Page 33 of Odin
I’mnotdying. My throat is no longer closed. The air is going in and coming back out. My stomach might be spinning and my head throbbing, but those are just the aftereffects. There’sair. I’mbreathing. I’m not going to die right here in front of her.
“I’m sorry.”
“For this, or this?”The panic attack or the pregnancy. “Either way, there’s nothing to be sorry for. This isn’t some weird cosmic karma. It’s biology. Yours and mine. Science. I don’t think of it as a punishment. I don’t want to undo what we did. Why would I regret knowing you? You are the brightest point of one of the darkest times in my life. No shame,” she repeats firmly. “No guilt.” Her eyes roam up and down my face.
I’m still spiraling.
I had a few illicit thoughts over the past weeks. Dreams that I woke sore and aching from in ways that weren’t just physical. I know that I’m not meant for Willow. She deserves better, of course, but she also deserves someone who will live out a life beside her. I’ll never be a respectable kind of person. Satan’s Angels might be viewed with something akin to respect in Hart because of all the good we’ve done for this town. We might be one percenters, but the club has shifted towards legalizing most of its cash flow, and we’ve never been into doing what most of the other clubs think it’s okay to put into a society just because they’ve personally been spurned.
I don’t feel like I’m a bad man, but I could be the best of men and still be completely wrong for her. For this. For a child.
God, by the time this baby is ten years old, I’ll be sixty. When they graduate high school, I’ll be old enough to be their grandfather. I probably won’t even make it to see them get married or maybe even graduate college. How is that fair to them?
No matter what kind of out of control thoughts plagued me in my unguarded moments, I never dreamed that me and Willow would be together, that we’d have a happy ending, because the world will always be there, ready to cut in and invade whatever happiness we might build with the cold cutting edge of reality.
Fuck.
Willow presses in, her brow knitted tightly in concern. The back of her hand grazes my forehead like a whisper of silk.
“You’re still so pale. Shit. Are you going to pass out?”
I try to shake my head, but the black is back, pushing in from the sides, and I sway violently from side to side instead.
“Oh my god. I should have brought juice or something.” She snaps her head around, whipping me in the face with hair that smells like grapefruits and fresh air. “Hold on.” Her hand curls around my shoulder. “You’re going to hold on, right?”
“Yeah,” I force out, just so I don’t terrify her completely.
She’s gone in a whisper of citrus scented air, leaving the bench beside me painfully empty. I can believe in that reality more than I can in the fact that she’s here and in what she just told me. I can understand that she’s pregnant, even though that alone makes my head swim, but what she’s offered? The fact that she believes I’d be any kind of decent father or role model for anyone?
It hurts in all the ways that the best things in life still cause pain and fill a person up with terror.
“Odin?” The air pressure changes and I know that she’s back.
If I had two good eyes, maybe I could actually fucking see something, but I can’t shake the black from this one. I turn my face towards her like I’m searching for the warmth of the sun.
“Here. I got you ice cream from that little cart over there. Open. I’ll feed it to you.”
There’s no fucking way I’m going to let her do that. I fumble with my hands to try and find the damn thing, and that’s exactly when she presses the spoon of the cold, sweet treat to my lips. I open only to protest, and she stuffs it in.
Strawberry.
The creamy goodness of one of the only flavors I like, floods over my tongue. How the hell did she know? If she’d picked vanilla, I might have yakked all over her.
She feeds me calmly, spoon after spoon. The sugar really does help, or maybe it’s just shock fucking off now that I’ve had a good fifteen minutes to process. My brain might not have sorted things out, but I guess my body is doing its thing. Even if it’s old as fuck.
Shit.
As soon as she senses me come back online, she passes the bowl into my hands. It’s huge. She must have got the largest size they have, and they scooped half the pail into the clear plastic thing.
I don’t have much of a filter on a good day, and right now, my hatches are far from hatched and my defenses are far from defending.
“Are you sure you want someone like me in your child’s life?”
Her hand gravitates to my knee like she needs to brace us both. “What do you mean someone like you?”
I don’t want to explain my entire sordid childhood to her. I’ve already given her most of the outline of my younger years. I do want her to understand that I have no idea how to be a father, though. “My mom was a drug addict. She used all throughout her pregnancy. I was born addicted. My grandma took care of me, I guess, until I was four. I don’t remember much of anything about any of that. When she passed, I went to live with my aunt. She was my mom’s younger sister. She didn’t want me, but she did like the sympathy people gave her, or the props, I guess, for looking after her dead sister’s kid after she OD’d and her own mother passed,” I pause, hating to go back to my childhood, but she has to know.
She’s looking at me with such kindness in her eyes I can hardly bear to continue, but she places a warm hand on my knee.
