Aced

“Do you ever wish we could just shut the world out? Make this our own little space and ignore everyone else?” I stop moving as I utter the final words, but my mind keeps going.

Colton angles his head and stares at me, trying to decipher what it is I’m getting at. “Yeah. All the time.” He smiles softly. “But I kind of think you’d get sick of me if I was your only company.”

I force a swallow down my throat as the huge pocket sliding glass doors behind him loom larger than life, my eyes flicker to the expanse of them that never bugged me before but now all of the sudden seem like this huge beacon advertising our life and allowing people to see in.

“No one can see in here, Rylee. In the fifteen years I’ve lived here, not a single photo has been taken from the beach.” His tone is serious, eyes full of concern. I should love that he can read me so well. Appreciate that he immediately tries to assuage my anxiety before I even express it.

But I can’t. I’m too focused on the large windows and thoughts of long-range lenses that might somehow be able to see us through the tinted glass.

“What about rogue reporters? Or drones? Drones are the newest thing,” I say, risking like sounding like a crazy woman, but the need to keep this space in lockdown is more important.

“You know the windows are tinted. We can see out but no one can see in, unless they are open, okay?” He has a placating tone in his voice that pisses me off at first and then snaps me out of the moment of hysteria, bringing me back to myself.

“Sorry.” I shake my head and press a soft kiss to the top of Ace’s forehead. “Today rattled me. I don’t mean to sound crazy. I’m just tired and—”

“Today rattled me too, Ry. It makes me thank God I overhauled the security system last year.” He walks toward me and pulls Ace and me into my safe space, his arms, and presses a kiss to both of our foreheads. “You guys are my everything. There’s not a thing in the world I wouldn’t do to make sure the two of you are safe.”

The next twelve hours pass in bouts of sleep followed by blurry-eyed moments of shoveling food in, changing diapers, and trying to stay awake while Ace nurses so I don’t hurt him somehow. It’s a brutal cycle I’m sure I’m doing all wrong. I can’t for the life of me bear to hear Ace cry, so when he does, I try to nurse him or lie on the couch with him on my chest so I can sleep when he does. The minute I set him down in his bassinet, he wakes right back up.

I’m mid-slumber, blissfully so, and yet sleeping so lightly out of partial fear I won’t hear Ace if he wakes up and needs me. So when I startle awake with my heart in my throat and with a body full of aches, what scares me most is the reality I’ve fallen asleep on my side with Ace beside me nursing.

That panicked feeling doubles as I immediately put my hand on Ace’s chest to make sure he’s breathing and that I didn’t roll over on him in my sleep. Just as my mind is back at ease, Colton thrashes beside me, yelling out in a voice sounding hollow and scared. Was this why I woke up in the first place?

“Colton!” I gasp out to try and wake him. At the same time I hurriedly gather Ace into me so somehow, some way, Colton doesn’t hurt him while in the throes of his nightmare. “Colton!” I try to push myself up against the headboard with Ace pressed against my chest when Colton’s protests and harsh grunts fill the silence of the room around us.

“No!” he shouts again, but this time shocks himself awake. Without seeing his eyes through the moonlit room, I know whatever he dreamt about has left him shaken. I can smell the fear in his sweat, hear the grate of his voice, and sense how disoriented he is.

“It’s okay, Colton,” I say, jarring him again as he startles at the sound of my voice. It unnerves me, considering I can’t remember the last time he had a dream like this. When I reach out to touch him he jumps, and I just keep my hand on his arm to let him know he’s with me and not in the dark room with the musty-smelling mattress that still controls his dreams from time to time.

Or maybe more often than that and he hasn’t told me.

“Fuckin’ A,” he grits out as he shoves himself off the mattress and starts to walk back and forth at the foot of the bed, trying to work off some of the discord rioting through his system. He rolls his shoulders to come to grips with whatever it was that marred his dreams.

After a few moments with his fingers laced behind his head in a complete inward focus he stops at my side of the bed and rests his hips against the mattress. “I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” I say, eyeing him cautiously as I study his body language to figure out his state of mind. If he’s freaked, moody, scared . . .

“Goddamn fucking dreams.” He makes the statement more to himself than to me. Since I can’t remember how long it’s been since Ace last nursed, I let him latch on as Colton sifts through his emotions.

“You want to talk about it?”

“No!” he barks into the room before sighing when he realizes the bite in his voice. “Sorry . . . I’m just in a bad spot. Okay?”

All I can do is nod my head and hope he’ll talk to me, get out whatever it is into the open so it doesn’t eat at him like I know his past sometimes does. He doesn’t know I can see when the ghosts move in, how the demons of his past try to ruin his happiness, haunt his eyes, and etch lines in his face.

As much as I hate asking this question, I need to. “Is it Ace?” I ask in the softest of tones almost fearful of the answer.