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“We’ve had some fucking great times too, Belles.”
“We have.”
“Like that time I took you shark diving.”
“That wasn’t fun. You and Casper have a seriously warped sense of a great time.”
“Yes, but afterwards…the adrenaline made for great—”
“Jesus!” Covering his mouth with my hand, I scowl at him. “Really? We’re back to you and your cum-rod getting all up in my butt?”
“Shitbox. I said shitbox. Swapping out that word changes the context. It’s not as jovial and fun. And getting all up in there is…fun.”
Fucking hell.
“I swear to God! You know what else I told your sister?”
“That I’m God?” he grins.
“That you’re a fucking pain and that sometimes I really have to hold on to all the cares I give for you because you are hard work!”
“You’re the one that said if you really want something, you have to work for it. I’m sticking with your motto.” Leaning in, he kisses my forehead and then the tip of my nose. “I guess it means you really want me, huh?”
“I don’t want you. I own you, remember? You’re mine. My right person. And I would go back and walk the line quietly if it meant the last six months turned out differently. Because my only regret in this life we’ve chosen is losing our little girl. Everything else…I would do it all again in a flash of a heartbeat.”
A sober softness smooths his face. In an instant he’s got me on my back. My body protests at taking his weight, but as he kisses my face over and again, dotting his physical affection on me, the physical pain slowly ebbs away.
“You didn’t lose her, Arabella.”
He slips down my body, his lips trailing kisses down my neck to my chest. Although I’m naked and I feel his awareness of the fact, he doesn’t once try to sway the moment into something sexual.
It’s one of the things I’ve always found astonishing about him. Christopher loves to fuck. We both do. But he never lets that cloud his awareness of the situation. He’s always so attuned. So good at gauging things.
“You don’t lose a baby. I’ve always hated the way people say that. It’s so dismissive. Like another life is something you can misplace.”
“That’s not what I meant.” My heart feels for him. Not as someone that has gone through all this with him. But as someone who loves him so dearly that I feel his pain on top of mine. I feel his sorrow and his resentment. And despite what I told him last night—I am sorry for leaving him. I’m sorry for not being there to hold his hand for both our sakes. Even if I’m not sorry for doing what I could to protect him.
“It’s impossible to lose a baby,” he says again, laying his head on my stomach.
His finger traces my scars, and I really expected to feel something other than the comfort of our closeness.
“They’re alive and it doesn’t matter how small or new or any of those fucking clinical terms they like to use. They are real and they have hearts. Beating hearts. So you can’t lose them. Sometimes they-they…they die. They’re people and they die.”
They’re people and they die.
It’s a hard fact. There’s no way to pretty it up or sugar-coat it.
Closing my arms around his head, I hold him to me, trying as hard as I can to give him some form of relief.
Where I woke up to our dead child, he watched her go. I can feel a lot of things and hurt in many ways, but I’ll never know or understand what that moment did to him.
And it’s wrong of me to envy something so morbid, but I do. I wish I knew. I wish I felt it. And I wish I understood.
I wish I had been there with them. That I could miss her weight in my hands. Instead, I live with the constant physical emptiness. The ghost of a bump and the ghost of our baby.
“When we look back on this, I want to see a trail, Christopher. A thick, crimson path, and I want to know that I helped pave it. Not because it’s justice or retribution. I just want blood. I want to win.”
“You can have whatever you want, Belles. Any fucking thing.” There’s deep, never-ending affection and devotion in the way he presses a kiss to my belly. The caress of his fingers is like a biological obsession of his body with mine. “It’s all yours, so long as you don’t leave me again.”
