Night Shift 2(34)

Like we hadn’t almost ruined the life we’d built together.

Hours later, when the sun had already risen, and the noise from the hallway evidenced that our kids were up full of energy, Keira woke. She didn’t say a thing to me as she stirred, pulling back from my chest, her head grazing my chin as she looked up. That face was perfect to me, no matter how many times my wife complained about the barely-there wrinkles around her huge blue eyes. It was those eyes I’d fallen for back when I was barely twenty, back when it took very little for a girl to catch my eye.

But that long ago Keira had indeed caught my eye, and my ear, and my attention, as she screamed at me because I’d slacked on a joint school project. She’d screamed and raged and had a fine old hissy fit, and the more upset she got, the more eager I was to have her. That had been a lifetime ago. She still had the same fire in her eyes her eyes, and every day I woke I was still eager to have her again, and again. The years had been good to us, until recently. It was high time they were good to us again.

Keira moved against me as I stared at her and I bit my lip, eager just then to touch and taste and take from that small frame, those thick, luscious lips, that soft pale skin because I needed her. Because she needed me. The need in her eyes was almost desperate. But there was something else in those eyes, something I couldn’t quite define. Something that had me worried. Something that urged me toward quick action and I took it then, with Keira’s surprised expression softening into acceptance. She flinched only a little when I bent toward her, taking a kiss, holding her face still because I knew she’d understand what that meant. No matter what either of us had done or how awkward the distance had made us, I still wanted her. Hell, I’d never stop wanting her.

She closed her eyes when I kissed her but before we could go any further a soft, perfunctory knock sounded against our door and we broke apart just as Makana, our ten-year-old, popped her head past the frame, her smile widening when she spotted me.

“Makua?” she said, a question that didn’t need clarifying.

“Come here, nani.” And she did, followed by her twelve-year-old brother, Koa, who tried to pretend he wasn’t happy to see me. It had been over a week since I’d last seen them. It hadn’t been only my wife that I’d missed. Phone calls and texts just didn’t suffice. “Keikis, come to me.” And just like back when they were tiny, and storms would rage across the lake during hurricane season, they both fell on the bed between us, huddled close for comfort and safety.

“Are you staying, Makua?” My daughter snuggled close to Keira, easing her back against her mother’s chest as she watched me.

“Yeah, nani. I’m staying. Always.”

“Good,” she said, exhaling softly before she elbowed her brother for room as he stretched out on his back between us, trying to conceal the pleased grin that twitched at the corners of his mouth.

“Good,” I repeated because it was, our family close, sated, content again. As I leaned back, listening to Mack catching me up on the competition routines Aly was teaching her at the dance studio, I watched Keira over our children’s small heads, catching her gaze when I stretched my arm across the pillows to hold her fingers. A smile flirted across her face, and I thought that maybe, just maybe we were back to being good.





3





Bobby had warned me about the moment. My old boss had seen the way Kona and I carried on after years apart. It had made her laugh how just Kona’s smile, a single look he threw in my direction, left me a little flustered with the faintest blush working over my cheeks even after nearly a decade together.

“It hasn’t happened yet,” she’d said the last time I’d seen her, five years back when Bobby ignored the doctors and the pastors and settled back home with her sons in Nashville, waiting on death. Her body had been so frail, and her normally dark skin had gone pale and thin.

She’d been the only real mother I’d ever had. When I arrived in Nashville I was nineteen and pregnant and heartbroken over what life had thrown at me, but Bobby had opened up her home to me. Nearly as poor as I was, she gave me a job and a room to rent over her small garage until I got on my feet and my stride was steady. She’d always offered advice; most of it I’d taken, but some I didn’t bother with since those bits of wisdom almost always concerned men—a concept I had no intention of revisiting.

And then, Kona came back into my life.

“It’s been what, sugar? Going on eight years now that he talked you into marryin’ him?” she’d asked just a few days before she died.

