Page 74 of Like Fathers, Like Son
“On the offchance that nobody has her, and she ran… what are you planning to do here?”
He finally released my arm, but my urgency had faded a little, because I had no fucking idea. We’d just come to some kind of agreement about our future together, or at least I’d thought we did.
What if she’d just been playing me? What if it had just been some kind of bullshit to get me to let my guard down? Was I going to just force her back with me? Did I even want her enough to keep having to force the situation?
There was a baby to consider now too, but did that excuse what she’d done if, in fact, she really had done yet another runner on me?
“Blaze?”
“I don’t know, okay? I need to know the situation to make that decision. She’s not keeping my fucking child away from me. Now I’m going in, and I want you to wait here. I’ll keep an open call with you, so you can come in if needed, but otherwise…I need to be the one to rescue her, if there’s rescuing to be done. You get that right? I have to prove to her that I can be her saviour, that I’m someone she can rely on to keep her safe.”
They didn’t like it, but they grudgingly agreed, so we started a call on our phones, and I popped my wireless ear bud in, stuffing the phone in my back pocket. They had the call on speaker and were sitting at the ready.
They both nodded at me and I left, wondering what the fuck I was about to find in that building. What if someone else did have her? What if they were doing the things I’d done to her? What if they accidentally, or deliberately, killed our baby?
That last thought had me running, and I didn’t stop until I reached the nearest window, and carefully leaned in to look for my woman. There was nobody in that room, and the door was right beside it, so I carefully checked it and, finding it unlocked, I let myself in. Maybe she really was in here alone, and hiding. A guy like me, I mean, he’d lock the fucking door, right?
Was I running in to rescue a woman who’d just keep running from me, no matter how many times it seemed like she’d accepted our future together? I hesitated in the dusty room filled with covered appliances. An industrial kitchen, perhaps?
A scream caught my attention, and the only thought in my mind then was ‘save her’. I had to save my family from whoever had them, and I’d tear apart whoever had touched her.
Gray
I DIDN’T LIKE THE kid going in alone, even though I could kinda understand the fact that it was from some foolish need to be her fucking white knight, or something.
Dory muted the phone, so we could talk freely without distracting Blaze, and he looked as worried as I felt.
“I don’t like this, Gray.”
“Well, duh, Dory. It’s not exactly the ideal situation, is it? You’re thinking she did a runner again? I think our boy has enough of both of us in him, to be able to lock that shit down next time. He might be making a few rookie mistakes, but he’s learning along the way.”
I grabbed the back of the seat to drag myself forward to lean between the seats. The tingling pins and needles sensation in my arm made me curse under my breath.It turns out burns are fucking evil.
I’d had multiple treatments and skin grafts, and even though the finished result still looked a bit likeFreddy Krueger’sface, at least the arm was mostly mobile. It was just weaker, and hurt like a bitch more often than I ever admitted to Dory and Wilma.
“Gray, look, I know we’re fucking psychos and this worked for us, but maybe it’s just because Wilma was the right fit for us. Right now, we’re literally enabling our own son while he lives out a fantasy of recreating our past, or something. We’re both also smart enough to know that this is fucking wrong. We are, right?”
Blaze was muttering something quietly so we both paused to listen, in case our boy needed our help, but he fell silent again and we heard a shuffling noise, like he was moving around in there.
We’d seen him check the window and then go in, but now we were reliant on what we could hear to save him. We’d always fucking save our kid, even if it meant everyone else in that room had to die.
Dory knew this too, but sometimes that flicker of conscience got in his way. I’d have to fuck that out of him later, but for right now, Blaze might need us. He was our only priority right now.
Dory
IT WAS LIKE TALKING to a brick wall, because of course, Gray was way more fucked up than me, and he always had been. He definitely intended to keep helping Blaze with whatever he wanted to do to keep Anneka, and even though I’d thought I was completely on board with that, I had occasional doubts.
When we took Wilma, she’d also struggled with our behaviour, and treatment of her. She’d struggled with being a captive at our whims, and it was only when she started to focus on who we really were as people, that she recognised something in us. Something that matched something in her too.
I was pretty sure Anneka didn’t suffer from the same affliction as us, or Blaze, for that matter. Our son was incredibly, scarily intelligent in terms of his IQ, but he could be just as dumb as us when it came to matters of the heart and soul.
A distant scream made us sit up and pay extra attention, but Blaze muttered for us to stay put while he checked it out. We both got out of the car anyway, and started heading towards the building, because when he needed us, we weren’t going to be pissing around.
“You gonna be up to this?” Gray asked me, even though I should have been asking him. I knew that his arm was giving him extra trouble today. The cold always seemed to make it play up more, even though he always tried to hide it.
“Whatever our son needs, he gets,” I said firmly, catching Gray’s nod of agreement. We’d always said we wanted to do better than our own parents, and this was our chance to prove it. If anyone touched a single hair on his head, we’d both make sure they suffered for days.
Anneka
