with a soft sigh.
Reagan and Grace waited in the kitchen, cups of coffee clasped in their hands as they greedily inhaled the strong smell of ground coffee beans.
“There’s more over there,” Reagan grunted, staring into his coffee. Black with three sugars. He’d always taken it the same way.
“Grazie, Ray.”
He poured himself a cup, taking a seat at the table opposite Grace. She seemed lost in thought.
Children squealed, screamed, and laughed as they ran amok on the new equipment at Tugwell Park. The warm July sun shone over Eastbourne like a watchful parent—just cool enough to be gentle, but not hot enough to be stifling. Indie and Grace were among the gaggle of children playing on the swings, their delighted squeals ringing out as Laker and Archie made their way over.
“Arch! Laker! Push us, push us!” Grace cried, showing off the gap in the front of her mouth where her two top teeth had been just days before. At six years old, she was excited to have finally caught up with Indie, who’d already lost hers and started growing in the adult pair a month before.
The two boys, then thirteen and fifteen, grinned at the girls’ loud cheers as they pushed hard on their backs, sending them flying up in arcs towards the perfect blue sky.
“Don’t tell Dad, all right? He’ll ground us again if he finds out we were pushing you squirts this high.”
Laker laughed at their vehement nods, fiddling with the cap in his hands between pushes.
“So, when’re you goin’ back?”
Laker cursed under his breath at Archie’s question. “Twentieth of August. Ma wants me back for school and shit.” His scowl turned into a smile again as Indie cheered that he was ‘the best pusher ever.’
Archie snorted, stepping back with Laker to let the girls swing under their own steam. He smirked at his friend. “Yeah, drug pusher.”
As the teenage boys goofed around, shoving each other playfully, their fun came to an abrupt halt. Indie and Grace were swinging themselves in towards each other, tangling their feet together as they crossed over before giggling when they released and sailed back down. Laker watched from the corner of his eye as Indie’s swing caught and twisted. Unbalanced, she shot her hand out to grab the nearest thing—the chain of Grace’s swing. The pair screamed as they careened through the air and landed sharply on the asphalt with pained cries.
“Oh, shit…” Laker breathed, moving around to scoop Indie into his arms. She already had tears pouring over her rosy cheeks as Archie lifted Grace. “You okay, Pie?”
Despite her tears and the pain in her ankle, she managed a weak smile at the use of the nickname only Laker ever used.
“I think my ankle is broke, LJ.”
Her whimpers just about broke his heart. To make matters infinitely worse, a boy he knew occasionally said mean things to the girls chose that as the perfect time to make a bad situation even worse.
“Ha-ha, Indie fell over!” he crowed.
Archie saw the anger on his friend’s face immediately. Checking with Grace first to make sure she could stand, he set her on her feet and clasped Laker’s shoulder hard. Deep, dark, furious green eyes locked on the boy’s face as he spun, ignoring Ar
chie’s hold. Indie cringed and cowered into Laker’s chest, clutching at his Captain America t-shirt.
“Are you seriously laughing because she hurt herself?”
The eleven-year-old, redheaded boy grinned wickedly, not realising it was the stupidest thing he could have done in front of the protective older boy. Laker ground his teeth, his fingers flexing behind Indie’s back and knees where he cradled her.
“Leave it, man. The kid ain’t worth it,” Archie insisted.
The only thing that stopped Laker from pummelling the little brat was the fact that he couldn’t stomach the thought of putting Indie on the ground to do it.
“No, he’s not.” Glaring at the boy, he continued, “If I see you anywhere near these two again, you won’t be so lucky. We clear, kid?”
The boy all but wet his pants at the look on the older boy’s face as he towered over him, angrily spitting the words. He took one quick glance at Archie’s face, set with the grim determination of someone who knew what it was like to lose a fight to the tall, Italian teenager, before turning tail to run right out of the park.
Slowly but surely, the fury leeched from Laker’s body.
His eyes melted back to the soft shade of green Indie often likened to her favourite mint chocolate chip ice cream, a toothy yet sheepish half-smile taking the place of his previous scowl.
As the foursome returned home to get Indie’s ankle checked by her dad, Laker apologised, grinning gratefully when she just patted his cheek and thanked him for sticking up for her. Years of being sporty and fitness-oriented allowed him to keep her in his arms until he relinquished her to Reagan on the doorstep.
Grace’s half-smile was wiped from her face at the sound of footsteps. Baby-blues landed on Laker after flitting to the doorway in time to see Reagan’s retreating back.
“He’s gone to take a shower,” he explained.
“Okay,” she mouthed in reply, nursing her coffee.
As Laker stood, blinking blearily now that the adrenaline of Indie’s panic attack had worn off, Grace couldn’t help but smile at the look of boyish displeasure on his face; the amount of sun pouring in through the open drapes on the French doors apparently too much. His face reminded her of Carl-Roman. She couldn’t wait to see the little boy again.
He reached up to scratch absent-mindedly at his stomach, not noticing the way Grace’s cheeks flushed crimson as her eyes caught sight of his toned midsection, his shirt rising up as he gazed around the room.
“Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m dying for another coffee.”
With that, he strode across the room, flicking the switch on the kettle to set it going again.
“You sleep all right? I didn’t hear a peep last night. It’s so quiet here, much quieter than my place. Took me ages to get used to it. I’d forgotten how silent this place can be.”
Grace nodded in agreement. Back on the ranch, there was always at least a little noise—the horses kicking about in the barn, Jesse snoring next-door, the cats yowling from the windowsill. The nights back home were eerily silent.
“Where do you live now? Is it nearby? I think you mentioned it, but I don’t remember.”
