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“Don’t worry, kid,” I assure her sleeping form. “I’ll always call you Alex. And I’ll beat up whoever bullies you because your dad is a pompous git.” As an afterthought, I add, “I might not be able to beat up kids but I’ll teach you how to kick them in the crotch. We’ll practice on your dad, first.”
Charlotte snorts from where she is lying on the couch, the back of her hand over her eyes. “I’d like to see that.”
She was so exhausted when I dropped by that I insisted on her laying down while I hold my little niece.
“Are all babies this delicate?” I muse aloud, and Charlotte makes a sound.
“That’s a stupid question.”
“Would Mila have been this tiny?” The words are torn from my lips, and this time Charlotte removes her hand to eye me with something akin to sympathy.
“Is it bothering you that you never got to know her as a baby?”
I shrug, my eyes tracing Alex’s smooth face. “I just wonder if I would be a different person if I had the opportunity to be a father to her when she was born.”
My relationship with Charlotte has always been one of understanding. She and I come from similar backgrounds, and whenever she is around, she offers a companionship that isn’t sisterly in feeling but that of a soldier who shared the same battlefield as me, who knows the stakes, who can see what the others can’t.
Charlotte doesn’t say anything for a few moments, staring up at the ceiling for a few moments. “I would think so. Children have this ability to change you so drastically. I can see so many changes in Philip now that Alexandria is in our life.”
I brood over the thought before saying, “Eve doesn’t trust me.”
“Oh?”
I frown. “At first she tried to blame my ‘playboy’ lifestyle. But it’s more than that.”
“You mean the kiss?”
“Yeah. She thinks I find her ‘convenient.’”
Charlotte sits up, stretches, and then moves over to the kitchen to make some coffee. “An odd choice of word.”
I move to Alex’s bassinet and place her in, gently, before returning to the armchair. “I think she’s scared of her feelings for me.”
Charlotte throws me a sharp look over her shoulder. “You think she has feelings for you?”
My eyes trace patterns across the wooden coffee table, idly, my brain working in overdrive as I try to solve this puzzle that is called Eve. “We always had a connection. She makes me feel human.”
A cup of coffee is handed to me with a faint smile. “You are human, Zayn.”
I glance at her, and our eyes meet and hold on for a few moments before she nods and takes her seat. “She calms you down. She calms down the thirst for violence inside you.”
“It’s a gaping hole,” I find myself muttering. “So much emptiness and anger. So much noise in my head. She takes it away.”
Memories of hands on my body.
Me, defending myself.
Strangers with leering looks on their faces approaching me as I huddle into a ball, trying to escape the nightmare.
Charlotte sips at her coffee, not saying anything, just observing me.
She went through similar circumstances. She knows what it was like. Or she knows what it was to see the nightmare and escape.
The black-haired boy with terrified blue eyes has never managed to escape. He was tormented, abused, broken.
He endured.
“I have nightmares sometimes,” Charlotte admits, softly. “But Philip chases them away. It’s like he wraps me in a cocoon of his love.”
