Aced

MY BODY BREAKS OUT IN a sweat. It’s a different kind than I’ve ever experienced before. This kind is that whole-body heat that causes your limbs to tremble, heart to race, and head to become dizzy. I swallow over the unease as Sammy drives us out from the protected cover of the hospital’s parking garage into the driveway where paparazzi swarm us instantly.

All in a shoving match to try to get their lenses to see through the dark tinted windows of the Rover and get the first picture of Ace. The coveted shot they could sell and make a year’s salary with a single frame.

Fists bang on the windows. My body jumps. I lean over the baby carrier buckled in between Colton and me. With my back to the window to block the view of Ace and my eyes closed, I fight back the threatening tears.

“Don’t, Ry. Please don’t,” Colton murmurs as he reaches out to take my hand with one hand and smooth over my hair with the other. I clear my throat and blink the tears away and stare at Ace—this sweet, innocent baby who doesn’t deserve any of this.

I chose to step into this lifestyle because I love Colton, and yet now I’ve brought this baby into it. I know it’s too late but I don’t like it. Eddie waltzed into that room to make a point and to taint this perfect moment in our lives just like he did with the video.

“We’ll never get this back,” I whisper. Hands thump the rear window as Sammy turns into the traffic and away from the vultures looking for scraps.

“What do you mean?”

“This moment. Our time in the hospital where we get to bond before everyday life gets in the way. He took that from us. He took that feeling away. We’ll never get that back.”

“Yes, we will,” Colton answers immediately. He releases my hand and frames my face so I’m forced to look up and meet his gaze filled with so much concern and guilt over what happened. “Remember that empty picture frame? This was the first memory we put in there. No one will ever be able to take that away from us, baby. It’s just you, Ace, and me. Our first memory slid into that frame without us ever doing it. Eddie was there for a split second of time. I’m so sorry I fucked up and wasn’t there. But this—this moment, this memory, this life-changing event—overshadows it by miles.”

He runs his thumb over my bottom lip as if he’s trying to reinforce his words with his touch. And it does work. His whispered words and reassuring touch calms me so I’m able to shut out the external factors and focus on what matters most: us.

Solidifying this notion further, he presses a kiss to my nose and then to my lips before resting his forehead against mine. “Thank you for the greatest gift I’ve ever been given besides you. This memory doesn’t even need a frame though because the look on your face when you held Ace for the first time will forever be burned in my mind.”

His words anchor my tumultuous psyche and the foundation that’s been shifted beneath my feet. His touch reinforces our undeniable connection and irrevocable love. The baby sleeping peacefully in the carrier between us the greatest proof of that love.

“I don’t blame you. Never. I’m just . . . we just have more than us to worry about, and it scares me because I feel like we have no control over anything.”

“No one has control of life, Rylee. That’s the beauty and fear in living it. We take each day as it comes, try to maintain our little piece of it, and enjoy every goddamn moment we’re given.”

“I just want our little piece to have peace.”

The gates at home are just as crazy with paparazzi as the hospital. Probably even more so because they all knew where we’d be going when we left, and so we go through the routine again of thumping on the windows and shouting through the glass for us to give a statement.

Desperate to regain some kind of privacy and keep our son free from this absolute madness, I demand Sammy pull into the garage to let us out, which means he first has to move Sex out while I sit in the car so he can pull the Range Rover in.

I know I am being ridiculous and yet every part of my life and body has been exposed to the public beyond—my nonexistent privacy ever so easily invaded as shown by Eddie’s demonstration today—that I desperately need to keep Ace as ours before sharing him with the world.

Screw the offers to our publicist, Chase, from People Magazine and US and Star offering ridiculous amounts of money for the first pictures with Ace. This isn’t a matter of money to me, but rather the gaining back of some of our privacy. Our normalcy. Not feeling so goddamn exposed. The vulnerability that comes with living in a fishbowl surrounded by prying eyes.

I need our burst bubble back to whole again. Colton and I worked so hard to keep that bubble around us—cocoon our marriage and us in its early days. The one that told the press to back the hell off because no matter how hard they tried, we weren’t going to bend to their gossip or tricks.

And we haven’t.

Even with the release of the video, we didn’t. And yet I still feel like they stole something from us. The part of us that makes us feel like every other couple in America, trying to make their marriage work and live their day-to-day life. It’s not the anonymity so much but rather the constant state of being bared and vulnerable to the prying eyes and public scrutiny that caused me to lose my job, put Zander at risk, and took a special moment in our lives and turned it into Internet ecstasy.

It’s just too much. All at once. So much so I’m hoping Ace helps us find that peace again. The piece of peace I told Colton I need.

