by Ivy Smoak
"Rodent?" Bastian said. "That's a little harsh. Although he is in desperate need of a good bath."
Nut threw the remaining piece of grape at Bastian's cheek.
Bastian laughed. "You know I'm just kidding with you," he said and patted the squirrel's head again. "Besides, Nut's distraction also allowed me to get you this." He pulled out the golden fabric that the merchant had been trying to sell her.
"But I...I didn't pay for that."
Bastian winked. "It can be our little secret." He pushed the fabric into her hands. "It really does match your hair perfectly."
The dark room suddenly felt stifling. Their eyes locked. No one had ever looked at Oriana the way Bastian was staring at her. It made her heart race. And her palms felt sweaty. This was how she desired for Rixin to look at her.
"I should probably get back," Oriana said. She pressed her lips together, wondering why she had broken the spell. Bastian was making her incredibly nervous.
He took a step back from her, pushed a tattered curtain to the side, and looked out the window.
Oriana smoothed out her skirt while his eyes weren't trained on her.
"It appears everything has settled down. You should be safe to go." He turned back toward her and gave her another charming smile.
"I don't know how to thank you." She looked down at the cloth in her hands, unsure whether a thank you truly was in order. He was a thief. A thief who had saved her life. With a smile that could light up this dark room.
"No need to thank me. It was my pleasure, my lady." He winked again and jumped onto the window sill.
"But..." began Oriana. But before she could say another word, he was gone.
The push and pull in Scarlett’s favorite story reminded me of my relationship with Penny. In our case though, it truly felt like she had saved me. Not the other way around. I smiled as I watched the two of them. The two women in my life that had saved me from the hell I had been living.
Penny was great at reading to Scarlett. She changed her voices depending on the characters, which always made Scarlett giggle. But tonight, it had just put Scarlett fast asleep.
“You’re better at that than I am,” I said.
She looked up. “At reading? I highly doubt that.” She closed the book but still continued to stroke Scarlett’s hair.
“At reading out loud. The voices you make.”
For a moment she looked embarrassed. “What, you like my suave thief voice?” she said deeply.
I laughed. “Not as much as your princess voice.”
She smiled. “Well that’s good. Or else I’d be worried about what kind of kinky things you were into.”
“Nothing quite that kinky.” I walked into the room and pulled my shirt off over my head. I forced myself not to smile when I caught her staring at me undressing. Such a simple act seemed so normal a few weeks ago. And now there was a newness to it. She wasn’t used to seeing me like this. It would take time for us to find our normal routine again. Time for us to remember what normalcy even felt like. I was okay with that. I paused before pulling off my jeans. If there was even a part of her that still wanted to take things slowly, I wanted to respect that. Even if we had already sped things up quite a bit earlier tonight.
I grabbed a pair of pajama pants from the closet and gestured to the bathroom. “I’m going to finish getting ready for bed. Feel free to keep reading if you’d like.”
She didn’t look up at me. Instead, she buried her face in the book. And a few minutes later when I reemerged her body was curled around Scarlett’s and her eyes were tightly closed. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to look like she was asleep or if she was just so happy to be back in Scarlett’s good graces.
I climbed into bed, trying not to disturb her. It had been a long day for both of us. I understood if she didn’t want to talk anymore. But as soon as the covers shifted she opened her beautiful blue eyes. “I really am sorry, James. For everything.”
I stared down at the two of them. A smile was stretched across Scarlett’s face, but my dear wife looked full of apprehension.
“Baby, how many times do I have to tell you that you have nothing to be sorry for.” I reached out to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear and her face melted into my touch.
“When I couldn’t remember our past, it felt like a bolt of electricity shocked me every time we touched,” she said. “Like my body was trying to tell me how perfect we were together.”
I smiled. “And you don’t feel it any longer?”
“No, I do.” Her cheeks were rosy, like she was embarrassed by her admission. “But it’s different. Familiar, I guess I mean. In a good way.”