Laker tipped his head to smirk, not unkindly, at her, “Rome. Not so close, no.”
Again, Grace’s cheeks flushed. He ramped up his accent on purpose, her embarrassment acute as she wrapped her arms around her middle. “That should have been obvious, huh.”
Nodding teasingly, he hummed a moment later when he raised his fresh, steaming cup of coffee to his lips. There was a sharp pang of longing in Grace’s stomach at the realisation—that’s how Ryan drank his coffee, too. Black, straight from the kettle, and scalding hot.
“You want…?”
“No, thank you.”
The pair sat in companionable silence for a little while, until Grace remembered something else. Another childhood memory. She couldn’t help but let out an amused little giggle. Laker eyed her with his head cocked slightly to one side. Grace likened him to a puppy you couldn’t help but be fond of despite his mischief.
“What was that girl’s name…Tisha, was it?”
Laker groaned, his head hitting the table with a muted thump. Of course, of all the childhood memories they shared, that would be the one Grace never managed to forget.
Reagan had tasked the boys with looking after the girls for the afternoon while he and Peter worked. It was a Saturday, but since Penelope and Karen died, they’d needed the extra hours, especially during winter months when construction work was scarce. Then, in the bitter cold of late March, two years later, the men were forced to run their construction business while managing their homes and the five children they had between them.
Thankfully, with Laker staying just down the street with his aunt and uncle for a while, they felt marginally better leaving the two older girls with him and Archie. The two-year-old twins were with their grandparents for the day, so the troublesome foursome found themselves at a loss for something to do.
Deciding they didn’t want to stay inside when there was still plenty of snow to play in, Laker and Archie bundled the girls up in their outdoor clothes, leading them down to Hampden Park where many other kids of similar ages were revelling in the freshly falling snowflakes. Much to the delight of the boys, there were also some girls of their age. Leaving Indie and Grace in the playground with some friends from school, Archie and Laker sauntered towards the giggling girls with all the cockiness of teenage boys.
An hour later, when Indie’s fingers were so red she thought they’d fall off, she and Grace made their way over to Laker and Archie. The two would-be studs were still trying to make a good impression, to little avail.
Seeing her chance to cash in on a piggyback home, Indie beamed as sweetly as she could manage and tapped Laker on the hip. He glanced down at her, two pink spots high on her cheeks from the cold. His lips automatically pulled into a wide, toothy smile that had the girls swooning around him. His mega-watt smile had always been his ultimate weapon—he just hadn’t learned to use it to its full advantage yet.
“Whatta you after, Indie Pie?” His strong accent made it sound more like ‘afta’ which—to the teenage girls who’d never been anywhere further than Brighton with their mums—was about as exotic as it got. That wasn’t including the way he dropped to his knees to talk to Indie either, his bright grin never wavering even when she jutted out her lower lip to ask to go home. Intelligent beyond her years and as perceptive as her quick-witted father, young Indie knew just how to play the cutesy little angel. After all, Archie had enrolled her and Grace many a time to help impress girls. They’d been trained well.
“Well, we’ll be seein’ you. Gotta get these ones home before they freeze.” Laker scooped a beaming Indie onto his back, Grace demanding the same treatment from Archie, before they turned back to their now-staring admirers.
“Add me online, Laker,” one girl simpered with all the grace of a smitten, fourteen-year-old. Her friends were quick to suggest the same thing to both boys, so when they carried the two girls away a few minutes later, the first thing they agreed upon was that they definitely had time to stop and treat their little helpers to sweets from the penny shop—while adding their new fangirls on BEBO, the most ‘in’ social network site of the times.
Indie and Grace reached across to high-five each other.
Laker groaned. “That girl, Tisha, she didn’t stop harassing me for about a year!” He erupted into chuckles at the memory, wiping his eyes theatrically as Grace beamed—much like she had back then. “It was all your fault, too. You and Indie were too good at playing the cute card.”
“Yeah, but it was so fun.”
Laker couldn’t help but grin and agree, his mind full of the beaming, giggly girls instead of the shells they’d become.
~ oOo ~
Reagan hauled himself from the shower almost forty minutes later. The past month had exhausted him physically and mentally, so he’d taken the time to really savour the shower and s
oak his tired muscles. He followed Laker’s chuckles and Grace’s quieter giggles to the kitchen where he found them raking over funny and embarrassing stories from their childhood. One of which was a trip to the park that Reagan remembered all-too-well, albeit not as fondly as Laker and Grace.
“Archie dropped my new phone in the pond that day,” he commented wryly, alerting the pair to his presence. Laker’s grin widened while Grace’s fell for a second before stretching out again. “Insurance wouldn’t pay, so I made him save up for months to buy me a new one.”
“Yeah, and then you didn’t make him buy it. He was so annoyed ‘cause by then he’d missed the chance of a date he was supposed to go on with Tisha’s friend.”
Reagan wrinkled his nose. “‘Tisha?’ What sort of name is that?”
Laker and Grace shared a bemused look, bursting into loud laughter at the utterly bewildered look on the older man’s face.
~ oOo ~
Five minutes later, after the pair had regained control of themselves, Peter arrived to tell them his youngest two daughters would be coming over at lunchtime; they’d be there in less than five hours after returning from their camping trip with Mary and Roy, their maternal grandparents. Grace’s skin crawled with nerves. It felt as though someone was running an electric current through her skin.
When Indie emerged from the bedroom, weary after her late-night panic attack and embarrassed at the way she’d behaved, it was to gentle smiles and a hug from Marley. Once she’d decamped from Laker’s lap at the dining table, anyway.
“Morning, baby girl,” she sighed, not realising how much she needed a cuddle from her baby until Marley wrapped her arms around her neck.