My nerves are frayed. My body beyond exhausted. My mind in a mental overload so much so that everything I try to focus on becomes harder to concentrate on instead of easier. It’s been such a long time since I’ve felt this way, Mrs. Always-in-Control. Yet right now I’m so drained I don’t have the strength to care.

We walk into the house and as tired as I am, I feel restless, antsy, wanting to close myself off in a room with my two men and let the world fall away. Instead, I pull Ace against my chest and pace, letting the unsettled feeling rule my movement.

“Ry, you need to sit down,” Colton says as he comes down the stairs from putting the bags and gifts away. All I can do is shake my head and try to figure out why I’m feeling so restless even in our own house. “You just had a baby. You promised me you’d take it easy until you heal more. This,” he says motioning to my pacing, “is not resting.”

“I know. I will,” I murmur softly, my mind distracted elsewhere and locked on an idea.

“What is it, Ry? I can see your mind working. What’s going on?”

“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.

“No.” He sighs deeply. “Yes,” he says even softer than I did. And as much as I’m internally freaking out over this, as much as it’s supporting the theory I thought was happening in the hospital, I also know Colton well enough that I need to sit back and listen because he deserves a minute to explain. “It’s not him, Ry. It’s not you . . . it’s just me being a dad is stirring shit up I thought I’d come to terms with.”

“That’s understandable.”

“No, it’s not. It’s fucking bullshit. You can sit there and carry our son for nine months, go through all that labor pain like a goddamn champ, looking no worse for wear, and hell if I’m not the asshole so fucked up with nightmares, I’m afraid to sleep in the bed in case you have Ace in here.” His words hang in the silence as it expands angrily in the space between us.

“Kelly found your dad, didn’t he?”

Colton looks over at me and even though it’s dark, I can see his jaw clench and the intensity in his eyes, and know the answer before he nods ever so slowly in response. Everything clicks into place for me.

“Yeah, and between that and the dreams, my head’s one goddamn patchwork quilt of bullshit.” The pain in his voice is raw, the turmoil within him almost palpable, and while I rarely press him to talk about things, this time I am.

“How so?”

“How so?” he mocks me, sarcasm lacing the laugh he emits after it.

“Tell me about your dreams.”

“No.” The quick response unnerves me and tells me they are worse than the normal ones he usually has no problem sharing. And that in itself worries me.

“Do you plan on going to see your dad?” I ask, knowing full well what happened the last time I made a suggestion like this to him. How he’d sought out his mom and that night at the track where he’d bared his past, let go of the demons that had spent a lifetime weighing him down. It had allowed him to begin the journey forward. When he doesn’t answer, I respond in a way completely contradictory to the way I did when he first told me about this. “I think you should.”

Colton startles at my comment, confusion over my about-face written all over his handsome features. “Come again?”

“Maybe you need to look him in the eyes, see that you are absolutely nothing like him. Maybe you’ll find out he knew nothing about you or—”

“Or maybe I’ll find out my dad was my abuser and not only is her blood running through me but so is his.” His anger causes my mind to spin in a direction I’d never considered before.

“What are you saying, Colton?” I push gently for more because I hadn’t expected that response.

“My dreams,” he begins and then stops momentarily as he shakes his head. He reaches out to hold Ace’s tiny hand that has escaped from the blanket. “I’ve been having this dream that I walk in that room and my mom is there. She’s younger, prettier, not at all how I remember her, and she’s holding a baby. I think it’s me. She sings to me and there’s a man in the corner I can’t see. I think he’s my dad. When I look back to her she’s how I remember—strung out, used up . . . It’s so real. I can smell her, the stale cigarettes. I can hear the drips from the apartment faucet I used to count. See the superheroes I tried to draw in crayon on the wall so I could focus on them when . . .” His words break my heart for the horror he endured and survived and is now reliving now due to circumstances beyond my control.

I wish there was something I could do to help him, comfort him, anything to help take this pain and conflict from him. But I can’t. All I can do is stand beside him, listen to him, and be here for him when or if he decides to face this ghost head-on.

“Fuck,” he curses as he shoves up from the bed again. Baxter lifts his head to see if it’s time to go out as Colton walks to the wall of windows looking into the darkness of the night to his beloved beach down below. “The fucking problem is it’s me in the dream. His body. His hands. His stench. But my goddamn hands reaching out to take Ace and do God knows fucking what to our son.” My stomach rolls as I look down at Ace’s angelic face. I can’t even fathom how much I’m going to hurt for him when he gets his first set of shots, so I can in no way comprehend the horrors Colton’s mom made him endure for a five-minute high.

“Oh, Colton,” I murmur to his back, needing him to come closer so I can wrap my arms around him and reassure him. But I know even my touch won’t calm the stormy waves crashing against each other inside him.

