After her car disappeared from view, I called Stan, my attorney. He answered on the first ring just like he always did.
“Colorado, how’s it hanging?” he asked. I could hear the sounds of partying in the background, and I smiled. He was the hardest working attorney in Denver, and yet he always seemed to be having a better time than me.
“I’m good, Stan. How’s your Mom?” Stan’s mom had been in and out of the hospital lately, and we’d almost lost her.
“Her BP has been steady the last few weeks. Looks like she’s going to pull through for now.”
“I’m happy to hear that. Give her a kiss for me, okay?”
“Of course. And thanks for those flowers you sent,” he said.
“My pleasure. Hey Stan, you know that private investigator you used last year, in that insurance case you told me about?”
“Sure, Maria Gold. Best damn investigator in the state. What about her?”
“I have a job for her. Can I get her number?”
“Sure thing, Jesse. I’ll text it to you right away. Anything I can help with? Everything okay?”
“Oh, yeah, for sure. Nothing serious at all. Just a private matter I want to look into…”
I hung up the phone, my thoughts drifting off as I replayed kissing Maisey a million times in my head. The sight of her hurrying away from me in fear wouldn’t leave me all night long. I didn’t like it at all, the last thing in the world I wanted was for her to be afraid of me.
I’d never wanted to make someone feel safe before, but there it was. A need to protect someone other than myself. A need to keep her close, to comfort her, to make her hands stop trembling when she touched me. Whatever had gone wrong in Maisey’s life, I wanted to make it right.
Don’t get me wrong, I also wanted to make her quiver and squirm on the end of my cock, but I wanted her to be smiling at the same time.
Because she deserved it.
She might be stubborn, but so am I… Especially when I really wanted something.
And there was nothing in the world that I wanted more than Maisey Jayne.
16
MAISEY
It happened suddenly. That’s how it always happened. And I hated it. I wished there was some warning, even a small one, just a quick moment to prepare before panic set in and chaos ensued.
But it just wasn’t like that at all.
When Maddy had an asthma attack, it happened totally out of the blue. Usually, when we were having fun, enjoying life, and having half-forgotten about her problems…
I say half-forgotten because completely forgetting just didn’t happen.
It was always there. Lingering in the back of my mind.
Tonight, it happened at the movie theater. That was the worst… Maddy always got embarrassed whenever it happened in public.
She was such a trooper, though. She always was. So much calmer than I ever was. I mean, I tried, I did, but there was something about your own child gasping for breath that shoots right through every layer of toughness you possess.
Maybe I didn’t look like it. Maybe if you were watching me when it happened, you would only see a mom moving in practiced motions, doing whatever was necessary to help her child. Maybe you’d think I was the smartest person in the room because I knew what to do, what to reach for, what to look for.
But I wasn’t.
I was just the most afraid person in the room. And that momentous fear was like an electric jolt that shocked me into action. There were no choices for me. No fight or flight. Just go. Move. Help.
Save.
She was everything to me, and it wrecked me every single time. The attacks happened more times than I cared to count. I didn’t even want to know the number anymore. It was in her records. I couldn’t keep up with all the information, and finally, one kind doctor one night who had seen me struggling to remember everything stopped me, reminded me that every detail was written down meticulously, and that remembering wasn’t my job. Maddy needed me to be her mother, not her doctor. So that’s what I did.
And every time she had a bad asthma attack, off to the doctors we went so they could document the incident and exam her again. We knew the routine. That part we were used to. That part we could handle. It was the part during the actual attack that was unnerving, because we never knew how bad it was going to be, if this was the one that we needed to call an ambulance for, if this was the one that….well. We tried not to go there.
We never said those words out loud…
I’d be lying if I didn’t think about it. How awful it would be if it didn’t stop. If whatever medicine she was on didn’t work. If it quit working…
Catastrophic thinking, my therapist would call it. I did it all the time. I was supposed to redirect my thoughts, remind myself that right now, in this moment, Maddy was okay, I was okay. Most of the time it worked before I let myself get too far down the rabbit hole.