The sounds that come from me make him laugh deep and slow, and, hey, looks like my thigh-poking worked after all.
Chapter 28
Holly
It’s the middle of the night and I’m locked in a motel bathroom. My mom is on the other side of the door making horrific noises. A little while ago, two men showed up at the door of our motel room, where she’d taken me after having a huge fight with my dad, and when they started to push her around, she told me to go in here and lock the door and not to open it until she came for me. I’ve squeezed myself between the toilet and the bathtub, so grateful that I’m small enough to fit there, even though I’m already in the fourth grade.
I’m so, so tired, but terrified to close my eyes for fear of what will happen. I think I do finally doze for a few minutes with my head against the toilet seat, before I’m shocked awake by a loud crack, followed by a shouted curse word, and finally, what sounds like a door being slammed. Then silence. And I know my mom said not to come out until she opens the door to get me, but after a while of no sound at all, I creep towards the bathroom door, worried that maybe she’s not okay out there. I reach a shaky hand up to the brassy doorknob, flip the lock, and open the door just a crack. I stick my face against the crack to peer into the room and see a body on the floor-
And then shoot up to a sitting position, gasping for breath. The back of my neck is hot and sweaty, my armpits sticky, and this can’t be good for my baby, so I work to breathe, in, out, in, out, but can’t close my eyes because when I do, I see the beat-up body of my mother lying, blissed out in a drug-induced state, on the floor of a scummy motel room.
I haven’t had that nightmare in years, and I am pissed that it’s back. Pissed off and shaky and very thirsty. I fling off my blankets, press my feet to the soft rug that lies under my bed and slowly stand before shuffling my way to the kitchen. My feet are cold now against the hardwood floors and I can’t stop shaking. I reach my bedroom door, too impatient for a cold drink to turn back for my slippers, and nearly pee my pants when I open the door to find a big, half-naked man on the other side.
I shriek and try to slam the door, but Dean is faster, so he’s able to catch me around the waist and pull me in to his warm body.
“Hey, hey, what’s going on, what’s wrong?” His low voice doesn’t soothe me this time, even as I try to crawl into his skin. I just end up shaking more.
“Mama, are you okay?” He pulls back just enough to catch my gaze, his assessing stare taking in my face. “Is it the baby?”
“No,” I manage to squeeze the word out before burying my face in his chest again. I want to be tough, darnit, I want to be able to tell him I’m fine, I just need a drink of water, and I definitely don’t want to love the way his arms feel around me right now. But I do.
“I need water,” I croak out, my words muffled against his skin.
“I got it, you get in bed and I’ll bring it to you.”
“No,” I say, a little too loud while grabbing back on to his arm that’s loosened from around me.
He stares at me a beat longer before responding, “Alright, come on.”
He walks me out to the kitchen, accompanies me to a barstool, and proceeds to fill a glass with ice water before joining me on the neighboring stool.
The water is magic. I must have been gasping in my sleep because my throat is so dry.
Dean’s head is propped in a hand whose arm is leaned on the counter, and he is facing me, watching me, waiting. While I drink, his left hand moves to my back and starts rubbing around and around, little circle into a big circle.
“Better?” He asks after a couple minutes of silence.
I nod, returning my nearly empty water glass to the counter. His hand leaves my back for a moment and attempts to smooth my hair back from my face, but I must have been thrashing about a bit because the hair is not having it.
“The hair that shall not be tamed,” I attempt to joke, but it doesn’t come out in the right tone.
“Will you tell me what happened now? You’re kinda freaking me out.”
“You don’t look like you’re freaking out,” I tell him, not in a snotty way, more in wonder.
“I’ve spent a lot of time training to be cool under pressure.”
“Mmm.”
He leans his face closer to mine, eyebrows lifted, expectant.
“I had a nightmare,” I reluctantly confess.
“Must’ve been a bad one, I could hear you all the way out here. Wanna talk about it?”
“Not really.” This isn’t my first ride in the nightmare rodeo and I’d done the talking thing-heck, I’d done all the things and, in the past, what I found to work best was to drink a glass of water and climb back into bed with a book until I passed out.
“I know a little something about nightmares.”
His words are sweet, and so is his expression. That’s the only reason I can give for the words that come out of my mouth next.
“Will you sleep with me?” I ask, turning my body to face his, and then immediately blush.
His eyebrow lifts so slowly, seriously, the control is amazing, and then he smirks.
“I thought the doctor said no-“
“Oh, hush, you.” I stop him before he can start, going so far to press a hand over his mouth. Gah. The big oaf and his sexy, smirky innuendos.
I feel the vibrations of his chuckle shoot down my arm, then he grasps my palm, gives it a kiss, and holds it in his hand.
“Let’s go.” And then he’s on his feet, tugging at my hand, stopping at the sink to deposit my glass, before leading me down the hall to my bedroom where I just asked him to join me in bed. Sitting out in the kitchen, recovering from my nightmare, I’d forgotten he was half naked. Now, though, standing at the foot of my bed where he’s about to join me, his bare chest is all I see. It’s a really attractive chest and I am actively avoiding looking at it. At least he has pants on because I was not sure I could handle crawling into bed with him in his underwear. That would most likely cause me to have dreams of another kind, ahem.
