Page 35 of Liquids

“You don’t have to do anything just because I’m there, Rig. I’m already impressed.”

“That’s not how a guy’s brain works, babe. His girl’s there, he’s gonna bring his best game.”

His girl?

I swallow. “I’m your girl?”

He glances over at me, and his mouth has an amused twist. “Of course you are. Just don’t read too much into it.”

“Like lifelong commitment and babies, you mean?” I say, laughing.

“Yeah,” he says, grinning back. “None of that shit.”

God, I like him. And I want to say that I’m trying not to read anything into all of this, but it’s becoming increasingly hard when he takes care of me as well as he does.

My eyes blink open later to find a shadow looming over me in the dark. “What’s your dream, Carl?” Rig says, voice rough from sleep.

I roll over onto my back as he collapses back down next to me. “What? Have you been lying awake?”

“Sometimes things play on my mind. Answer the fucking question. What’s your dream?”

To pay my debts off? Live somewhere where the smell of the drains doesn’t make me gag on a daily basis? To somehow relive the whole thing with Charlie and do it right this time?

“Peace.”

“Peace,” he rumbles beside me like he’s chewing the word over. “Why don’t you have that?”

I run my hand down my face. “Not for me, for him.”

“He has peace, babe.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because for all the time he was alive, he had you. You gave him that.”

And my hand drops away as I stare up at the ceiling in the darkness. He didn’t see him, didn’t see how he struggled to breathe. How he fought to live. God, every time I think about it, it’s unbearable.

“Is that why you have to stay here, to be close to him?” he adds.

“I have to protect him. It’s messed up, I know.”

“You get that it’s not your fault, right?”

“I should have left Mark. I knew it. All through my pregnancy I was thinking about it. He’d hit me sometimes, not often, but there was enough doubt in my mind to justify it.” I twist my head on the pillow to find Rig also lying on his back and staring at the ceiling. “That’s why I don’t draw or paint. I gave it up as a punishment for not getting the hell out of there when I knew …”

His body goes rigid beside me. “Not getting … What the fuck?”

I can’t justify it to him. I know it makes no sense, but I have to do something. There was nothing to do in that incubator room but watch him die.

“You’ve been punishing yourself for ten years?” he growls. “People make mistakes, babe.”

Yeah, yeah. “I understand that. Doesn’t make it any easier. I watched him struggle, Rig. I watched him die.” The last words come out on a gulp as my eyes fill with tears.

“Fucking hell,” he says, as he pulls me into him, and I press my nose into his chest hair and breathe. Breathe. Breathe. I don’t know how much time goes past, but eventually I feel my body relax into him.

“Worst thing in the world that, babe. I’m sorry,” he rumbles.

I tip my head back to look at him. “What’s your biggest mistake?”