Page 170 of Iced Up Love: Part Two
Comfort.
Not effort.
The kettle clicks on.
My hands move.
This is what I want. This is what I stay for.
thirty-seven
Elijah
By the time she falls asleep, the apartment has gone quiet in the kind of way that should feel peaceful and doesn’t.
There is food still cooling in the kitchen, a mug half-finished on the bedside table, a soft lamp burning low in the corner because Jackson insisted the room felt too clinical in the dark, and her body is finally still beneath the blankets after the effort of getting her home, getting her settled, getting enough into her that Zach was satisfied she wouldn’t wake up nauseous and shaking in the middle of the night. All of it should feel like progress. It should feel like relief. It should feel like we brought her back here and that means something good.
Instead, all I can think every time I look at her is that walls did not save her last time.
A locked door did not save her. A known space did not save her. Being loved did not save her.
She is home now, and that should matter more than it does, but all it really does is sharpen the reality that I have brought her back into a world where the danger has not actually ended.
Jackson sits on one side of her, half-turned toward the bed, one forearm resting near her pillow, his fingers moving through her hair every now and then in slow strokes that look absentminded until I watch him too closely and realize there is nothing absentminded about them at all. He is touching her because he needs the proof of her there under his hand, because the second he stops, his mind will go back to that car, to her body going still, to whatever part of himself has not stopped panicking since.
Zach is on the other side, closer to her waist and legs, seated but not relaxed, his shoulders still carrying that rigid edge that tells me he’s monitoring even when he looks still. He has already adjusted her pillows twice, checked the angle of her body three times, refolded the blanket because it was pressing too closely against her stitches, and moved her water within reach even though she is asleep and won’t touch it for hours. Every part of him is directed at her body, at what it needs, at what might make it heal faster, easier, smoother. If I didn’t know him, I would say he looked calm. I do know him, and I know this is not calm. This is obsession redirected into care.
And me, I can’t sit.
I’ve tried once already. I lasted less than a minute before the pressure under my skin drove me back up again. So I stand by the windows, then by the door, then at the end of the bed, then near the dresser, moving only enough that I don’t feel like I’m vibrating apart, because if I sit still, all I can hear is the clockwork of my own thoughts and none of them are fit to live with.
She’s asleep. She’s breathing. She’s home.
And I still don’t trust any of it.
Not the locks. Not the street below. Not the man at the building entrance. Not the cameras Christian had installed before she even left the hospital. Not the silence from the Vargas family. Not the way quiet can be strategic.
Most of all, I don’t trust myself with the fact that she is here and vulnerable and carrying something inside her now that changes everything.
That thought still lands like a blade every time it comes back to me.
Not just her.
My child.
Our child.
What sits in my chest when I think that is not softness first. It should be. It should be some kind of wonder, some kind of peace, some moment of stunned gratitude that life still found its way through all of this.
What I feel first is fear.
Raw, immediate, ugly fear.
Because she was bleeding with my child inside her.
Because she stopped breathing with my child inside her.
Because I didn’t know, and now that I do, every mistake I made before feels ten times worse.
