“Bring back some of that baby oil you bought the other day,” Hendrix calls out.
I trip over my feet when my thighs clench. Hendrix and baby oil spell trouble. The really good kind for me.
The hallway is dark, the silence only disturbed by Fénix’s agitated whines. We keep the door to his room open at night and turn on one of those starry sky nightlights that projects onto the ceiling. Low classical music plays from the small radio I bought because I read somewhere that it’s not only soothing, but the music can also help with a baby’s brain development.
Lifting Fénix from his crib, I gently bounce him and pat his back. “Hey, little man. What’s all the fuss for? I just fed you two hours ago.”
I get my answer when I smell his diaper. How can babies smell so good, but their shit reek like a sewer?
Of course, he doesn’t make it easy. He wriggles like a happy puppy when I place him on the changing table, smearing crap all over his backside when I try to undress him from his onesie. Fénix is biologically Constantine’s, but I think some of Hendrix’s DNA must have snuck in at some point during conception.
After thirty wet wipes and a hefty amount of Boudreaux’s butt paste, I’m finally able to redress him. “There. All clean.” I blow a raspberry on his soft belly, much to his squirming delight. “All right, little monster. Let’s get you back to sleep.”
I look forward to the day when he is able to sleep through the night. At least I’m not having to feed him every three hours anymore. Those first weeks after he was born were pure exhaustion for all of us. I’ve never been so tired in my life. I chalked it up to good practice for when I start my residency, and I get to look forward to twelve-hour shifts, many of them probably overnighters, at the hospital.
Sitting down in the glider that faces the window, I sing Fénix the lullabies Mama used to sing to me. In these quiet moments, when it’s just the two of us, I often think of my parents, and the sadness creeps in. Fénix will grow up never knowing his grandparents, not really. Stories I will tell him won’t be the same. He will never know their love, or how good one of Mama’s hugs felt, or hear the sound of Papa’s deep laughter.
So much time has passed since I last saw them. There are days when I have trouble picturing them when they were happy, the only vivid memory I still carry of them being the night they were murdered right in front of me. A memory no child should ever be forced to carry.
My lips linger when they brush a kiss over my son’s forehead. “Only sweet dreams,” I whisper as I lay my greatest miracle back down in his crib.
I never thought I would get this. True love. A family. God, how I wished for them on those lonely nights at the farm when I’d look up at the stars, searching for something, for them, even though I couldn’t remember who they were. My mind locked the door on my past, but my heart never did. Alana gave me a good life and cherished me like a daughter, but I never truly felt whole.
Tiptoeing out of the bedroom, I head downstairs. Tristan wasn’t in bed with us when I woke from the dream. He hasn’t been sleeping well since the accident. Several mornings, I’ve found him outside on the back patio deck, just staring out at nothing, waiting for the sun to rise, an untouched, half-full glass of whiskey in his hand.
Sure enough, when I get to the back door, I see him sitting outside, alone, in the darkness. Tiny puffs of his breath waft up like smoke into the cold air as he stares out over the backyard. Backtracking, I grab the cotton fisherman throw blanket I like to cuddle with from the couch and wrap it around me.
The hinges quietly creak when I open the screen door, and Tristan glances over, those gorgeous light-brown eyes following me as I cross barefoot over to him. Without a word, I climb into his lap, draping my legs over the arm of the lounger, and snuggle in when his arms come around me.
His chest expands with a deep inhalation, his cheek tenderly nuzzling the top of my head. “You always feel like heaven in my arms,” he whispers against my ear.
For such a proud man who was forced to endure so much pain, Tristan wears his feelings for me like a jagged, open wound, never shy to show me the soft heart that beats underneath the hardened exterior.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Better now.”
Holding my ear to his chest, I listen to the solid thump, the sound blending with the early-hour hoot of an owl somewhere in the distance.
“I keep replaying it,” he says. “The sounds and chaos right before everything just…stopped. Then nothing. No bright light or angels or demons came to drag me away to the afterlife. Just…nothing. Like an abyss of unending emptiness. And then you appeared, reaching for me, begging me to stay.”
My breathing constricts. “I’m glad you listened.”
We hold one another just a little tighter. The thought of losing him—I don’t think I would ever recover. How can your heart continue to beat when part of it is unexpectedly and cruelly ripped right out of your chest?
“I hate that it was that close. We just found each other again, Red. We have a child. I haven’t even had the fucking chance to be the husband and the father I promised I’d be.” His voice breaks, shattering me in the process.
Fighting the sting of tears, I lift my head and take his gorgeously stubbled face between my hands. “You kept your promise. You came back to us.”
“What if I can’t next time?”
I refuse to accept that possibility. “Wherever you are, I will find you.Gheobhaidh mo chroí do chroí.”
Our lips meet, our kiss filled with desperation as the horizon brightens with the first streaks of dawn. A new day. One I might not have had with him if Aleksander hadn’t…don’t go there.
As if sharing the same thought, Tristan says, “I owe Aleks my life. It’s a debt I need to pay back with blood.”
Aleksander already feels a shit-ton of guilt. He blames himself because Tristan almost became collateral damage in a feud between the Petrovs and Androvs that has gone on fordecades. All because of greed. More power. More money. More territory. It’s a recurring theme we can’t escape from.
