My fingers curl, irritation nipping at the back of my skull at how easily I can see it. How effortlessly it comes into focus. I already know how she’d feel beneath my palm as I brush it over the life we created. How she’d sigh and shift closer to me, which would immediately prompt Dom to tighten his hold on her. Maybe she’d wake up, sleepy lashes lifting, sleep heavy eyes finding me in the semi darkness. She’d smile and reach for me, tug me back into bed with them, ignoring my halfhearted protest that I need to get to work.
“Five more minutes, Nicky,” she’d murmur, and I’d submit because she asked.
I’d kick out of my shoes and crawl back into her arms.
But that’s just a fantasy.
A pathetic delusion that will never happen because that space… her space would be empty the second things got too rough. I would live in perpetual fear of ever closing my eyes.
Yet, that fantasy continues to linger. Whisps of smoke clouding my sanity. It draws me in deeper, encases me in the illusion of walking into the kitchen to her sitting at the island, our baby against her breast while Dom cooks breakfast. Us piled together on the sofa, a beautiful little girl with her mom’s bright eyes and pigtails in my lap while we watch Christmas cartoons.
I suck in a breath still scented with her and my traitorous cock twitches as if all too eager, willing and able to make my wish come true.
“Babe?”
The quiet murmur of Dominic’s voice has my head turning in the direction of my boyfriend. His dark eyes bounce between the road and me filled with questions and concern.
“Yeah?”
He nudges a chin in the direction of the windshield. “Left or right?”
I almost laugh at the blatant fork in the road. The two paths expand ahead like some cosmic joke.
One in the direction of Pine Meadows Farm.
One leading out of Piper Falls and back home.
I almost say right.
“Left.”
Dom turns the wheel and we continue along the winding path.
Pine Meadows Farm hasn’t changed since I was old enough to follow Dad through the maze of pine trees. It’s still a three-story log cabin standing watch over a sprawling field of prickly branches dusted with a fine layer of snow. Lights loop through branches and swoop overhead in a tent formation. I remember as a child, I would run wild through the place. Everything about it felt magical. That magic dimmed the older I got and the outing became a task I was compelled to attend.
It feels different again.
In the bright lull of early morning, the faint overcast of a lingering storm, the lights aren’t as sharp. They don’t cast the dazzling sparkle that I remember. Yet, when I roll out and reach for Isla’s door, something tingles through me.
Excitement?
I can’t fathom why, but it stays as she ducks out of her seat and lifts her face towards mine. The soft velvet brown of her eyes catch on my soul and I feel it like a punch.
“Thank you,” she whispers, and the faint rasp takes me back to her in the foyer, face wedged against Dom’s chest, sobbing like her world was shattering.
Memories of it steal every sprinkling of joy I’d been feeling, and it’s replaced with an anger, a homicidal hunger to find the person responsible and gut them. A strange and illogical desire when I’m a fucking lawyer. I help put crazy people behind bars. I don’t actively promote homicide, and yet…
I would for her.
I would commit all manners of atrocities for her.
Instead, I take a step back and wait for her to move so I can shut her door. Dom appears at her other side and, without a word, takes her hand. His big one swallows her tiny one with the curling of his fingers. She doesn’t fight him. Doesn’t pull away. She turns her face up to his with that same sweet expression of such trust and my boyfriend grins at her like they’d done this a million times.
And I’m not jealous.
I’m nearly certain I’m not. Not that he might like her more or that she might steal him. The gnawing in the pit of my stomach is from how easy they make it look.
How much I like seeing them together.
