Billy stirs behind me.
He sleeps lightly now, ever since the baby was born. Before, sleep had been something he fell into like a dead man, exhausted by guilt or violence or both. Now he sleeps in fragile pieces, a man trying to keep the world from touching the things he loves.
His hand brushes my hip.
Warm.
Reassuring.
A tether.
“I’m awake,” he murmurs into the back of my hair, lips brushing my nape with a gentle kiss, voice still rough with sleep.
“I know.”
I smile, still staring down at August, thinking of how much he looks like a complete fifty-fifty split of us both, my lips, Billy’s chin, my cheekbones, Billy’s nose, a mix of our eyes, a grey-blue,greyzel.
I lean back into him, allowing his warmth to seep into me.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” I whisper, feeling his hand smooth around my hip, his splayed fingers over my belly.
“You didn’t,” he lies.
He always hears me, even in dreams.
Billy presses a kiss to my shoulder.
“Can’t sleep?” he asks.
I shake my head, my hair coming forward of my shoulders, a strand sticking itself to my lip, catching in my eyelashes.
“He’s six months old tomorrow,” I whisper, tears springing to my tired eyes. “It’s been six months.”
He doesn’t need me to elaborate. He knows what I mean, the blood, the whip, the moment the universe cracked open and something new crawled out of it screaming.
He exhales against my skin, “Feels like a lifetime,” he says.
“It does.”
“A good one?” His tone tries to be light.
It fails.
I turn to look at him, his face is half-shadowed, half-soft, blue eyes dark, mouth gentle, brow creased with the kind of worry he no longer tries to hide from me.
I run a finger across the faint scar on his shoulder blade.
One of many.
One of too many.
“We’re alive,” I say.
It’s not an answer, but it’s the truth.
He pulls me onto his chest, wrapping both arms around me like he’s trying to anchor us both to the same piece of earth.
“Sometimes,” he confesses into the dark, “I look at you and him, and it feels like everything I ever wanted is in this one room. And other times I feel like the walls are going to crush us.”
