I froze.
“I’d already started planning our life out here. Thinking about what you would like and not like when it came to a house. Wondered if I could convince you to move in with me when we’d only known each other for a few months.”
I turned my head up so I could see if he was sincere.
His eyes were on the gate that was blocking our access to the rest of the land.
Then he tugged me forward and we were walking.
Up a long winding red clay driveway that likely would be a bitch if it rained. Through it was lined with trees that were high and beautiful beyond belief. Then that long driveway turned into a sprawling meadow, and I knew that this was where the house would go.
“Right here,” I told him.
He stopped, and we looked at the land before us.
“I want to put a house there, on the top of the hill.”
He echoed my thoughts exactly.
“I want to leave as many of the trees as we can and to disrupt the look of the land as little as possible,” he explained. “I want a shop where I can work on my bikes and cars. I want a…”
“Pond would look good right here,” I pointed to a really low lying spot where the land dipped sharply into what looked like a creek at the very bottom.
“There’s a year-round creek right there,” he informed me, confirming my suspicions. “And I’ve thought about damming it up right there and doing the same.”
I grinned and pulled away from him, walking down the steep hill to the creek beyond.
Chapter 16
You’re allowed to like other people. You just have to like me more.
-Text from Sean to Naomi
Sean
I watched as Naomi walked down the deep ravine that led to the creek below, her hand down at her side to catch herself if she started to lose her footing, and wondered how I got this lucky.
Naomi was my saving grace. The one woman who’d changed my life and made it into everything I’d ever wanted.
I’d been putting off bringing her here.
I didn’t want to know if she hated it. Didn’t want to see the same look on her face that I’d seen on Ellen’s.
But today, after all that bullshit with the burning flags, I realized that I needed to stop being a little bitch and make my move.
I needed to either bring her into my world, or get rid of her, because I was falling fast. I was falling hard. And I didn’t care. I liked where I was about to land.
My eyes strained down to her ass, which filled out those yoga pants spectacularly.
Looking at that view everyday wouldn’t hurt, either.
“Are you coming or what?”
My eyes traveled from her ass to her face, and I grinned.
Shoving my hands into my pockets, I started down the steep hill, catching up to her easily with my long strides.
She huffed at me as I caught up to her and then passed her, and I turned around to laugh at her only to catch her jumping at me.
I caught her, easily, and glared at her.
“You shouldn’t be doing that,” I chastised her.
“Yes, Dad,” she drawled sarcastically.
I moved my hands around to come to a rest under her butt, and squeezed it lightly.
“Ouch,” she snapped her hips forward. “That hurt.”
I turned my face, waited, and was rewarded when she placed her lips to mine.
I took a step down onto a rock that led to the creek, and came to a stop, waiting for her to get down.
She didn’t.
“You getting down?”
She shook her head, shrugged, and wrapped her legs tighter around me. Her arms followed suit, choking off my airway, and her chin came to a rest on my shoulder, her face pressed against mine.
“You have food in your beard,” she pointed out after a while.
I shook my head.
“I can either reach up, letting you go in the process, and remove it. Or you can do it for me, and stay where you are,” I muttered darkly.
She snickered.
“Not funny,” I said. “You ate breakfast with me. How could you not see that I had food in my beard?”
Her giggling was making it really hard to hold onto my scowl.
“I didn’t see it until I was right here,” she admitted, reaching forward and plucking something out of my beard.
She held it out to me to see, and I shook my head.
“Hot sauce,” I said. “Throw it down.”
She pressed her mouth into my neck, and started to snicker once again. “I thought you were saving it for later.”
I pinched her ass, causing her to squirm in my hold.
“If you look over there, that’s the neighboring property,” I jerked my chin in the direction I wanted her to look.
She did, and frowned. “That’s kind of close. What if they build a house or something right there? Then they’ll be able to see into your oasis.”
Hearing her obvious pleasure as she discussed the land made my heart happy.
“I didn’t want you to think that you were a substitute,” I told her bluntly. “That’s why it took me so long to show you. Plus, I wanted to make sure that what we have between us is real.”
She squeezed my neck tighter, cutting off circulation to my head.
“Can’t breathe,” I squeaked out.
She let up, but not before placing a kiss on my quickly reddening forehead first.
Then she patted me on the shoulder and started to squirm.
Understanding she wanted down, I dropped her legs, and she did the rest of the work.
“What’s down here?” she asked, pointing in the direction of a wooded area that I hadn’t gotten a chance to explore yet.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “We have another hour or so before we need to head home and catch a nap before work. If you want, we can walk that way. When we get tired, we’ll turn around.”
She looked skeptically at the sheer drop that led even further down into the woods.
“I’m going to bust my ass, possibly break my arm, and have to skip work because I’ll be in the ER getting a cast fitted onto my arm. As long as you’re okay working with someone you don’t like, I’ll do it.”