“You feeling better?” He asks, lying down next to me without touching me.
I do a quick self-evaluation and decide that, yes, in fact, I am feeling better.
“I am, thanks.”
A hand brushes against my thigh (over the covers) and then pats it twice.
“Good. You need anything before I fall asleep?”
Look, I’ll just say it, it’s weird having a man in my bed. It’s been a while (and I’m not counting the night he and I, you know) since I’ve shared a bed with someone, and the whole low-voices-talking-in-the-dark thing is really quite comforting. Or maybe it’s just Dean.
I fall back asleep in no time at all. And I don’t have a single nightmare.
Naturally, I wake up with a hot, hard man pressed against my back-what, not hard like that, sheesh, I mean, hard, like muscly-hard. Never mind. I’ve only just opened my eyes and my brain is already scrambled. His back is warming mine and I can feel his breath moving the hair at the crown of my head. It’s a step up from the mouthful of cat fur I woke up with yesterday.
“Your bed is super comfortable.” And, oh, his morning voice…stupid sexy. If I weren’t already pregnant...
“If I roll over any, I’m going to squash your cat.”
“Well, don’t do that.”
“Where’d you even come up with the name Bubberchop?”
“I don’t really know.” I start making kissy sounds to bring Bubberchop to safety. “He’s got these little chops,” I explain, scratching the fur at the side of his face, “and he’s such a little bubber,” I finish in my special kitty boy voice.
He grunts (or maybe snort-laughs) as he can now squirm and stretch, and his hand starts to slide down my waist and onto my belly, surprising me, and apparently also him because his whole body freezes.
“You can touch it, you know,” I tell him quietly, grabbing his hand with my own and moving it to where I’m pretty sure her feet are
since I can feel her starting to move around. She’ll probably start kicking any second and I suddenly, really want him to feel her.
“She’s pretty active when I first wake up, just give her a minute.”
He’s silent and his body is still tense, I can feel it, and I get it, this is an unusually intimate moment for the two of us. And, yeah, sure, we’ve had sex, but I wouldn’t exactly call the moments we’ve shared thus far intimate.
And then she kicks, my little butternut squash, and I feel him suck in a breath, and when she kicks again, he laughs, just one short bark of amazed laughter.
“Fuck, that’s crazy,” he says, mostly to himself, I think. I look down and see that his hand covers a good majority of my baby belly and I have the urge to lift my shirt and see how it looks, his skin on mine, his hand covering our baby.
This is a moment I could not ever have imagined, not in a trillion years.
He stays like that, his hand holding our baby, until she settles and is still again.
But he doesn’t move his hand. In fact, one of his legs comes up to spoon both of mine, like he’s now settling in.
“She does that every morning?”
“Yup. Every morning while I’m lying in bed, and then throughout the day, usually after I eat, and always in the evening when I’m settled on the couch.”
“Huh.”
“It’s weird, like she’s already got a little pattern,” I muse, the comfort of having someone to share this with curling in my belly.
“Will you talk about your dream now?” He asks after several moments of silence.
“I’d really rather not,” I tell him, my warm feelings evaporating, and I work to shift out of our cocoon.
“Holly, wait,” he pulls me back in. “I’ve spent a lot of time with guys dealing with PTSD and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you gotta talk about this stuff. If not with me, then with someone.”
I bite down on the word who before it can snap out of my mouth, opting instead to close my eyes and take some deep breaths.
“It was an old nightmare, or, I guess, more like a memory,” I tell him, knowing he’s right and forgetting how hard it’s always been for me to share this stuff. I haven’t been to therapy since right after my grandma died when I spent a few months in grief counseling with my old therapist.
“From a bad night with my mom, she was drugged out, blacked out, left for dead by some jerks, while I was locked in the bathroom of a gross motel room.”
Dean doesn’t say anything, but his breathing changes, becomes choppy and uneven.
“I always wake up right at the moment when I open the bathroom door and see my mom’s body on the floor. I don’t know why the dream is back now; it’s been years since all that has affected me.” In other words, I’ve worked through it all.
“All that? Jesus, Holly.”
He rolls onto his back and I take the opportunity to push myself up to a sitting position, my feet on the floor. It tends to take me a few extra minutes these days to stretch my back and get the blood flowing back into my legs before I’m ready to stand.
I glance back over my shoulder and catch him staring at the ceiling, one arm cocked behind his head, the other resting, palm down, on his chest. His naked chest.
It’s obvious he’s thinking hard about what I said and, maybe even the events from last night. Sigh.
“Dean,” I begin, turning back around to face him better, “it sounds horrible, I forget that sometimes, and I’m not avoiding talking about it, not consciously.” His eyes slide to mine and his head follows.
“It’s just, I’ve had years of therapy, years.” I lean in toward him to emphasize the point. “I’ve learned how to deal with my past and the feelings I have about it, and it’s not that I’m burying anything, I just am able to feel the feelings and then close a door on them. The things that I went through as a child…I can’t allow them to rule me, you know what I mean?”
