Page 70 of Like Fathers, Like Son
Blaze
IsleptcurledaroundAnneka like we’d always been supposed to, like I’d never managed with her full consent before. It was everything I knew it would be, and my sense of being in the right place was solidified in my mind by the time I woke up.
She was mine, and being together wasn’t enough. I had to keep her, and that meant getting her back to the house with me.
She wouldn’t like it at first, I was pretty sure, because she’d returned to her life, and was used to seeing her mum and friends. Jesus, maybe she could live there with me, but I could let her come and go sometimes, so she wasn’t so trapped. I had no idea how to make this work, but I knew I would.
I was woken with this desperate urge to watch the sunrise from the beach, something I’d never been in a position to do before, but I’d woken crazy early as I always did, so it had to be done.
“Anneka?” I lightly shook her shoulder, and she grumbled, rubbing her face against the pillow.
“Hey, wake up. Wanna watch the sunrise with me?”
She cracked one eye open to glare at me in the dim light, my phone screen providing the only light in that moment.
“Are you out of your fucking mind? It’s not even light yet?”
I grinned, feeling oddly amused by her crankiness in the morning, and wondering if it was the norm, or if she was just cranky today for some reason.
“It’ll be amazing from the beach. Come with me.”
She promptly closed her eye again, and snuggled deeper into the covers.
“Nope.”
“I’ll keep you warm,” I promised, and she sighed, both eyes popping open.
“I’m pregnant, Blaze. Do you understand that sleep is important for the baby I’m growing?” Oh. She was right, I should be more respectful of that stuff, shouldn’t I? Once I had her back at the house, I’d make sure she got all the rest she needed.
“Fine. You rest while I go watch, then I’ll come back for you. We’ll go home together.”
She frowned, lifting her head from the pillow.
“You mean our separate homes, right?”
“Nope,” I mimicked her earlier response, as I kissed her forehead and eased out of the bed carefully, tucking the bedding back around her.
She glared at me before she settled back down.
“We’ll see about that, won’t we?”
I laughed it off then, but by the time I’d wrapped up in my clothes and made the icy walk down to the beach in the dark, I realised that she planned to fight me on that one thing. That one thing that was the key to our future. If she pushed me into it, I’d have to take action she really wouldn’t like, to force the issue. She’d come around again though, right?
I reached the beach just as the sun started to peek over the waterline, and it was every bit as breath-taking and beautiful as I’d imagined. I wished again that Anneka had chosen to come with me to watch, because it could have been one of those moments we’d look back upon years from now, and sigh over how romantic it had been.
I shouldn’t have let her refuse. I should have forcibly dressed her and marched her down here for it, but then even I could see how that behaviour would prevent it from being that moment, instead being something else I’d forced her into.
I sat on the cold sand, and hugged my legs as I watched the sky turning beautiful shades of peach and pink, darkening to vivid orange as the world around me started to brighten. I’d seen the sun rising before, but it had been nothing like this. It had just grown lighter, which had been a big disappointment that time, but this? This was epic. A reminder that life went on all around us, that there was always something bigger than us, something more powerful.
It quieted my soul, leaving me calm and peaceful, kinda like I’d been last night with Anneka. I hadn’t hurt her. She didn’t fight me, and I didn’t feel the need to hurt her. Could we be like that in future, or would I start to yearn for the fight just so I had a reason to hurt her?
I was smart enough to realise that genetically I hadn’t exactly won the sanity lottery, and being raised by parents like mine had skewed my understanding of what romance and love should be. Not that I wasn’t raised happy, by parents who loved me and my siblings, but instead of trying to deter the kind of behaviour that put people behind bars, they supported it, enabled it, encouraged it even.
Between that and mum’s diaries, I was never going to be normal, was I? Never going to look at a relationship with the kind of understanding that a large percentage of the population did. I saw things differently. I expected different things, and I expected people to bend to my will, and give me what I wanted, when perhaps I should be accepting the word ‘no’ every now and then.
As the sky grew light enough that the day had fully dawned, and I could no longer feel my ass after sitting on the cold sand, I made my way back to the hotel. It was time to take Anneka back to the house, regardless of her wishes, because we had a baby to raise together, and she knew that fighting me wouldn’t make a difference.
Anneka
