Page 12 of The Next Of Us
Sudden?
Suspicion crowded out every other thought as I narrowed my eyes on his face and bit out, “What is going on?”
Jaw clenched, he held my eyes, his gaze fiercely intense.“I’ll tell you.I’ll tell you everything.Just…Nadine…Please,” he closed his eyes, “come to the cabin with me.”
His breath hitched as a tear escaped beneath his closed lid and stained his cheek.
I pushed back my chair and closed my arms around him, drawing his head to my breast.
His arms banded around my waist like a vice as he pressed his face to my chest.“Please.”
I dropped my face to the top of his head and breathed him in.I hated that tear, hated and feared in equal measure everything it might have represented, but I loved this man.
“Okay.”
5
Tightrope
Nadine
The tightrope we’d walked these past months stretched taut across the silence between us despite the wall I thought we’d breached the night before.
Outside the car window, draped in white like a bride, the world shone, its beauty magnified by its very stillness, but I barely saw it.
It merely served as the backdrop to the scenes playing out in my mind, a pristine canvas in the black box theater of night.
Finding out we were pregnant with Thalia when Aaron was only 19 was a shock.At 20, I wasn’t much older, but Aaron was still a freaking teenager.I hated to think about those early days when I hung suspended between will I or won’t I keep the baby, a baby who was now all grown up and the undisputed light of my life.
Five years after Thalia, or Boomer as Aaron had monikered her, arrived on the scene, Brandon entered the world.I smiled to myself.Brandon, meaning broom-covered hill, was sure to escape Aaron’s penchant for horrible nicknames.But no.Aaron found an alternate meaning, swordsmith, and so dubbed my sweet baby, ‘Spike’.
This past year had sucked the life and joy from both of us.
I had changed.
So had he.
Especially toward me.
My hand itched to reach for his thigh, but it no longer came easy.I tucked it under my own.
I had no regrets about us or our life, but I did have questions.
Had I trapped him?
Would he have eventually found someone else better suited to him at university?
Would I have found someone else?
These questions plagued me after we had our second child.We chased them away together with therapy and a short stint of antidepressants, but the vacuum of his inexplicable silence brought them back with a vengeance.
Despair cast a dark shadow, but I drew in a quiet breath and forced myself to focus on the truth and not the lie.
Despite the statistics all but guaranteeing our marriage would fail, Aaron and I had made it.
We raised our kids.We loved them well.And we loved each other.
Even if this weekend ended in divorce, we had made a beautiful family.