His eyes take on the assessing stare and I don’t look away. He needs to see that I mean what I’m saying and I’m saying what I mean, so I hold his eyes.
“Mm,” he grunts, “yeah, I know what you mean.” And I bet he does.
Here we are, just a couple of people with baggage, making a baby. Oh, sheesh, my life.
Dean goes for a run and I decide to get a little editing work done. I’m set up in my bed, a stash of pillows supporting my back, a handy little tray supporting my laptop. The house is quiet. I should be getting so much work done.
But I’m not.
My brain keeps rewinding to this morning, a certain someone’s body wrapped around mine. And the weird thing is, neither one of us even seemed surprised.
Now, I typically try not to let my mind wander too far into this arena of thinking because it’s super dangerous. I have a file of Dirty Dean thoughts that is kept under lock and key in my brain and that’s where I hold the memories of our sexy times together. But since this morning’s little spooning session didn’t exactly qualify as sexy times, I was letting my brain simmer in the memory for a minute.
And it’s as I’m recalling just how warm his hard, bare chest felt, even through my shirt, that the very subject of my musings saunters into the bedroom pulling a sweaty t-shirt over his head.
“Hey,” he says, using aforementioned t-shirt to wipe his face and make his hair go sticky-uppy (not an actual word, I know, but, gah, brain…mush…).
“Hi.” Why, yes, that obnoxiously breathy voice does belong to me. “You, uh, must have run a lot, like, far…this…morning.”
His arms freeze mid-face-swipe to look over at me. I smile…ish.
“Nah, I only did six today. I didn’t want to be gone too long.”
I nearly choke.
“Six?” It takes my brain a second to catch up. “What, like, six miles?! You ran six miles on purpose? Who does that?”
He turns that smirky-smirky face to me and holds out his arms, just begging me to take in all his manly glory.
“Mama,” is his response, all deep and growly.
“Oh, lord, you’re ridiculous. Go take a shower, you big, stinky oaf.” You fine, sexy beast, my loins add. Ugh. I flop back into my pool of pillows and cover my eye roll with a forearm, listening to him chuckle his way out the door. Six miles. Honestly.
“What are you always clicking away at, anyway?” He asks, returning wet and clean, a pair of board shorts hanging low on his waist.
“Hmm?” I hum absent-mindedly, mind-deep in my latest WIP, a paranormal romance that is making my brain hurt.
“What are you doing?”
“Oh,” I look up and focus on him, “um, I’m editing.”
His hands on hips and patient expression ask for further explanation.
“I edit books on the side.”
“You edit books on the side.”
“Yes.”
“Hunh.”
He turns and walks down the hall, returning a moment later with a shirt on.
“Not to be too forward, but is that how you can afford this house? Because…”
I laugh, surprised by his question and his implication.
“Because there’s no way a high school librarian’s salary can?”
He shrugs unapologetically, “Well…”
“Well, I couldn’t, that’s true, not even with the extra money I get for my editing jobs. This was my grandparent’s house and when my grandma died, she left it to me.”
He moves to sit on the edge of the bed, facing me.
“So what kind of books do you edit?”
“Oh, all kinds. Right now I’m working on a story about shape-shifters who fall in love.”
He gives me the blank stare and I have to roll my lips between my teeth to keep from laughing.
“Now, now, Dean Slade, don’t be a genre-snob,” I reprimand with a finger wag. “I work with self-publishing authors and I have a website where they can contact me. I’ve been able to pick up some extra work while on bedrest, so I’m taking advantage,
growing my nest egg, buying fancy strollers…”
I watch as he runs his fingers through his damp hair, so obviously mulling over his next words.
“I know I, uh, went about it the wrong way at first, but, Holly, I really do want to help out. You want a fancy stroller, just tell me, you don’t have to go and work a second job.”
“That’s nice, Dean, thank you,” I say, meaning it. “You did go about that the absolutely wrong way, but I like to think we’re both on a bit of a learning curve here, so…I forgive you,” I finish, smiling sweetly.
“You forgive me,” he mimics, shaking his head, one side of his mouth tipped in amusement. “Good to know, Mama, because I know how you independent women can get.”
“Ah!” I stare at him, mouth agape. “You better watch it, buddy, or you’ll see just how independent this woman can get.”
The storm that usually hovers behind his eyes has cleared to show nothing but clear, beautiful blue. Gah, how he loves to push my buttons.
“Oh, yeah?” He teases, rising from the bed. “What are you gonna do, put wiggly eyes on my sweet potatoes?”
My mouth opens again. Oh my goodness, was he-could he be-flirting?
He backs towards the bedroom door, laughing at his own joke.
“Be careful, Dean, you don’t know what kind of tricks I have in my bag.”
“Can’t wait.”
Chapter 29
Holly
It’s official: I’m a blob. I am a gelatinous pile of goo.
And I know Maya agrees because every Thursday when she comes to see me, her eyes widen just a little bit more, and this time I even got an “oh, honey” when she walks in the door and sees me melting into the couch.
“Maya, you gotta help me,” I beg of her once she’s taken off her coat and joined me on the sofa. “I can’t take eight more weeks of this.”
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