In a good way. “I still feel it too.” I rested my head down on my pillow. “Like my body is the negative end of a magnet and you’re the positive end.”
“Why do you always do that? Make yourself the bad part of an equation?”
“There’s no bad part of a magnet.” She was right though. I automatically made myself the negative end. Why did I do that?
Penny just stared at me.
“I don’t know why I do it,” I said.
“I’ve never met a better man in my entire life. There’s no reason on earth that you of all people should be self-deprecating, James. You’re perfect.”
I laughed at that. “Hardly. You should have seen your face when I told you I was an addict.”
“Which time?”
“The second one. You were much kinder the first time I told you.”
“I remember the first time. It was raining. Our relationship had felt so strained. Because you were hiding a part of your past from me. But your past doesn’t define you, James. You can be perfect even if you’ve had a hard life. The difference between that time and this time was that I loved you then. And when you told me the second time you were a stranger. It’s easier to judge a stranger when you don’t know how pure their heart is.”
“I didn’t know that you never told anyone. About my problems. Melissa didn’t know. I just assumed that she did.”
“It wasn’t my place to tell anyone. It’s your story to share with whomever you choose. Not mine.”
“It wasn’t because you were embarrassed by me?”
“James.” She removed her arms from around Scarlett. “How could you even think that?” She climbed over Scarlett’s sleeping body and then over me to try to close the distance between us.
I resisted grabbing her hips and pulling her on top of me. Our daughter was sleeping peacefully beside us. I didn’t want to disrupt her sleep, no matter how badly my body was calling for Penny’s.
She fell onto the other side of me with a quiet “oomph” before nestling herself between my arms. “Never in my life have I been embarrassed by you. I’ve always been the embarrassing one. I’m from a lower class,” she said in an accent that sounded far too similar to my mother’s.
I laughed. “I’ve never been embarrassed by you. I love you. I’ve loved you since the first moment we met and you took my breath away.”
“And I love you.” She yawned and closed her eyes, like the only thing keeping her from sleep before was the lack of my arms around her. “We were both wrong, you know,” she said into my chest with another yawn. “Love isn’t light or dark or a whirlwind of color.”
“If it isn’t those things, then how would you describe it?” I pulled her a little closer to my chest, savoring the feeling of her breath against my skin.
“This.” She sighed like she had never been more content in her entire life. “This is love.”
She fell asleep in my arms, her breath slowly becoming more shallow. I wanted to stay up forever watching her. For a few weeks I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to have another one of these moments. And now that it was here, I was terrified it would slip away again.
I stared at her luscious lips and the delicate curve of her jaw. Her long eyelashes cast shadows on her cheeks. And her red hair shimmered even without a light source. She was perfection in every se
nse of the word.
Her chest slowly rose and fell, outlining her perfect breasts through one of my old t-shirts. It was the sexiest thing I had ever seen. She moaned in her sleep, a sound I was all too familiar with when I was deep inside of her. I bit back a groan of my own. If my daughter wasn’t asleep behind me, I’d wake up Penny and make love to her. Again and again until neither one of us had enough energy to continue.
All I wanted to do was catch up on lost time between us. I wanted to show her how much I loved her. Penny was right. Love couldn’t really be defined. It wasn’t a balance of light and darkness or a whirlwind of color. It was a feeling. This feeling. And I’d spend the rest of my life making sure she felt this too.
Chapter 11
Tuesday - Penny
I wasn’t sure when I drifted to sleep, but when I opened my eyes I almost screamed. Then everything came back in a rush. It was James’ arms wrapped tightly around me. My husband. I’m in New York City. I’m a mother. I’m a wife. I took a deep breath. My heartbeat kicked up a notch instead of calming down. It all still felt unfamiliar, even though it felt like home. Would that feeling go away? Would this ever become normal again?
There was no light streaming into the room. It was probably the middle of the night. But my eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness as I stared at the man lying next to me. He belonged in a magazine. Or on a T.V. show. How did he end up here with me in the city that never sleeps? He belonged in Hollywood.