I gave her a look that clearly relayed what I thought about her trust in me and held out my hand.
She didn’t even hesitate.
Placing her hand into mine, I helped her down the hill.
And not once did she fall.
Me, on the other hand…yeah, I was a different story.
***
“Oh, my God,” Naomi’s eyes were bright. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
I looked over at her for the fifth time in less than an hour.
I was driving the medic, and trying hard not to laugh at the horror that was still pasted on Naomi’s face.
“I’m fine,” I promised her for the final time. “Drop it, okay?”
She bit her lip, but her eyes stayed on my eyebrow where I was now the proud new owner of fifteen stitches.
It started at the bridge of my nose and curled around my eye, stopping just above my eye socket on my left side. I had no eyebrow, though you couldn’t tell really since the stitches were now acting as a temporary one.
“Does it hurt?” she whispered.
I shook my head.
“No.”
I was lying. It hurt like a motherfucker.
I didn’t want her to feel worse than she already did, though, so I kept silent on how much it was throbbing.
Since I couldn’t take any pain meds while I was at work, I was stuck with feeling the sharp ache despite taking both Tylenol and Motrin.
“It looks like it hur…”
“Naomi, I’ll smack your ass if you ask that again,” I growled.
I’d fallen.
Oh, boy had I fallen.
And not gracefully, either.
I’d
just helped Naomi over a fallen log, and had put my weight on it to hop over myself.
The weight of my body had been a lot more than Naomi’s, and seconds after my full body weight had been on it, it collapsed out from under me.
I fell, face forward, straight into a stump and split my eye open.
“You could’ve lost your eye,” she continued.
I sighed.
“I really, really don’t want to talk about this right now,” I grumbled. “So, if you’d please shut up, I’d appreciate it.”
She started to snicker, and I narrowed my eyes at her.
“I’m not eating Taco Bell again,” she declared once she’d managed to compose herself. “I haven’t tried it since I got my colostomy reversal, but I just don’t think my belly can handle it.”
I hummed in approval. “I think that’s acceptable. So you either have Subway, which happens to be on the way home. Or Fanny’s.”
Fanny’s wasn’t really on the way home, but I could make it on the way home. They’d never notice if I stopped in and grabbed the food.
“Fanny’s,” she said excitedly. “I’ve never had it, but I’ve heard that it’s good.”
It was. “The best,” I promised. “Call ahead. Tell them you want two specials.”
“What’s the special?” she asked as she took her phone out of her pocket and started googling the number.
She’d just gotten on the line with them when the tones dropped.
“Medic 33, child sick and lethargic at 777 Pointy Grove Lane.”
My stomach dropped.
“Oh, God,” Naomi echoed my thoughts. “Never mind.”
Naomi hung up the phone and I swung around a slow driving car, flipping on my lights at the same time.
The drive to the house was silent and tense, and by the time we arrived, the sick feeling in my stomach had turned to a deep ache that resonated in my bones.
It took three minutes and thirty-seven seconds to respond to the call.
This was going to be very bad. I knew it before I’d even gotten out of the medic.
“Shit,” Naomi said, seeing the parents standing in the street. “I’ll grab the doors.”
I didn’t wait to see if she got them or not. The minute I had the ambulance in park, I was running toward the front of the house as fast as my legs would take me.
My head no longer hurt, and my eyes were focused on my target.
The little baby in her mother’s hysterical arms.
I’ll remember the sight for the rest of my life.
The little girl was nearly naked, the only thing covering her tiny body was a white diaper with a little yellow stripe up the middle.
One tiny leg and one tiny arm were flopping loosely in the near freezing night air. Likely when she’d been holding her, the blanket had been swaddling her little body. Now the hot pink blanket only accentuated how very pale the baby was.
The minute I was in reaching distance, I took the limp child from her mother’s arms and ran to the ambulance.
It took me less than twenty seconds.
I placed the little girl down on the backboard, listened to the doors slam behind me, and started CPR.
***
I dropped down to my knees after leaving the ER’s trauma bay, put my hands behind me head, and hunched my body in on itself.
I couldn’t find any breath in my lungs. They were burning, right along with my eyes.
Tears threatened, and the only thing that was holding them back was the fact that I had an audience.
Had I been alone, they’d be flowing freely down my cheeks to disappear into my beard.
Even now, I wasn’t sure whether I could make it back to the medic without breaking down.
Hell, I was in the middle of the damn ambulance entrance to the ER, and I couldn’t find it in me to move.
“Sean,” Naomi whispered. “Look at me, baby.”
It took me a minute, but I finally managed to look up at her.
The harsh brightness from the lights lighting the ambulance bay hurt my eyes, but I looked anyway.
“She’s going to make it,” Naomi promised me again.