“You know . . . I asked Kelly to find my dad so I could come full circle with my history and put it to bed. I sure as hell don’t want a Kumbaya session with him that’s for sure. Wasn’t even sure I’d speak to him, but deep down I think I wanted to see if we were alike in any way. Stupid, I know, but a part of me needs to know.” He turns to face me now and in a sense I get he’s asking for me to understand something he doesn’t even understand.

“And now?” I prompt in the hopes he’ll keep talking, that voicing aloud his fears will allow him to overcome them.

“Now it’s like,” he sighs and runs a hand through his hair, such a striking silhouette against the moonlight coming through the windows at his back, “now I wonder if the dreams are true. Was that fucker my dad?” he asks, voice full of distraught disbelief. “I never once thought that as a kid. Never once made that connection. I knew I had her tainted blood in me, have dealt with that, knowing the other half of me was at least okay . . . but what if he’s just as bad? Even worse? What if I go to see my dad and it’s true? Then what, Ry?”

The look on his face and sound in his voice tears me apart because all I can offer are words right now and words won’t help. They won’t take away fear or mitigate the unknown. But I offer them anyway. “Then we deal with it. You and I. Together.” I reach out for his hand and link my fingers with his. He blows out a breath. “Parents give you their genes but don’t make the person you become.”

Will he ever be free of this torment? See the amazing man inside of him that we all see?

“Still, Ry. If it’s true, every time I hold Ace will I . . .? I don’t know.” His voice fades off as he looks down at our linked hands, the silence heavy in the air around us. “Since I’ve been eight years old, there hasn’t been a single person in my life I have had a blood connection with. That’s what being adopted is like. And it’s not like Andy, Dorothea, or Quin made me feel any less because they were related and I wasn’t . . . but a part of me wanted to have that connection with someone. Desperately. I used to watch Andy, memorize everything about him so I could learn to laugh like him, talk like him, gesture like him. Just so I could be like somebody. So people might see us together and from our mannerisms alone think I was his son.”

“Colton.” It’s all I can say as pain radiates in my heart, digs into my soul, and brings tears to my eyes for the little boy hoping to belong and for the grown man still affected by the memories.

Still conflicted by the memories.

“Do you know what it’s like to know that for the first time in almost thirty years I’m connected to someone? Blood. Genes. Mannerisms. All inherited. That Ace is a part of me?” The incredulity in his voice resonates louder than the words.

“You’re not alone anymore.” I squeeze his hand, a silent affirmation.

“You’re right. I’m not,” he says. I watch his posture change—spine stiffens, shoulders straighten—to be more defensive. A man’s vulnerability only lasts for so long after all. “But at the same time I was naïve in thinking that this—the blood connection with Ace—would override the rest of this shit.”

I narrow my eyebrows. “What shit?” I ask, trying to figure out which one of the myriad of things can be considered as shit.

“Nothing. Never mind,” he says as he stands back up and presses a kiss to my forehead and Ace’s. “Just some things I need to work through on my own. I promise I’ll try to be quick.”

Our eyes connect under the cover of night, and I worry about what the darkness is hiding that I’d normally be able to see. I thought it was just the idea of becoming a dad but now I worry it’s more.

I’ve been so absorbed in my own world with everything that’s happened over the past few weeks that now I feel like an ass. I can worry about Zander, be upset over my job, and yet not once did I stop to look at the man beside me, my rock, to ask him what other shit he was dealing with.

I want to tell him, just not now. Can’t he deal with this all in a bit? Hell yes, it’s a selfish thought but at the same time, when I look down at Ace he trumps all of this. He is the perfect moment in our lives and we need to stay just like this, all together, as a unit. Colton promised me this moment and now we’ve found it, all I want to do is hold on to it for as long as I can.

But when I look back up to Colton and see the stress in his posture, I know that while the moment is perfect for me, he’s just taking a little bit longer to find his.

“Get some sleep. I’m going to go sit out on the patio for a bit and clear my head,” he says. I know that means the nightmare is still there, still lingering in the fringes of his mind and he’s not ready to go back to sleep again for fear it will return.

I bite back what I really want to say. Don’t go. It’s lonely in bed without you. Talk to me. Instead I say, “Okay. I’m here when you need me.” Because we do need you. But I also know Ace and I need the him that is one hundred percent and if he needs some time to get there, then I’m resigned to give it to him.

For him. Anything for him.

And for us.

This is marriage; being who you are while being what your partner needs when they need it the most. Stepping up while they need to step out.

“Night,” he says as he heads toward the door.

“Colton?” His name is part plea, part question because I know he is shutting down and possibly shutting me out.

He stops in the doorway and turns to face me. “It’s going to be fine, Ryles. All of it.”