He said he had forgiven me. He said he loved me. He had said all the right things. But was any of it true? Were we really happy? I couldn’t remember anything about the day of the accident. But I did remember the note that I found. The one where it sounded like I tried to take my own life. James mentioned tonight that it was better if I didn’t remember that day. Was that why?
I stared at the stubble along his jaw line and the slope of his nose. His muscular shoulders and strong chest. I gently placed my hand on his left peck and ran my thumb along the scar. He said it was a minor cardiac episode. He brushed it off as no big deal. But he had surgery. Doctors had cut him open and done something to fix him. Or they had tried to fix him. James’ exhales sounded slightly labored. Like it was hard for him to breathe. He was more hurt than he was letting on. That much was clear. He was focused on me remembering and Liam healing and wasn’t thinking of himself. I felt fine. I was fine. Liam and James were the ones that needed my help, not the other way around.
All I knew for sure was that the man in front of me had my heart. He still felt like a stranger in some ways. But my memories were coming back. I knew that I loved him more than life itself. So I was going to figure out a way to alleviate any stress on him. And find a way to heal him and my baby. I leaned forward and placed a kiss against his scar. When I did, my eyes landed on a tattoo on the side of his ribcage. I had seen a glimpse of it before, but now the whole thing was visible in front of me.
It looked like the lines of an EKG. The ones you see on heart monitors. The beginning of it was flat and there was a date on it, and then the lines started up and down. It was the date when we first met in the coffee shop. His words came back to me in a rush. “My life began the day I met you,” I whispered out loud. But there were two more dates beneath the first one now. The date that Scarlett was born. And the date that Liam was born. Tears pricked the corners of my eyes. His heart beat for us. His family. Another memory rushed to the surface. One where James was hurt. Where he needed me just as much as he needed me now.
I woke up in the middle of the night freezing cold. I was hunched over in the chair beside James' bed, curled up in a ball. My eyes blinked in the darkness. The only light in the room was the medical equipment and the moon shining in through the windows.
I felt like I needed to throw up again. But I didn't have anything left to throw up. I was going to be a bad mother. Because I was selfish. Because I didn't know how to live without James. And every day that passed it seemed more likely that I'd need to.
The beeping was all I could hear in the room. The constant beeping. The beeping that was slowly driving me insane.
I wrapped my arms around myself and stood up. Despite how cold I felt, that wasn't why I had woken up. I was dreaming of our wedding night and what could have been. I let a small smile unfold on my lips. I pictured his hands on me, whispering that I was his wife. And he had let me slowly take off his tie and tuxedo jacket. I had unbuttoned his shirt and found his tattoo. His wedding present. The present I had completely forgotten about.
I glanced at the door. No one was going to come in right now. I needed to find it. I needed to see his gift to me. I slowly climbed onto his bed and lay down beside him.
He didn't smell like James. He smelled like the cheap shaving cream they had let me shave his face with and the soap I sponged him with. I ran my fingers down the scruff that was already forming on his face again. I wanted to kiss him, but there was a tube down his throat. Instead I gently ran my index finger across his bottom lip.
"Wake up, James. Please. You promised you wouldn't leave me. You told me this love was forever and always."
Nothing.
Every time he didn't respond, it killed me a little more inside. I slowly pulled down the front of his hospital gown, revealing tons of wires attached to his chest, monitoring his heartbeat. The tattoo wasn't on his chest. I kept pulling.
First I saw the bandage on his ribcage. Where they had fixed his punctured lung. I gently kissed the bandage. Then I saw the larger bandage on his stomach, the evidence of his ruptured spleen. I gently kissed the second bandage. But there was no tattoo.
I had the strangest feeling that maybe this wasn't James. Maybe this was some imposter, and James was somewhere happy and healthy. Somewhere away from me. Somewhere where no one would try to hurt him. But I knew that wasn't true. I knew every contour of his six pack. I knew the line of his happy trail.