“Around that, yeah.” There’d been a wicked twinkle in the old lady’s eyes, something I hadn’t seen from her in the two weeks we’d returned to Nashville to say our goodbyes.

“Hmm.” That little noise always meant something, mainly things she’d keep to herself until the time she knew she could annoy me the most.

“What?” I’d asked, leaning next to her on her bed. Out in the yard Ransom and Kona took turns slinging Mack and Koa over their shoulders, then spinning them around, pretending to be giants with kid-sized lumps growing out of their backs.

Bobby watched them along with me, a slow working smile twitching her lips. “Eight years, and the moment hasn’t happened.”

“We’ve had plenty of moments, Bobby.” She’d waved me off, laughing a little when I waggled my eyebrows.

“I’ll tell you something straight.”

“I expect nothing less from you, lady.”

She’d taken my hand, rubbing her blunt fingernails against my palm, same as she’d done years before when I’d get upset about how miserable it was carrying such a huge baby at only nineteen, or when there weren’t enough customers at the diner for the tips to do more than barely cover groceries.

We’d sat there next to each other, those faint, slow touches moving over my skin, watching the family Kona and I’d made as if the struggles didn’t matter, because none of them had kept us from that moment.

“You and Kona have had some worry, there’s truth in that for sure and, I reckon you’ve had even more happy.” I’d nodded, not watching her when my mouth quirked up on one side. But I felt the look she gave me and for a brief second I’d wondered what she’d seen when she looked at me. “Happy is good. Worries come and we all take them as we can, but there’s always a moment, sugar, when a woman and man know each other well enough, long enough that they truly can’t keep anything from the other.”

“We have that,” I promised her, pulling my attention from the window to watch her shake her head.

“No, sugar. Not yet you don’t. It’s that moment no one ever really tells you about. When a couple share a look, a feeling and know right in their bones, right to the marrow, that they are set right where they are, that this other person is the one who won’t keep anything from you, who you can’t keep yourself from. They know you, sugar. They know you like the print of their thumbs and the true nature of their own minds. The dirtiest, filthiest, most shameful bits of you, they know it. They know it and they go on wanting you all the same. That moment comes, Keira and you either hold tight or you run like the rip of light at starless midnight.” She moved her head against her pillow, exhaling at the effort before she spoke again. “It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s coming. I see that plain.”

“Bobby…I don’t understand…”

“You will, my sweet girl.” She’d slowed her movements over my palm. “Don’t worry over that moment coming, Keira.” Bobby closed her eyes, stifling a yawn and I kept my gaze on her, waiting for her to explain. “You’ll only need to worry if it doesn’t come.” Bobby tilted her head, that small, sweet smile warming my chest as she blinked twice to stare at me. “The way that man looks at you, the way you look back at him, me, I don’t worry so much. That moment’s comin’.”

But it hadn’t. Not yet. Not five years later. Not in the shift of our lives, the moments that shook us, tempted us to give in. Not even then, the moment still hadn’t come. Now, the moment haunted me, followed me, as Kona and I headed out for a few days away at a familiar retreat in Tennessee. “We need some time alone, Wildcat,” Kona had told me, and he was right, we did. I hoped that the cloud that had covered me earlier would lift once we got to our special place in the mountains, that I’d be able to shrug off the darkness that wouldn't let me go.

But the tension had mounted with every mile we drove from New Orleans. Kona still kept his hand relaxed, palm open as he drove—an invitation to touch him, show him that I hadn’t forgotten how well we’d always moved together.

Point. Counterpoint—from the time we were kids just figuring out what we wanted from each other.

He always had an answer for any complaint I had. He always tried to figure out a problem when it came head on. Maybe that was the issue. Kona had done the one thing he promised he’d never do—he shut me out, tried to fix things on his own. The intention had been good. He wanted to protect us. But not being allowed to help him carry that burden? That hurt more than I thought it would.