21. No Sleep
21
NO SLEEP
Hayden
I couldn’t sleep. I mean, how could I when there were Maiden’s problems, that dumb incident outside the therapists, Cara spinning her webs, and now Solly? But none of that was what I was really thinking of. It was her .
That normal, nice school teacher. Maybe that was it, that she was normal and nice . There weren’t many people like that in my world. It was more than that though, and I knew it. Something new was aching in me because of her.
Those lips like candy. The soft, warm skin that curved along her neck and stretched across her shoulders. Those green eyes that were so deep with intelligence, and a hint of sadness in them, that I just wanted to ease. Her scent, what was it? It slipped into my nose when we were close and I couldn’t get it out of my head. It wasn’t perfume. It was her . As if you could taste how sweet her body was in the air.
I dragged myself up and to the bathroom. There was no toilet paper in the en-suite and I suspected Cara had something to do with that. I trudged in the darkness down the hallway to the master bathroom. It wasn’t entirely dark, though. There was a light on in the room at the end of the hall and faint sounds from Cara’s room.
I padded quietly past the bathroom door and toward her room.
“…Yes, like that, exactly as I showed you… You make me happy, and I’ll make it all go away…”
The door was slightly ajar, and I pushed it a crack wider with my fingertips. There was Cara, riding on top of Solly. Their naked bodies writhing on each other in the warm glow of the lamplight. I felt sick.
“Daddy?”
I turned and saw Maiden back down the hallway. He spoke sleepily as he rubbed his tired eyes. Marvin the dinosaur tugged tightly against his chest. Over their grunting, Solly and Cara didn’t seem to notice, and I quietly padded my way back down the hallway to Maiden.
“You okay, Champ?” I kneeled down and asked in a whisper.
“What’s mom doing?”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. Silly grown-up stuff. Let’s get you back to bed, okay?”
“I wasn’t sleeping good, daddy.”
“Huh, me neither. You wanna come crash with me tonight?”
Maiden nodded his sleepy head, and I felt a rush of fatherly love for that adorable little man. How had I bought all this into my home, our home?
“Okay, go get Pascal and we’ll try get some sleep.”
Pascal, a plush turtle we’d got at Six Flags five summers ago, had seen better days. I felt like that ragged plush turtle sometimes. Once shining, fun, and vibrant. Now it was ragged and battered by life, its eyes having been drawn back on with a marker pen more times than I could remember.
Like Pascal though, I would always be there for Maiden. He had me to rely on. Who did I have, though?
I scooped up Maiden, Marvin, and Pascal and carried them back to my bed, smiling at the tiny person in my arms, but also worried for him. When he was four, I’d lost him for a moment. Cara was supposed to be watching him while I swung by the bank, but being Cara, she’d got distracted by something shiny in a store. By the time I came back, he was gone. For the first time in my life, I froze. Incapacitated with absolute terror. Everyone had looked to me to act, but I didn’t know what to do.
Twenty minutes later, we found him. Maiden had wandered into a kid’s birthday party happening at the pizza joint next door. No one had noticed there was an extra kid, and he was happily chewing on a slice of pepperoni.
I’d never left him alone with Cara again. People couldn’t be trusted. No one except me.
The rain began to beat down hard against the city that night as I lay restlessly, tussling with my aching feelings.
I couldn’t risk it again, but maybe I had to. Something inside me was changing. The feelings I’d once shut down were operating again, compelling me to act. All I could think of was her. The soft curl of her brown hair caressing that smooth, exciting curve of her shoulder. Those slim, tiny wrists that made me crave to touch them. The sweet delight in her smile. And those eyes. Those fucking eyes that I wanted to fall into and never come back from. The way she squinted one of them when she laughed, the lines around her mouth that I wanted to press a thumb softly over. It felt almost irresistible. Almost .
My heart beat harder. It wasn’t almost . It was true. I rolled out of bed, threw on a shirt, then stumbled out into the hallway and reached for my car keys.