I tried to swallow down the lump in my throat as I pulled the gown down his arms. There was the bandage on his arm. Stitches. I should have been counting my blessings, not my husband's fatal wounds. All three, so close to his heart that it broke mine even more.
Again, there was no tattoo. Where was it? I moved his arm slightly and looked along the inside of his bicep. And that's when I saw it. On the side of his chest, hidden by his arm. Because it was personal. It was only for me to see. Because he was mine and I was his.
"James." I ran my finger up and down the pulse of the tattoo. "You promised me forever. Getting married was supposed to be our new beginning. Not the end." I was choking on my words. "It's too soon! You have to wake up. I need you. I need you!"
I splayed my hand on his chest. "Wake up! You have to wake up! I need you. Baby, please, I need you." I pressed the side of my head against his chest. I needed to hear his heartbeat. I needed to know he was going to be okay. "Please, James. You promised. Please don't leave me like this. Please don't leave us."
And that's when I saw it. His index finger moved.
I blinked back my tears. “I’m going to fix everything, James. I’m going to take care of our family,” I whispered into the darkness. I slowly ducked out from between his arms and slid out of bed, being careful not to wake him. I looked over to see Scarlett sleeping peacefully. Every few breaths she made this adorable little snoring noise. I knew she hadn’t been sleeping well with everything going on. She only ever snored when she was truly exhausted. She would probably be out for several more hours.
I glanced at the clock. It was only 4 in the morning. There was plenty of time to do all the research that I needed. I tiptoed out of the bedroom and down the hall. Melissa and Josh were still sleeping on Scarlett’s bedroom floor. I glanced into Liam’s empty room. Always empty. I remembered taking Scarlett to the paint store to pick out the color. She and James spent the whole day painting this room, getting it ready for him. James had insisted that I couldn’t help, that I needed rest. But I watched the two of them laugh all day long, paint smeared on their clothes, hands, and faces. Mo
re paint ended up on them than it did on the walls. And I remembered thinking how lucky our baby was to join this family. A family full of love. And how soon I was going to get to bring him home. Tears pooled in the corners of my eyes. I’m going to fix this. I ignored the ache in my chest as I made my way down the stairs.
A memory flashed of a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs and I froze mid-step. Rob had been hurt here. I remembered that feeling of despair seep over me. We had all been hurt here. It felt like everyone was always out to get us. So many people had tried to break us down. The University of New Castle. Isabella. James’ mother. Dr. Nelson. We’d had our fair share of heartache and suffering. Enough was enough. I had always been a believer in fate. But fate had a funny way of returning the favor. Pick on someone your own size, stupid fate!
I walked down the rest of the stairs, pushing aside the negative memories. I only wanted to remember the positive ones. There were more of those. I could picture the Christmas garland strung around the banister and the tree in the living room on Christmas morning. A surprise from James even though he always tried to convince me it was actually Santa. He did it every year. Turned our home into a Christmas wonderland. Everywhere I turned, more memories rushed back. The good outweighed the bad tenfold. And I was going to put the bad to bed permanently this time.
When I reached my office another memory flooded to the surface. When we first moved in and this room was empty, James and I had made love in front of the fireplace. He had been complaining about not hiring movers and I had wanted to lighten his spirits. I wasn’t sure who recommended the idea, but we had ended up playing hide-and-go-seek. He had scared me half to death when his arms wrapped around me in the darkness. A smile spread across my face. But he more than made up for the fright.
I collapsed in my desk chair and turned on my laptop. As soon as I opened up an internet browser I started typing away. I looked up poison and how important it was to pump your stomach. I wasn’t sure if Liam or mine had been pumped. I looked up preemies and how their chances at survival depended on how far away from their due dates they were born. All the problems and issues they could have down the road. It was like I jumped into a dark hole and couldn’t escape. I researched hospitals and experimental drugs and jotted notes down in a notebook the whole time. The odds weren’t in our favor. I already knew that. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t hope. And I had to have hope. If I didn’t have that, there was nothing to hold on to.