I swallowed, nodded, and then cleared my throat.
“Yeah,” I licked my lips.
She was, or at least she had a very good chance.
It’d been two minutes into CPR that she started breathing.
That tiny little body had looked so very delicate laying on that adult sized backboard.
And the needles I had in the medic weren’t small enough, so I hadn’t been able to start an IV.
The baby was a week or two, at most, and had been born at a mere four pounds in the first place. Her parents guestimated her weight to be around five pounds due to a doctor appointment they’d had earlier in the week. The girl likely had never even been out of her parents’ loving arms.
“The parents get here yet?” I asked roughly.
She nodded, pointing to a car that was parked haphazardly in the ER drop off.
“Just got here when you came out the side door.”
I nodded my head almost automatically.
“Let’s go.”
I got up, ignoring the sympathetic glances from my colleagues, and got into the passenger seat.
Naomi, not even questioning this, got into the driver’s seat, adjusted the settings, and put it into drive.
We arrived at the station five minutes later, and I was out and moving toward the door before she’d even put it into park.
I didn’t bother to think she’d leave me be, though, which was why I left my bedroom door open before I took a seat on the bed and dropped my head into my hands.
My eye throbbed, but I didn’t care.
I needed the pain. Needed the proof that I was going to continue to live.
“Was that your first baby?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“No,” I muttered. “Fourth.”
I remembered each and every time I had a call on an infant. Three of them hadn’t made it. Two of them had died from SIDS, and one of them was an accidental drowning in the bathtub when her mother left her to check on the dinner that was cooking.
This little girl was lucky to be alive, and I was grateful that I didn’t have to experience the loss of an infant patient for a fourth time.
“That was terrible,” she murmured, pushing my hands lightly.
I took the hint and moved my arms, freeing up my lap, and she dropped into it, straddling me and wrapping me in her arms.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
I shuddered.
“I’ll be okay,” I muttered. “Just hits me hard.”
She pressed a kiss to my temple, just above my stitches.
“So…does it hurt now?”
I bit my lip, then started to laugh lightly.
“Yeah, it hurts like a bitch.”
Funnily enough, I wasn’t sure if I was talking about my head or my heart.
Chapter 17
I just want to lay in a pile of warm laundry and eat bread.
-Text from Naomi to Sean
Sean
“Sean.”
“Yeah, babe?” I asked, sitting back on my bike and holding it steady with just the power of my legs.
“Have you gotten to the store yet?”
I shook my head. “No. I met a buddy in the parking lot, and we got to BS-ing. What’s up?”
I waved my friend off, someone I’d known since high school, and he gave me a two-finger salute before heading inside the grocery store to do his own shopping.
Her voice tremored. “Brady’s not here. He’s never not here.”
My brows rose.
“That’s surprising,” I admitted. The man was always on time. In fact, he was always early. “Did you call him?”
“Yes,” she answered quickly. “I called him about ten times. He’s not answering. And I know he didn’t forget. He has
impeccable timing and remembers everything that I ever say, most of the time using it against me at a later date.”
I snorted.
“I’ll go check on him, babe,” I murmured. “Start your walk. If I find him, I’ll send him your way.”
“Okay, but if you need to get inside his house, he said there’s a key right inside the garage underneath an old golf bag.” She blew out a breath. “I don’t even know what to do with myself. I feel lost.”
“Go walk,” I repeated. “I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.”
“Okay,” she breathed. “I love you.”
Then she was gone.
I, on the other hand, was finding it hard to breathe.
I love you.
Holy shit.
She’d never once said that to me. Not when I’d just made love to her. Not when I held her in my arms and pressed my lips against her head. Not when we were saying goodbye.
Never.
Then bam.
The words hit me like a sledgehammer, and it took me a few long seconds to get my head unscrambled.
I love you.
Stupidly, I’d been waiting to say those same words to her, unsure if they’d be welcome at this point.
Now that she’d said them, I felt like an asshole for not telling her before now.
As I rode to Brady’s place, I realized that I needed to apologize again. She wouldn’t think that I needed to, but I did. I’d been holding myself back, even now, because I was too worried that she’d throw the words back in my face.
But she hadn’t done that and I should’ve realized that she wouldn’t.
Five minutes later, I pulled into the driveway behind Brady’s truck, and turned off the engine.
Everything looked okay from here, even the blinds were open, meaning he was up.
Brows furrowing, I got off the bike, hung my helmet up, and started toward the door that would lead inside from the garage.
I knocked, and waited.
Nothing.
Thirty seconds later, I knocked again.
Nothing.
Worry starting to tighten in my gut, I turned around and walked toward the golf bag, finding the key exactly where she said I’d find it.
Holding the key at the ready, I walked back to the door and tried the knob to find it unlocked and turning in my hand.
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