A Broken Soul(4)

Music and dancing was all I really had, so as long as my body allowed it, I was going to pour my anger and frustrations and pain out the only way I knew how.





Quinn



I WOKE WITH a start, jolted out of my recurring nightmare when all the air whooshed from my lungs. It took several seconds for the lingering dregs of the nightmare to let go of my conscious and for sleep to leave me all together, but once it did, I realized it wasn't the dream that rendered me breathless.

That was courtesy of my daughter and her flailing limbs.

Once the nightmare finally released me all together, the pained sound of Addy's voice was no longer at the forefront of my mind. I let out a heavy sigh and turned my head on the pillow to stare at my daughter as she slept next to me. I managed to find a smile as I watched her for a while. The only time I ever got to smile genuinely in the past three and a half years was when I looked at her. There was no sorrow on her soft, sleeping face, and there were times I couldn't help but envy that. Some days I would have given anything to be free of the pain that always lingered in the recesses of my mind.

That familiar ache in my heart, along with the lingering pain in my body thanks to the accident, was a constant reminder of everything I'd lost. It was a reminder that my world had stopped, and to this day still hadn't fully started back up again.

More than my body broke the night I lost Addy. My heart, my mind, and my soul were still in tatters, and if it hadn't been for the sleeping girl next to me, I had no doubt I would have let the pain swallow me whole. 

Sophia rolled again in her sleep and I barely managed to catch her arm before she caught me in the jaw. One of the downsides of having a six-year-old who crawled into your bed in the middle of the night was the physical beating I took on a regular basis. My girl tossed and turned like nobody's business.

A glance at the clock on the bedside table showed I had enough time to get a quick shower in before having to get Soph up and ready for school. I flung the covers back and threw my legs over the side of the bed, resting my elbows on my knees and scrubbing the last bit of sleep from my face. Just as I did every morning, I gave myself a few extra moments to gaze at the picture sitting on my nightstand, reaching over and running the tip of my finger along the cool glass that set over Addison's smiling face. "Morning, baby," I whispered into the silent room before forcing myself from the bed and into the bathroom.

Showering and dressing in my PFD uniform in record time, I opened the bathroom door and reentered the bedroom.

I flipped on the overhead light and pulled the covers to the foot of the bed. "All right, Sleeping Beauty. Time to wake up."

Sophia let out a small mewl of protest and pulled one of the pillows over her head to block out the light.

"Uh uh," I chuckled, coming to sit on the mattress next to her. "None of that now." I moved the pillow off her head and tossed it far enough away she couldn't reach it. "Ten minutes, squirt, or you go to school without breakfast."

She let out a grunt but sat up, her mass of blonde hair in tangles all around her head, standing on end. Like a zombie, she climbed off the bed and moved toward the bathroom off the hallway. When I heard the sink cut on, I took that cue and headed into the kitchen to start breakfast.

Sophia joined me ten minutes later, dressed for school. She climbed onto one of the barstools at the kitchen island just as I slid the last pancake onto her plate.

"Teeth brushed?"

"Uh huh," she mumbled, still not fully awake.

One corner of my mouth kicked up in a grin as she rested her elbow on the counter, propped her chin in her hand, and watched as I cut up her pancakes and slathered them in syrup. "You do a good job or just run the brush over them a few times?"

"I did good," she answered, then forked a heaping bite of pancakes into her mouth. "Wanna smell my breath?" she asked around the food.

"I'll pass. And don't talk with your mouth full."

"You asked," she shrugged before turning back to her food. There weren't many dishes I could cook well -Addy was always the cook in our household - but my girl loved her old man's pancakes. It was one of the few meals I didn't have to bribe her into eating. It was either bribe her with a few extra minutes on her iPad or a knockdown drag-out fight, and on the evenings I was home from the fire department, I was usually too exhausted to fight. Needless to say, my daughter was better at using her iPad than I was, and we ate a lot of pancakes. Much to my own mother's displeasure.

"Daddy?"

I finished my sip of coffee and looked up from the news site I was scrolling through on my phone as I stood across from her. "Yeah, Angel?"

"Can I be a ballerina?"