Page 63 of Axe
I felt like I was on shaky ground. Sure, things seemed good—no, fucking great—but I couldn’t help but feel uneasy about what the future really held for us. I believed him when he said he wanted all of me, forever, but I wondered if we weren’t both lost in the newness of the whole thing. Or that he would wake up one day and realize that I was broken beyond repair. Would there be a point when all of my demons would be too much for him? What about raising a kid that wasn’t his? That wasn’t an easy thing. And let’s not forget where Neiryn and I came from. Would he always be able to see past my entanglement with Savage?
In a sense, I was waiting for reality to slap him in the face, for the day when he wised up and realized we weren’t worth the trouble.
But for now, I would just enjoy it. I learned a long time ago that you couldn’t control the future and that in the blink of an eye your life could change. I was going to take the good, however it came and for however long it let me hold onto it.
“I can hear you thinking over there,” he said and his words brought me back to reality. I shook my head, clearing away everything.
“I’m fine,” I said with a tentative smile that I tried to pass off as confident. I could see it on his face that he didn’t believe me for a second.
“A woman is never fine. Learned that a long time ago,” he responded as he shifted Neiryn in his arms. “I’m gonna go put him down. When I get back, you are gonna talk to me.”
With that, he stood. My eyes followed him until he was upstairs and out of sight. When he returned, he flopped down on the couch, reached over and grabbed my waist, then pulled me onto his lap. His arms went around me, holding me tightly against his chest as if he was letting me know he wasn’t going to let me go.
“Now, bitch, tell me what the hell has got you looking so lost,” he said then kissed the side of my head.
“I just…” I started but had a hard time grasping the words that followed.
To have said that I was bad at communicating would have been putting it mildly. I’d basically had only myself to talk to for the last seven years, and well, Neiryn, but he wasn’t much for conversation.
“Baby,” he said as he ran his fingers through my hair and pulled my head back so that I was forced to look into his eyes. “I might not be great at this relationship shit. Truth is, I know I downright suck. But none of that has to do with you. In fact, I’ve never even really wanted to try like this before. I want you to know that I will bend over backwards, dive to the deepest depths of the ocean, and jump into a damn volcano to make this work, to do right by you.”
I couldn’t say anything in return. This man had my heart and he was doing his best to hold onto it and not crush it at the same time. I understood that for him it was trial and error on getting it right. But that meant that he was trying with everything that he had in him. Not that I was exactly miss-know-it-all when it came to relationships either. I was just as blind as him.
“I love you,” he whispered, his voice suddenly sounding choked up with emotion. “That ain’t gonna change today, tomorrow, or fuck, fifty years from now.”
“You don’t know that,” I said, trying my best to blink away the tears.
“Yes,” he stated. “Yes, I do. Because I’ve never felt as whole as when I’m here with you and Lil man. I’ve never felt the calm that I’ve craved my whole fuckin’ life. And that is what I get the moment I see you, a peaceful stillness of my soul.”
He kissed me as if he were kissing all of the bad, self-doubting thoughts away. He held me like he never wanted to let me go. He touched me like I was the most precious thing in the world.
He pulled away from my lips and I whimpered in protest. His fingers grazed the side of my face as he gently tucked my hair behind my ear. I loved the tenderness that he could give me as much as I craved the force with which he would take me.
“We may not be normal,” he said. I raised my brow at him and he chuckled. “Okay, we are definitely not normal. My point is, there are a lot of things about us that may not seem like they would work. But they do. This is us, baby, and admit it, its fucking perfect.”
I smiled because he was right. We weren’t like most people and so, therefore, our relationship would be like that either. But in our individual darkness, we became each other’s hope. He was the light that lit my way and I was the flame that kept his demons at bay.
The next morning, our blissful little bubble was popped with the loud ring of his phone. The moment he answered, I knew things were about to go sideways and I got a twisted feeling in my gut. I suddenly felt like things were about to get really bad, the kind of bad that you didn’t come back from. And I wondered if it would be my end.
